England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Drama; English drama -- 20th century; Mate selection -- Drama
Produced by Ron Burkey, and Amy Thomte
MISALLIANCE
by George Bernard Shaw
Notes on the editing: Italicized text is delimited with underlines
("_"). Punctuation and spelling are retained as in the printed text.
Shaw used a non-standard system of spelling and punctuation. For
example, contractions usually have no apostrophe: "don't" is given as
"dont", "you've" as "youve", and so on. Abbreviated honorifics have
no trailing period: "Dr." is given as "Dr", "Mrs." as "Mrs", and so
on. "Shakespeare" is given as "Shakespear". 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 The pound (currency) symbol has been replaced by the word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".
MISALLIANCE
_Johnny Tarleton, an ordinary young business man of thirty or less, is
taking his weekly Friday to Tuesday in the house of his father, John
Tarleton, who has made a great deal of money out of Tarleton's
Underwear. The house is in Surrey, on the slope of Hindhead; and
Johnny, reclining, novel in hand, in a swinging chair with a little
awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass
which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren
but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of
bracken and gorse, and wonderful cloud pictures._
_The glass pavilion springs from a bridgelike arch in the wall of the
house, through which one comes into a big hall with tiled flooring,
which suggests that the proprietor's notion of domestic luxury is
founded on the lounges of week-end hotels. The arch is not quite in
the centre of the wall. There is more wall to its right than to its
left, and this space is occupied by a hat rack and umbrella stand in
which tennis rackets, white parasols, caps, Panama hats, and other
summery articles are bestowed. Just through the arch at this corner
stands a new portable Turkish bath, recently unpacked, with its crate
beside it, and on the crate the drawn nails and the hammer used in
unpacking. Near the crate are open boxes of garden games: bowls and
croquet. Nearly in the middle of the glass wall of the pavilion is a
door giving on the garden, with a couple of steps to surmount the
hot-water pipes which skirt the glass. At intervals round the
pavilion are marble pillars with specimens of Viennese pottery on
them, very flamboyant in colour and florid in design. Between them
are folded garden chairs flung anyhow against the pipes. In the side
walls are two doors: one near the hat stand, leading to the interior
of the house, the other on the opposite side and at the other end,
leading to the vestibule._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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