GETTING MARRIED

Bernard Shaw

1908

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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.

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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.