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APPENDIX |
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Echoes of Oscar |
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Or |
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When Shaw texted Wilde |
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Click |
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This section of Shavings takes up the challenge implicit in
Hyndman’s statement and explores textual similarities in the work of the two
writers. We will add to this from time
to time, and readers are warmly invited to contribute their own aperçus. |
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b.
Candida |
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e.
Letters |
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a. Arms and the Man
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Although it is difficult for even close
reading to convince that this play is more than a trifle, a prelude to deeper
plays in future, it can perhaps be given some added meaning by incorporating
it into a Shaw/Wilde discussion. It is valuable, for example, to read Raina Petkova with Vera, Cicely
and Gwendolen in mind, curious mix as she is of
idealism both assumed and real, and artlessness, both real and assumed.
Major Petkoff says of his daughter ‘She always
appears at the right moment’, and his wife replies ‘Yes; she listens for
it. It is an abominable habit.’ This is not necessarily to
suggest influence, but it is to suggest affinity. |
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If The Manor House, Woolton,
Hertfordshire is a sort of internal Ruritania, so
the house in the ‘small town near the Dragoman Pass’ has its own status
between prelapsarian innocence and the Fall itself,
with the Tree of Knowledge (‘the only library in Bulgaria’), about to give of
its fruit. Such knowledge, in the form of self-awareness, is one of the
more serious themes in Wilde: ‘O Arthur,’ says Lady Windermere, ‘don’t love
me less, and I will trust you more. I will trust you absolutely. Let us go to
Selby. In the Rose Garden at Selby the roses are white and red.’ Act II
in both The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man are
each set in the garden of the respective houses. Raina
tells Bluntschli ‘You shewed
great ignorance in thinking that it was necessary to climb up to the balcony
because ours is the only private house that has two sets of windows.
There is a flight of stairs inside to get up and down by.’ The intertextual reading with Wilde here is in An Ideal
Husband: ‘At the
top of the staircase stands Lady Chiltern, a woman of grave Greek beauty’:
we are again in the Balkans. One may also note that the rose ‘Maréchal Niel’ in the garden at
Woolton is a climber. |
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The subplot between with servants Nicola
and Louka is more eighteenth-century than Wildëan, but there is one exchange of significance in a
conversation between Sergius (the officer formally
betrothed to Raina) and her maid: |
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Sergius: If our conversation is to continue, Louka, you will please remember that a gentleman does not
discuss the conduct of the lady he is engaged to with her maid. |
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Louka: It’s so hard to know what a gentleman thinks
is right. I thought from your trying to kiss me that you had given up
being so particular. |
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This shifting of how a gentleman should
behave is a constant theme in Wilde. |
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Lord Fermor: If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite
enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. (The Picture of Dorian Gray) |
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Lord
Illingworth: If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he
is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. (A Woman of No
Importance) |
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Sir Robert
Chiltern: You have lived so long abroad, Mrs. Cheveley, that you seem to
be unable to realise that you are talking to an English gentleman. |
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Mrs Cheveley: I realise that I am talking to a man who
laid the foundation of his fortune by selling to a Stock Exchange speculator
a Cabinet secret. (An Ideal Husband) |
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Jack:
It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private
cigarette case. |
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Algernon:
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about
what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture
depends on what one shouldn’t read. |
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Jack:
Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. |
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Algernon:
My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest
degree. (The Importance of Being Earnest) |
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Being found out is almost an obsessive
theme in Wilde (hardly surprisingly): |
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’No, Basil, you must tell me,’ insisted
Dorian Gray. ’I think I have a right to know.’ His feeling of
terror had passed away, and curiosity had taken its place. He was
determined to find out Basil Hallward’s mystery. |
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Algernon:
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live,
that is what I mean–so Bunbury died. |
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Jack:
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find
out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. |
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James Fane:
If this man wrongs my sister, I will find out who he is, track him down, and
kill him like a dog. |
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Lady
Chiltern: You have guessed it. After you left last night I found out
that what she had said was really true. Of course I made Robert write her a
letter at once, withdrawing his promise. |
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Lady Hunstanton: How charming you are, dear Lord
Illingworth. You always find out that
one’s most glaring fault is one’s most important virtue. You have the most
comforting views of life. |
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Lady Stutfield: Do you really, really think, Lady Caroline, that one should believe evil of every one? |
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Lady
Caroline: I think it is much safer to do so, Lady Stutfield. Until, of course, people are found out to
be good. But that requires a great deal of investigation nowadays. |
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Lady
Windermere: Have you found out at what time Lord Windermere came in last night? |
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Lady
Windermere: I know where Arthur keeps his bank book–in one of the
drawers of that desk. I might find out by that. I will find out. |
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Lady
Windermere: You think it wrong that you are found out, don’t you? |
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Lord |
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Lord Goring:
So she has found out everything! Poor woman! Poor woman! |
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Lord Goring:
That is the reason they are so pleased to find out other people’s secrets. It
distracts public attention from their own. |
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Lord Henry
Wotton: But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely
indifferent to her. And when a woman finds that out about her
husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets
that some other woman’s husband has to pay for. |
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Lord Henry
Wotton: I like to find out people for myself. |
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Mrs Allonby: I found out then that what he had told me
was perfectly true. And that sort of thing makes a man so absolutely
uninteresting. |
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Mrs Erlynne:
Don’t use ugly words, Windermere. They are vulgar. I saw my chance, it is true, and took it. |
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Lord
Windermere: Yes, you took it–and spoiled it all last night by being
found out. |
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Sir Robert
Chiltern: If my wife found out, there would be little left to fight
for. |
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It is clear enough that even in Edenic Bulgaria truth is a negotiable instrument: |
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Bluntschli: You said youd
only told two lies in your whole life. Dear young lady: isnt that rather a short allowance? I’m quite
a straightforward man myself; but it wouldn’t last me a whole morning. |
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Raina protests
that she is being insulted, and then collapses. ‘How did you find me out?’ |
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But of course all is sham here: the
heroism of Sergius, the social standing of Petkoff, the airs of Louka.
