How He Lied to Her Husband.docx

1、How He Lied to Her HusbandHow He Lied to Her Husband by George Bernard Shaw PREFACELike many other works of mine, this playlet is a piece doccasion. In 1905 it happened that Mr Arnold Daly, who was then playing the part of Napoleon in The Man of Destiny in New York, found that whilst the play was to

2、o long to take a secondary place in the evenings performance, it was too short to suffice by itself. I therefore took advantage of four days continuous rain during a holiday in the north of Scotland to write How He Lied To Her Husband for Mr Daly. In his hands, it served its turn very effectively.I

3、print it here as a sample of what can be done with even the most hackneyed stage framework by filling it in with an observed touch of actual humanity instead of with doctrinaire romanticism.Nothing in the theatre is staler than the situation of husband, wife and lover, or the fun of knockabout farce

4、. I have taken both, and got an original play out of them, as anybody else can if only he will look about him for his material instead of plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that have proceeded on Othellos romantic assumptions and false point of honor.A further experiment made by Mr Arnold D

5、aly with this play is worth recording. In 1905 Mr Daly produced Mrs Warrens Profession in New York. The press of that city instantly raised a cry that such persons as Mrs Warren are ordure, and should not be mentioned in the presence of decent people. This hideous repudiation of humanity and social

6、conscience so took possession of the New York journalists that the few among them who kept their feet morally and intellectually could do nothing to check the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and raving obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers abandoned all self-restrain

7、t under the impression that they were upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each other with their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad. They finally forced the police to arrest Mr Daly and his company, and led the magistrate to express his loathing of

8、the duty thus forced upon him of reading an unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the convulsion soon exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat impatient when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously ethical play forming part of a book which had been in circulation uncha

9、llenged for eight years, and had been received without protest by the whole London and New York press, gave the journalists a piece of his mind as to their moral taste in plays.By consent, he passed the case on to a higher court, which declared that the play was not immoral; acquitted Mr Daly; and m

10、ade an end of the attempt to use the law to declare living women to be ordure, and thus enforce silence as to the far-reaching fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for industrial purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well. Ihope Mrs Warrens Profession will be played ever

11、ywhere, in season and out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the public conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to keep up the price of every American commodity except American manhood and womanhood.Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of

12、 those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press, which was by

13、that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received a rather sulky and grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly been able to approach an American city, including even those cities which had heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when he produced Candida,

14、without having to face articles discussing whether mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as You Never Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs Warrens Profession, and acted by the monster who produced it.What made this harder to bear was that though no fact is better establ

15、ished in theatrical business than the financial disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had done all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly, being exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal fo

16、rtunes out of the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with that express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his financial engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted engagemen

17、ts to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres the American equivalent of our music halls, where he played How He Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press suggestion from which I suffer more, pe

18、rhaps, than any other author. Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the play contains and what the actor can do, not what the papers have told them to expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr Daly and myself which did something to console us for t

19、he very unsavory mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and which was not the less disgusting because we suffered in a good cause and in the very best company.Mr Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul free of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors.B

20、ut I have certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like that word ordure. Apply it to my work, and I can afford to smile, since the world, on the whole, will smile with me. But to apply it to the woman in the street, whose spirit is of one substance with our own and her body no less holy: to lo

21、ok your women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from America that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most abusively clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warr

22、ens Profession, has just been fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from advertisements of Mrs Warrens houses.Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators as aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which ha

23、ve an almost horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by persons and papers notoriously indifferent to public morals on all other occasions. The explanation is very simple. The profits of Mrs Warrens profession are shared not only by Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts, but by the landlords o

24、f their houses, the newspapers which advertize them, the restaurants which cater for them, and, in short, all the trades to which they are good customers, not to mention the public officials and representatives whom they silence by complicity, corruption, or blackmail. Add to these the employers who

25、 profit by cheap female labor, and the shareholders whose dividends depend on it you find such people everywhere, even on the judicial bench and in the highest places in Church and State, and you get a large and powerful class with a strong pecuniary incentive to protect Mrs Warrens profession, and

26、a correspondingly strong incentive to conceal, from their own consciences no less than from the world, the real sources of their gain. These are the people who declare that it is feminine vice and not poverty that drives women to the streets, as if vicious women with independent incomes ever went th

27、ere. These are the people who, indulgent or indifferent to aphrodisiac plays, raise the moral hue and cry against performances of Mrs Warrens Profession, and drag actresses to the police court to be insulted, bullied, and threatened for fulfilling their engagements. For please observe that the judic

28、ial decision in New York State in favor of the play does not end the matter. In Kansas City, for instance, the municipality, finding itself restrained by the courts from preventing the performance, fell back on a local bye-law against indecency to evade the Constitution of the United States. They su

29、mmoned the actress who impersonated Mrs Warren to the police court, and offered her and her colleagues the alternative of leaving the city or being prosecuted under this bye-law.Now nothing is more possible than that the city councillors who suddenly displayed such concern for the morals of the thea

30、tre were either Mrs Warrens landlords, or employers of women at starvation wages, or restaurant keepers, or newspaper proprietors, or in some other more or less direct way sharers of the profits of her trade. No doubt it is equally possible that they were simply stupid men who thought that indecency

31、 consists, not in evil, but in mentioning it. I have, however, been myself a member of a municipal council, and have not found municipal councillors quite so simple and inexperienced as this. At all events I do not propose to give the Kansas councillors the benefit of the doubt. I therefore advise t

32、he public at large, which will finally decide the matter, to keep a vigilant eye on gentlemen who will stand anything at the theatre except a performance of Mrs Warrens Profession, and who assert in the same breath that a the play is too loathsome to be bearable by civilized people, and b that unles

33、s its performance is prohibited the whole town will throng to see it. They may be merely excited and foolish; but I am bound to warn the public that it is equally likely that they may be collected and knavish.At all events, to prohibit the play is to protect the evil which the play exposes; and in view of that fact, I see no reason for assumin