Shaw, George Bernard, 1856-1950 / 2008-06-30 00:00:00
EBOOK FANNY'S FIRST PLAY ***
Scanned and proofed by Ron Burkey (rburkey@heads-up.com) 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 The pound (currency) symbol has been
replaced by the word "pounds".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.
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