The Project Gutenberg EBook of Fanny's First Play, by George Bernard Shaw

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Title: Fanny's First Play

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5698]
Posting Date: March 28, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FANNY'S FIRST PLAY ***

Produced by Ron Burkey

FANNY'S FIRST PLAY

BY BERNARD SHAW

1911

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pound (currency) symbol has been replaced by the word "pounds".

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 e