On Pygmalion
(2)
J. L Styan
Shaw is one who composed as it were
musically, and the unmistakable strength of his dialogue, even where a speech is
far beyond the limits of conversation, lies in its tune. A Shavian speech has a
vocal music which corresponds strictly with its logical structure, and it does
not tire the listener. From Professor Higgins of Pygmalion we hear this
Shavian tune:
Give her her orders: that’s enough for her. Eliza: you are
to live here for the next six months, learning how to speak beautifully, like a
lady in a florist’s shop. If youre good and do whatever youre told, you shall
sleep in a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy chocolates and
take rides in taxis. If youre naughty and idle you will sleep in the back
kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs Pearce with a
broomstick.
Higgins has just told Colonel Pickering that Eliza cannot
understand explanations and arguments. She is less than a reasoning creature.
‘Give her her orders’, he declares, and this he proceeds to do. All he says is
coloured by what he thinks of her—a mixture of private soldier, child, a
primitive, an animal, a thing of crude and undeveloped feelings. The actor’s
patronizing tone must dance to the fluctuating meaning: first peremptory, then
condescending, then grandiloquent, then winning, now threatening. The speech
proceeds from condition to condition, the voice changing for each ‘if’ through a
range of assumed emotions—it is Higgins acting a part for the benefit of Colonel
Pickering and Mrs Pearce, and he performs with what skill he can muster, this
then is recognized first, that the tune is pointed and balanced to offer the
actor a tonal plan that so fascinates the ear it cannot be misread.
Yet
the intonations of Higgins’s speech serve a further purpose, of subtilizing an
impression in the auditorium which follow rapidly upon the initial surprise of
his manner. His tone of course tells the audience immediately how he regards his
new protégée: he is talking so that it can be stated plainly that he is amusing
himself. He thinks she will not see beyond the surface of his words: hence his
acting a part. His tone is also to give us a string hint that, although Eliza
may not be articulate enough to express her indignation and her recognition of
his vanity beyond a limited ‘Youre a great bully, you are’, which perfectly
places him, she cannot in fact avoid instinctively knowing how she is being
treated, and sensing something of the motives of her tormentor. Hear the tune of
‘you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles’ as slowing, grave,
ominous, like a voice telling a nursery tale, with an unmistakable mockery of
exaggeration, and it must ironically give the lie to any unsound impression of
her complete simplicity. For the audience is already being prepared for the
crisis of Act Ⅳ.
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Source: The Elements of
Drama, Cambridge University Press, 1960. Pp.87-88.
