Fannys First Play

Fanny's First Play

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fanny's First Play, by George
Bernard Shaw #33 in our series by George Bernard Shaw
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Title: Fanny's First Play
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5698] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on August 9, 2002]

Edition: 10
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FANNY'S
FIRST PLAY ***

Scanned and proofed by Ron Burkey ([email protected]) and
Amy Thomte.

This text was taken from a printed volume containing the plays
"Misalliance", "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets", "Fanny's First Play",
and the essay "A Treatise on Parents and Children".
Notes on the editing: Italicized text is delimited with underlines ("_").
Punctuation and spelling retained as in the printed text. Shaw
intentionally spelled many words according to a non-standard system.
For example, "don't" is given as "dont" (without apostrophe), "Dr." is
given as "Dr" (without a period at the end), and "Shakespeare" is given
as "Shakespear" (no "e" at the end). Where several characters in the
play are speaking at once, I have indicated it with vertical bars ("|").
The pound (currency) symbol has been replaced by the word "pounds".

FANNY'S FIRST PLAY
BY BERNARD SHAW
1911

PREFACE TO FANNY'S FIRST PLAY

Fanny's First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its
lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the
substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful
and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and
dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality
and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would
surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we
do not seem to know that there is any other test of conduct except
morality; and the result is that the young had better have their souls
awakened by disgrace, capture by the police, and a month's hard labor,
than drift along from their cradles to their graves doing what other
people do for no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing
nothing of good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything
but how to keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing
within the bounds of good taste except when their excesses can be
concealed. Is it any wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in
our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that will get you into
trouble? But please do not suppose that I defend a state of things which
makes such advice the best that can be given under the circumstances,
or that I do not know how difficult it is to find out a way of getting into
trouble that will combine loss of respectability with integrity of
self-respect and reasonable consideration for other peoples' feelings and
interests on every point except their dread of losing their own
respectability. But when there's a will there's a way. I hate to see dead
people walking about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle class
people are all as dead as mutton. Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have
delivered on them the judgment of her God.
The critics whom I have lampooned in the induction to this play under
the names of Trotter, Vaughan, and Gunn will forgive me: in fact Mr
Trotter forgave me beforehand, and assisted the make-up by which Mr
Claude King so successfully simulated his personal appearance. The
critics whom I did not introduce were somewhat hurt, as I should have
been myself under the same circumstances; but I had not room for them
all; so I can only apologize and assure them that I meant no disrespect.
The concealment of the authorship, if a secret de Polichinelle can be

said to involve concealment, was a