Bluntschli, whom we meet as a sort of holy fool, is
man of sense and decisiveness when required to be so. Yet the play ends on an ambiguous note,
with Sergius’s declaration about Bluntschli, which from its punctuation is a statement,
but from its grammar is a question: ‘What a man! Is he a man!’ |
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b. Candida
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In Candida, we find a number of
references that draw us back to Wilde, not least in the two leading male
characters, the Revd James Mavor Morell and Eugene Marchbanks.
Morell (like the Revd Stewart Headlam,
who went bail for Wilde, and is referred in the stage directions towards the
beginning of Act I) is a Christian Socialist, but he also has something of a
physical resemblance to Wilde at the height of his powers: |
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A vigorous, genial, popular man of forty, robust
and good looking, full of energy, with pleasant, hearty considerate manners
[...] with a wide range and command of expression […] His well-spring of
enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion has never run dry for a moment […]
pardonably vain of his powers and unconsciously pleased with himself [...]
good forehead [...] eyes bright and eager, mouth resolute but not
particularly well cut [...] |
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Morell’s books
include Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, Fabian
Essays (to which GBS himself contributed), Morris’s A Dream of John
Ball, Marx’s Capital ‘and half a dozen literary landmarks in
Socialism’. One would be hard put in 1898 to name half a dozen literary
landmarks in Socialism that did not include Wilde’s The Soul of Man. His
admiration for his wife Candida, ‘a good woman’, is that of Robert for
Gertrude Chiltern (although Candida’s admiration
for James is exactly the reverse of that of Gertrude for Robert). He
also expresses himself aphoristically, although, as so often with Shaw, one
feels that Wilde would have been less sententious: ‘We have no more right to
consume happiness without producing than to consume wealth without producing
it’. We are told that he has addressed the Women’s Liberal Federation
on the theme of the Woman Question [Lady
Chiltern: I have just come from
the Woman’s Liberal Association, where, by the way, Robert, your name was
received with loud applause]. Candida can also express herself
aphoristically ‘How conventional all you unconventional people are!’ (cp. Lord Windermere:
How hard good women are! Lady
Windermere: How weak bad men are!) |
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But it is Morell’s
foil, the poet Marchbanks, who steps out of the
world of the Rhymer’s Club and the Café
Royal. The nephew of an earl (and Eugene of course means well-born,
while Marchbanks, in its form ‘Marjoribanks’,
was the family name of Lord Tweedmouth), he is ‘a
strange, shy youth of eighteen, slight, effeminate, with a delicate childish
voice, and a hunted tormented expression and shrinking manner that shew the painful sensitiveness of very swift and accurate
apprehensiveness [...] Miserably irresolute, he does not know where to stand
or what to do [...] His nostrils, mouth, and eyes betray a fiercely petulant
wilfulness’. It is not difficult to give a queer reading to this
description, nor to discern there something of ‘Bosie’ |
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This strikes Morell
as all too high-falutin’, but Candida reminds Morell that Marchbanks cleans
the household’s boots (Marchbanks:
‘Oh don’t talk about boots! Your feet should be beautiful on the mountains’),
and it will be recalled that Constance Wilde is said to have interrupted a
poetic discourse of Oscar’s by referring to Cyril’s boots. It is not
necessary to believe that she did so (Vyvyan |
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Morell’s
secretary is called Proserpine Garnett (‘a brisk little woman of the lower
middle class’), and acts to some extent as raisonneuse.
