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    Getting Married
    Getting Married
    Getting Married
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    Getting Married

    By George Bernard Shaw

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    George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is revered as one of the great British dramatists, credited not only with memorable works, but the revival of the then-suffering English theatre. Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, left mostly to his own devices after his mother ran off to London to pursue a musical career. He educated himself for the most part, and eventually worked for a real estate agent. This experience founded in him a concern for social injustices, seeing poverty and general unfairness afoot, and would go on to address this in many of his works. In 1876, Shaw joined his mother in London where he would finally attain literary success. "Getting Married", comes from a satirical standpoint, much like so many other of Shaw's works. The story follows a family getting together for a wedding, all the while building a case for the necessity of easy divorce proceedings.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781596748927
    Author

    George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London in 1876. He initially wrote novels then went on to achieve fame through his career as a journalist, critic and public speaker. A committed and active socialist, he was one of the leaders of the Fabian Society. He was a prolific and much lauded playwright and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1950.

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      Book preview

      Getting Married - George Bernard Shaw

      GETTING MARRIED

      BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4123-4

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-59674-892-7

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      N.B.—There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor's Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable when drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it, which turned out to be the classical form. Getting Married, in several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a long period, would be impossible.

      On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and handsome and healthy.

      The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII century palace. The palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or restored by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit complaints of the discomfort of the place, induced the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give him some money to spend on it; and with this he has got rid of the wall papers, the paint, the partitions, the exquisitely planed and moulded casings with which the Victorian cabinetmakers enclosed and hid the huge black beams of hewn oak, and of all other expedients of his predecessors to make themselves feel at home and respectable in a Norman fortress. It is a house built to last for ever. The walls and beams are big enough to carry the tower of Babel, as if the builders, anticipating our modern ideas and instinctively defying them, had resolved to show how much material they could lavish on a house built for the glory of God, instead of keeping a competitive eye on the advantage of sending in the lowest tender, and scientifically calculating how little material would be enough to prevent the whole affair from tumbling down by its own weight.

      The kitchen is the Bishop's favorite room. This is not at all because he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is one of the finest rooms in the house. The Bishop has neither the income nor the appetite to have his cooking done there. The windows, high up in the wall, look north and south. The north window is the largest; and if we look into the kitchen through it we see facing us the south wall with small Norman windows and an open door near the corner to the left. Through this door we have a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine. In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular chamber with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the upper floors of the palace. In the wall to our right is the immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand shops. In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door gives access to the Bishop's study, formerly a scullery. Further along, a great oak chest stands against the wall. Across the middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven stout rush-bottomed chairs: four on the far side, three on the near side, and two at each end. There is a big chair with railed back and sides on the hearth. On the floor is a drugget of thick fibre matting. The only other piece of furniture is a clock with a wooden dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the weights, chains, and pendulum being of corresponding magnitude; but the Bishop has long since abandoned the attempt to keep it going. It hangs above the oak chest.

      The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop's lady, Mrs. Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr. William Collins, the greengrocer. He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon. Mrs. Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features and fine grey hair with many white threads. She is dressed as for some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.

      Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist. His muttonchop whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their lower ends. He is an affable man, with those perfect manners which can be acquired only in keeping a shop for the sale of necessaries of life to ladies whose social position is so unquestionable that they are not anxious about it. He is a reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of saying anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always implies that he does it with your kind permission. Withal by no means servile: rather gallant and compassionate, but never without a conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social distinctions. He is at the oak chest counting a pile of napkins.

      Mrs. Bridgenorth reads placidly: Collins counts: a blackbird sings in the garden. Mrs. Bridgenorth puts The Times down in her lap and considers Collins for a moment.

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. Do you never feel nervous on these occasions, Collins?

      COLLINS. Lord bless you, no, ma'am. It would be a joke, after marrying five of your daughters, if I was to get nervous over marrying the last of them.

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. I have always said you were a wonderful man, Collins.

      COLLINS. [almost blushing] Oh, ma'am!

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. Yes. I never could arrange anything—a wedding or even dinner—without some hitch or other.

      COLLINS. Why should you give yourself the trouble, ma'am? Send for the greengrocer, ma'am: that's the secret of easy housekeeping. Bless you, it's his business. It pays him and you, let alone the pleasure in a house like this [Mrs. Bridgenorth bows in acknowledgment of the compliment.] They joke about the greengrocer, just as they joke about the mother-in-law. But they can't get on without both.

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. What a bond between us, Collins!

      COLLINS. Bless you, ma'am, there's all sorts of bonds between all sorts of people. You are a very affable lady, ma'am, for a Bishop's lady. I have known Bishop's ladies that would fairly provoke you to up and cheek them; but nobody would ever forget himself and his place with you, ma'am.

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. Collins: you are a flatterer. You will superintend the breakfast yourself as usual, of course, won't you?

      COLLINS. Yes, yes, bless you, ma'am, of course. I always do. Them fashionable caterers send down such people as I never did set eyes on. Dukes you would take them for. You see the relatives shaking hands with them and asking them about the family—actually ladies saying Where have we met before? and all sorts of confusion. That's my secret in business, ma'am. You can always spot me as the greengrocer. It's a fortune to me in these days, when you can't hardly tell who any one is or isn't. [He goes out through the tower, and immediately returns for a moment to announce] The General, ma'am.

      [Mrs. Bridgenorth rises to receive her brother-in-law, who enters resplendent in full-dress uniform, with many medals and orders. General Bridgenorth is a well set up man of fifty, with large brave nostrils, an iron mouth, faithful dog's eyes, and much natural simplicity and dignity of character. He is ignorant, stupid, and prejudiced, having been carefully trained to be so; and it is not always possible to be patient with him when his unquestionably good intentions become actively mischievous; but one blames society, not himself, for this. He would be no worse a man than Collins, had he enjoyed Collins's social opportunities. He comes to the hearth, where Mrs. Bridgenorth is standing with her back to the fireplace.]

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, Boxer. [They shake hands.] Another niece to give away. This is the last of them.

      THE GENERAL. [very gloomy] Yes, Alice. Nothing for the old warrior uncle to do but give away brides to luckier men than himself. Has—[he chokes] has your sister come yet?

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. Why do you always call Lesbia my sister? Don't you know that it annoys her more than any of the rest of your tricks?

      THE GENERAL. Tricks! Ha! Well, I'll try to break myself of it; but I think she might bear with me in a little thing like that. She knows that her name sticks in my throat. Better call her your sister than try to call her L—[he almost breaks down] L—well, call her by her name and make a fool of myself by crying. [He sits down at the near end of the table.]

      MRS. BRIDGENORTH. [going to him and rallying him] Oh come, Boxer! Really, really! We are no longer boys and girls. You can't keep up a broken heart all your life. It must be nearly twenty years since she refused you.

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