Misalliance
1914
When an airplane crashes into the conservatory of a Surrey country house on a spring afternoon in 1909, it upends far more than the greenhouse glass. Shaw uses this spectacular intrusion of modernity to detonate a powder keg of class resentment, romantic ambition, and wounded pride among the Tarleton family and their guests. The play unfolds as a fierce, glittering debate: Johnny Tarleton, the prosperous businessman, clashes with Bentley Summerhays, the airy young suitor who wants to marry Johnny's sister Hypatia. But beneath the wit and wordplay lies something genuinely urgent: the question of what women owe society versus what they owe themselves, and whether the old order can survive the new century's arrival. Shaw's dialogue crackles with his signature paradoxes and provocations, yet Misalliance has a warmth often absent from his cooler works. The characters are wounded, funny, and oddly sympathetic even at their most ridiculous. A comedy of manners that refuses to stay merely comic, it asks whether love and identity can ever truly transcend the stations into which we're born.
Editions
X-Ray
“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.””
— Bernard Shaw
“What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.””
— Bernard Shaw
“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Common people do not pray; they only beg.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Hypatia:...I don't want to be good; and I don't want to be bad: I just don't want to be bothered about either good or bad: I want to be an active verb.Lord Summerhays: An active verb? Oh, I see.An active verb signifies to be, to do or to suffer.Hypatia: Just so; how clever of you! I want to be; I want to do; and I'm game to suffer if it costs that. But stick here doing nothing but being good and nice and ladylike I simply won't.””
— Bernard Shaw
“The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.””
— Bernard Shaw
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— Bernard Shaw