Addressed as Miss Prossy, she may be a younger
incarnation of Miss Prism, who also has a pretentious classical first name, Letitia. Shaw likes to play these little games with
names: one thinks of ‘Rummy’ Mitchens, the broken
down old woman in Major Barbara, who was named after George Eliot’s Romola. |
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v
After writing the above, we read Sally Peters: Bernard Shaw, The
Ascent of the Superman. New Haven & London: |
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c. Major Barbara
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There is some scope for discussing ‘the
most marvellous of all gospels, the gospel of gold’, as expounded by Baron Arnheim to dazzle Robert Chiltern, and its use by Andrew Undershaft. Wildean
echoes are frequent in Major Barbara. |
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. . . |
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Sir
Robert Chiltern: Believe me, Mrs. Cheveley,
it is a swindle. Let us call things by
their proper names. |
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–
An Ideal Husband, Act I |
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Undershaft: Pooh, Professor! let
us call things by their proper names. |
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–
Major Barbara, Act II |
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. . . |
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‘I know how people chatter in |
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–
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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Lady Britomart: ‘It is only in the middle classes that
people get in a state of dumb helpless horror when they find that there are
wicked people in the world. |
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–
Major Barbara, Act II |
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. . . |
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‘Modern morality consists in accepting the
standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept
the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.’ (Lord
Henry Wotton speaking) |
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–
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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Mrs Cheveley: Nowadays, with our modern mania
for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of
purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues. |
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–
An Ideal Husband, Act I |
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Cecil
Graham: But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a
woman who moralises is invariably plain. |
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–
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act II |
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Lady Britomart: Just as one doesnt
mind men practising immorality so long as they own they are in the wrong by
preaching morality; so I couldn’t forgive Andrew for preaching immorality
while practising morality. |
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–
Major Barbara, Act I |
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. . . |
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Gerald:
Mother, this is Lord Illingworth, who has offered to take me as his private
secretary. It is a wonderful opening for me, isn’t it? |
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–
A Woman of No Importance, Act II |
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Lady
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Jack:
I know nothing, Lady Bracknell. |
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–The
Importance of being Earnest, Act I |
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Undershaft: He knows nothing and thinks he
knows everything. That points to a political career. Get him a
private secretaryship to some
one who can get him an Under Secretaryship. |
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–
Major Barbara, Act III |
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. . . |
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Lady
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JACK: Between seven and eight
thousand a year. |
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–The
Importance of being Earnest, Act I |
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Lady Britomart: You know how poor my father he is: he
has barely seven thousand a year now; and really, if he were not the Earl of
Stevenage, he would have to give up society. |
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–
Major Barbara, Act I |
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. . . |
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One should also note that the career of Adolphus Cusins in Major
Barbara turns on his being a foundling, while the future of Jack Worthing
turns on his not being one. |
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d. Too True to be
Good
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Jack: It is a terrible thing for a
man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but
the truth. |
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–The
Importance of being Earnest, Act III |
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‘Make any statement that is so true that it has
been staring us in the face all our lives, and the
whole world will rise up and contradict you.’ |
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–
Too True to be Good, Act II. |
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e. Letters
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Algernon:
I wish you would reform me. You might make that your mission. |
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Cecily:
How dare you suggest that I have a mission? |
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Algernon:
I beg your pardon: but I thought every woman had a mission of some kind,
nowadays. |
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Cecily:
Every female has! No woman. |
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–The
Importance of being Earnest, Act II |
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’No fascinating woman ever wants to
emancipate her sex’ |
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–
G.B.S. to Clement Scott, January 1902 |
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f. Cashel Byron’s
Profession
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Cashel
Byron’s Profession was written some years before the greater part of
Wilde’s work was undertaken, but it reveals how Shaw was also dipping into
the same pool as Wilde. Here is Lydia Carew on railway trains: |
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A train is a beautiful thing. Its pure white fleece of steam harmonises with every
variety of landscape. |
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This was said at Clapham Junction, where
in November 1895 Wilde had other things on his mind. |
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Cashel Byron’s
Profession also has a prominent character called Lord
Worthington. Had it been written ten years later we would have
seized on this compound of John Worthing and Lord Darlington, while Wilde’s
Lady Roxton and Lady Plymdale
seem to combine in Shaw’s Lady Roxdale (Widowers’
Houses). Byron goes to a ‘scholastic establishment for the sons of
gentlemen’ called Moncrief House. |
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g. Man and Superman
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John Cooper drew our attention to
the following: |
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In this world there are two tragedies. One is not
getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the
worst. |
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Lady
Windermere’s Fan, Act 3. |
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There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose
your heart’s desire. The other is to
gain it. |
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Man and Superman, Act 4. |
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h. Mrs Warren’s Profession
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In his article
‘Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan and Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession’,
in The Explicator, Vol. 56
(Spring 1998), 137-138, Christopher S. Nassaar
argues that Wilde's play is a chief influence on Shaw's. |
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Click |
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