Пигмалион. Цезарь и Клеопатра

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
Ш 81

ISBN 978-5-9925-0197-1
© Антология, 2006
© КАРО, 2006

Ш 81

Шоу Б.
Пигмалион. Цезарь и Клеопатра: Книга для чтения на
английском языке. – СПб.: Антология, КАРО, 2010. – 288 с. —
(Серия «Selected Plays»).

ISBN 978-5-9925-0197-1

Джордж Бернард Шоу (1856–1950) известный английский драматург, лауреат Нобелевской премии (1925).
В издание вошли две пьесы автора. Одна из них – «Пигмалион» (1914) – повествует о простой цветочнице, ставшей настоящей леди. Другая – «Цезарь и Клеопатра» (1899), в которой юная
девушка на глазах читателей превращается в настоящую царицу.
В книге представлен неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала.
ББК 81.2Англ-93

PYGMALION

Bernard Shaw

 4

Pygmalion

5

PREFACE

A PROFESSOR OF PHONETICS

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion1 needs, not a preface,
but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place.
The English have no respect for their language, and will
not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it
because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign
alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of themhave any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can
teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it
is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without
making some other Englishman despise him. Most European
languages are now accessible in black and white to foreigners:
English and French are not thus accessible even to Englishmen
and Frenchmen. The reformer we need most today is an
energetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the
hero of a popular play.

1 Pygmalion – Пигмалион – в греческой мифологии король Кипра и скульптор – изваял из слоновой кости статую
девушки (Галатеи), в которую и влюбился. Афродита, греческая богиня любви, пожалела его и вдохнула жизнь в статую.

Bernard Shaw

 6

There have been heroes of that kind crying, in the
wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in
the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, the
illustrious Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of Visible
Speech, had emigrated to Canada, where his son invented
the telephone; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a London
patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet
skull-cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in
a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another
phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike.
Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of
character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional
mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a
phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job)
would have entitled him to high official recognition, and
perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his
Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in
general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once,
in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South
Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the
Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to
commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance
of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a
savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and
literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic
expert only. The article, being libellous, had to be returned as
impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its
author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the
first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he,
who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had
actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal

Pygmalion

7

appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation
of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in
his own despite that he was squeezed into something called
a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests
probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing
could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with
the university to which he nevertheless clung by divine right
in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has
left any, include some satires that may be published without
too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe,
not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I
should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly; and to him
all scholars who were not rabid phoneticians were fools.
Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the
adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still,
as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With
Higgins’s physique and temperament Sweet might have set
the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himself
professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative
personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his
eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not
blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding
a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is
not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know
how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated
subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men
who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less
important subjects which they profess without originality and
sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he
overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect
them to heap honors on him.

Bernard Shaw

 8

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little.
Among them towered Robert Bridges, to whom perhaps
Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again
I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public
aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that
they are among the most important people in England at
present, it will serve its turn.
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely
successful play, both on stage and screen, all over Europe and
North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and
deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I
delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat
the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to
prove my contention that great art can never be anything else.
Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with
accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add
that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flowergirl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern
concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the
Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Théâtre Français is only
one of many thousands of men and women who have
sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.
Our West End shop assistants and domestic servants are bilingual. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last
state of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest
slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempts of phonetically
untaught persons to imitate the plutocracy. Ambitious flowergirls who read this play must not imagine that they can pass
themselves off as fine ladies by untutored imitation. They
must learn their alphabet over again, and differently, from a
phonetic expert. Imitation will only make them ridiculous.

Pygmalion

9

ACT I

London at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain.
Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions.
Pedestrians running for shelter into the portico of
St. Paul’s church (not Wren’s Cathedral but Inigo
Jones’s church in Covent Garden vegetable market),
among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress.
All are peering out gloomily at the rain, except one
man with his back turned to the rest, wholly
preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing.
The church clock strikes the first quarter.

THE DAUGHTER [in the space between the central pillars,
close to the one on her left]. I’m getting chilled to the
bone. What can Freddy be doing all this time? He’s been
gone twenty minutes.
THE MOTHER [on her daughter’s right]. Not so long. But he
ought to have got us a cab by this.
A BYSTANDER [on the lady’s right]. He wont get no cab1
not until half-past eleven, missus, when they come back
after dropping their theatre fares.

1 Сохранена авторская пунктуация и написание (с отклонениями от норм английского языка).

Bernard Shaw

 10

THE MOTHER. But we must have a cab. We cant stand here
until half-past eleven. It’s too bad.
THE BYSTANDER. Well, it aint my fault, missus.
THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would
have got one at the theatre door.
THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy?
THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldnt he?

Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton
Street side, and comes between them, closing a
dripping umbrella. He is a young man of twenty, in
evening dress, very wet round the ankles.

THE DAUGHTER. Well, havnt you got a cab?
FREDDY. Theres not one to be had for love or money1.
THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You cant have
tried.
THE DAUGHTER. It’s too tiresome. Do you expect us to go
and get one ourselves?
FREDDY. I tell you theyre all engaged. The rain was so
sudden: nobody was prepared; and everybody had to
take a cab. Ive been to Charing Cross one way and
nearly to Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all
engaged.
THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?
FREDDY. There wasnt one at Trafalgar Square.
THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?
FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you
expect me to walk to Hammersmith?
THE DAUGHTER. You havnt tried at all.

1 for love or money – (разг.) ни за какие деньги