George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

4 (p. 492) Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser’s leg, ... changing the King’s illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against Ghibelline): The Order of the Garter is an order of chivalry founded in 1348 by King Edward III; at the start of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany and king of Prussia (1888 to 1918), was stripped of this high British honor. Also at the start of the war, Britain’s King George V changed his family name from the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the English Windsor. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines were two warring political parties in Italy during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries; the Guelphs, the papal and popular party, opposed the authority of the German emperors in Italy, while the aristocratic Ghibellines supported the German emperors.

5 (p. 516) to destroy the militarism of Zabern: Zabern, usually spelled Saverne, in northeastern France in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, was the site of conflict between the German military and local citizens that contributed to the motivation for World War I.

6 (p. 517) Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed;All Highest Hohenzollern languishes in Holland, ... Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, ... the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; ... Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity: Hapsburg is the name of the ruling family of Austria that gained ascendancy over much of Europe during the sixteenth century. Hohenzollern is the royal family name of Kaiser Wilhelm II (see note 4, above), who abdicated to Holland on November 9, 1918. Czar Nicholas II of Russia (1868 — 1918), a member of the Romanoff (or Romanov) Russian dynasty and the last czar of Russia, was murdered with all his family by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Constantine I, king of Greece (1913-1917, 1920-1922), known as king of the Hellenes, did not support the Allied forces during World War I and consequently was deposed; he sought refuge in Switzerland. The Greek statesman Solon (c.600 B.C.), one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, was renowned as a wise lawgiver.

7 (p. 518) “Lass’uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh‘n”: The English translation is “Laughing let us be destroyed, laughing let us go to our graves”; the quotation is from the ecstatic love duet between Brunnhilde and Siegfried that concludes Richard Wagner’s 1871 opera Siegfried.

8 (pp. 518-519) That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House from the footlights during the war;for the Germans might ... not have waited for their cues: In a letter of October 5, 1916, to Sidney and Beatrice Webb (fellow members of the Fabian Society), Shaw recounts his experience with two zeppelins that passed over his country home in Ayot St. Lawrence; the experience was the inspiration for the end of the play. In the letter, Shaw writes: “The sound of the Zepp’s engines was so fine, and its voyage through the stars so enchanting, that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid.” Clearly, Shaw transmuted these feelings into Ellie and Hesione’s emotions at the end of the play. Shaw adds the following observation in the letter after he notes the human suffering caused by the bringing down of one of the zeppelins and the gleeful response of some of the onlookers, as well as his own ability to get right to sleep: “Pretty lot of animals we are!”

9 (p. 524) “It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find that nobody expects me”: It is a common motif in dreams that one arrives at a place where one is not known or expected. Heartbreak House begins with Ellie’s falling asleep, and with Nurse Guinness’s just managing to prevent a crash of bottles to the floor. These two actions frame the play as a circular dream: The entire play may be seen as Ellie’s dream; at the end of the play, the motif of the bottles that do not fall is replicated on a grander scale by the house’s escaping destruction.

10 (p. 596) “it’s like the night in Tristan and Isolde”: In Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1859), the lovers are drawn to the night as the realm where a true and complete union can take place between them.

11 (p. 611) “Fall and crush”: Hector echoes Albany’s line, “Fall, and cease” in the last scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear. As Albany sees the ancient Lear carrying in Cordelia’s murdered body, he expresses his sense that the world should collapse and end in the face of such evil. Likewise, through Hector’s sense of futility here, Shaw is expressing his own anger at the carnage and stupidity of a world gone war-mad between 1914 and 1918.

12 (p. 624) “Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal”: Through Hesione’s near-breakdown, Shaw is alluding (again) to the final scene of King Lear, when Lear enters with the body of Cordelia in his arms and commands everyone to “Howl, howl, howl.” Lear is reduced to a grieving animal howling out its raw pain. It is such grief over the cataclysm of the war that keeps threatening to break through the surface of the play, as here in Hesione’s attempt to suppress her despair.

13 (p. 625) “Was there no heartbreak in that for your father?”: Shotover’s humiliation here in the confession of how his daughter Addy’s leaving home broke his heart shows how deeply Shaw has embedded King Lear in Heartbreak House; just as Lear’s denial of his own mortality manifests itself in his incestuous impulse to keep his daughter Cordelia to himself, so too does Captain Shotover’s resistance to crashing the ship of state on the rocks manifest itself in his spiritual marriage to Ellie, who, as befits the dream-like state of the action, can be both his daughter and his wife. The issue of Ellie’s marrying the older Mangan, a man her adored father’s age, is Shaw’ s version of the first part of King Lear, where Cordelia must first reject her father’s demands on her.