#undershaft

Dr. Undershaft: Aha! Got you! You're the Ghost!

Death: YOU KNOW, YOU ARE RATHER AMUSINGLY WRONG.

Dr. Undershaft: Oh, I see. I'm dead.

Death: *nods* SUCH WOULD APPEAR TO BE THE CASE.

Dr. Undershaft: That was the murderer! Does anyone know?

Death: THE MURDERER. AND YOU, OF COURSE.

Dr. Undershaft: But *him*? How can——?

Death: WE MUST GO.

Dr. Undershaft: But he just killed me! Strangled me with his bare hands!

Death: YES. CHALK IT UP TO EXPERIENCE.

Dr. Undershaft: You mean I can't do anything about it?

Death: LEAVE IT TO THE LIVING. GENERALLY SPEAKING, THEY GET UNEASY WHEN THE DECEASED TAKES A CONSTRUCTIVE ROLE IN A MURDER INVESTIGATION. THEY TEND TO LOSE CONCENTRATION.

Dr. Undershaft: You know, you do have a very good bass voice.

Death: THANK YOU.

Dr. Undershaft: Are there going to be... choirs and things?

 KCrimson Roses - Maon Kurosaki

From Undershaft Jormungand: Perfect Order Opening Single.

Foundling – abandoned child

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, diplomat, philosopher, humanist and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. A founder of modern political science. “the end justifies the means”.

Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.[1] Moral nihilists assert that morality does not inherently exist, and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived.

Shirk – unwilling to do something, avoid or neglect a duty

Cannes – French pronunciation “Kan”

Treacle – basically syrup, sweet, British molasses (tree kuhl)

Perdition - (in Christian theology) A state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unpenitent person passes after death.

Epoch - an epoch is an instant in time chosen as the origin of a particular era.

Oligarchy - oligarchy, government by the few, especially absolute power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes. Oligarchs will secure effective control whether the formal authority is vested in the people, a monarch, the proletariat, or a dictator. oligarchy is a corrupted form of aristocracy (government by a relatively small privileged class or by a minority consisting of those felt to be best qualified to rule.), which denotes government by the few in which power is vested in the best individuals. Most classic oligarchies have resulted when governing elites were recruited exclusively from a ruling caste—a hereditary social grouping that is set apart from the rest of society by religion, kinship, economic status, prestige, or even language. Such elites tend to exercise power in the interests of their own class.

A brief history/background of George Bernard Shaw and the making of Major Barbara.

·         Won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1925

·         Born 1856

·         Born in Dublin

·         Moved to London in 1876

·         Advocated for the new theater of Ibsen, was very influenced by Ibsen (strong female characters, ex. A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler in comparison to Major Barbara and Candida, described as a “sort of Doll’s House with a happy ending”)

·         Started as a music and theater critic

·         His early plays attacked social hypocrisy

·         Major Barbara was one of Shaw’s most successful discussion plays

·         “The audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual.”

·         http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1925/shaw-bio.html#

·         Began writing plays as a way to express his opinions, particularly on injustice.

·         Started writing plays at 36.

·         In the Nobel Peace Prize presentation speech it is said “It is characteristic of Shaw that his orthodox socialistic severity toward the community is combined with a great freedom from prejudice and a genuine psychological insight when he deals with the individual sinner. Even in these early pieces one of his finest qualities, his humanity, is fully and clearly marked.”

·         On Major Barbara it is said “His next great drama of ideas, Major Barbara (1905), has a deeper significance. It discusses the problem of whether evil ought to be conquered by the inner way, the spirit of joyful and religious sacrifice; or by the outer way, the eradication of poverty, the real foundation of all social defects. Shaw's heroine, one of his most remarkable female characters, ends in a compromise between the power of money and that of the Salvation Army. The process of thought is here carried out with great force, and naturally with a great deal of paradox. The drama is not entirely consistent, but it reveals a surprisingly fresh and clear conception of the joy and poetry of the life of practical faith. Shaw the rationalist here shows himself more liberal and more chivalrous than is customary with the type”

·         http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1925/press.html

·         First production of Major Barbara was November 28, 1905 in the Royal Court Theatre.

·         There was a 1929 revival at the Wyndham Theatre

·         http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library/exhibits/shaw/stage.html

·         Peter Gill’s 1982 National Theater production of Major Barbara; programme excerpt http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/abj76/PG/pieces/george_bernard_shaw.shtml   (1905 production pictures included)

·         Eleanor Robson, an American actress, was the inspiration for Barbara. Shaw wrote letters to her during the writing of Major Barbara. "I have begun another play and lo! there you are in the middle of it ... I swear I never thought of you until you came up a trap in the middle of the stage and got into my heroine's empty clothes and said Thank you: I am the mother of that play ... the heroine is so like you that I see nobody in the wide world who can play her except you."

·         She was slated to play Barbara agreements with her American manager could not be reached.

·         Professor Gilbert Murray, whose translation of Euripides verse had just come out, was the inspiration for Cusins. In fact, Murray wrote the verses that Cusins says in the play and Shaw has expressed his gratefulness for Murray’s work on Major Barbara.

·         Murray was, like Cusins, born in Australia

·         Alfred Nobel patented dynamite, and was recorded as saying “My factories may end war sooner than your peace congresses. The day two army corps can destroy each other in one second, all civilised nations will recoil from war and disband their armies." This is a statement to which Shaw disagreed and says so in the play through Andrew Undershaft  "The more destructive war becomes, the more fascinating we find it."

·         In 1925, Shaw won Alfred Nobel’s Peace Prize, but arranged to not accept the money. He said "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite. But only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel prize."

·         The Salvation Army said of Barbara refusing to take the Bodger and Undershaft money  that it seemed incredible to them.  Any good Salvationist, they said, would, like the Commissioner in the play, take money from the devil himself and make so good use of it that he would perhaps be converted, for there is hope for everybody."

·         http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/abj76/PG/pieces/george_bernard_shaw.shtml