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Bernard Shaw

How He Lied to Her Husband & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

Edited by Vitaly Baziyan

The play How He Lied to Her Husband was first published in a translation by Siegfried Trebitsch on 28 November 1904 in the Berliner Tageblatt. First English edition was published on 19 June 1907 by Constable and Company Ltd, London. This publication from “John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to Her Husband, Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1920” is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading.

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play How He Lied to Her Husband contains 32 letters and entries, written between 1898 and 1949. Sources of this collection are prior publications Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw published by Max Reinhardt, Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch published by Stanford University Press, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a correspondence published by Constable and Company Ltd., London, Shaw on Theatre published by Hill and Wang, New York and Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Granville Barker published by Theatre Arts Books, New York; Shaw on Language published by Philosophical Library, New York, Bernard Shaw on Cinema published by ‎ Southern Illinois University Press, The Playwright & the Pirate. Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: A Correspondence published by Pennsylvania State University Press and The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The Times, 1898-1950 published by Irish Academic Press, Dublin.

The book represents a significant addition to contemporary understanding of Shaw’s play How He Lied to Her Husband. It reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of issues and relationships with contemporaries.

The ebook cover was created by the editor using the picture of Sir John Everett Millais.

Bernard Shaw has written How He Lied to Her Husband in 1904 for an American actor-manager, playwright and producer Arnold Daly, who wanted a curtain raiser for another play of Bernard Shaw The Man of Destiny. Arnold Daly presented How He Lied to Her Husband at the Berkeley Lyceum, New York, September 26, 1904.

Characters in order of appearance:

He (Henry Apjohn) – Arnold Daly

She (Aurora Bompas) – Selene Johnson

Her Husband (Teddy Bompas) – Dodson Mitchell

Producer – Arnold Daly

The play How He Lied to Her Husband was first presented in England by John Eugene Vedrenne and Harley Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre, London, February 28, 1905.

Characters in order of appearance:

He (Henry Apjohn) – Harley Granville Barker

She (Aurora Bompas) – Gertrude Kingston

Her Husband (Teddy Bompas) – Arthur Gordon Poulton

Producer – Harley Granville Barker

How He Lied to Her Husband was the first Shaw’s play to be filmed, namely for British International Pictures at their Elstree Studios. The film was first shown in London at the Carlton, on January 10, 1931.

Characters in order of appearance:

He (Henry Apjohn) – Robert Harris

She (Aurora Bompas) – Vera Lennox

Her Husband (Teddy Bompas) – Edmund Gwenn

Director – Cecil Lewis

Settings and costumes – Gladys Calthrop

How He Lied to Her Husband was the first play to be televised on July 8, 1937.

Characters in order of appearance:

He (Henry Apjohn) – Derek Williams

She (Aurora Bompas) – Greer Garson

Her Husband (Teddy Bompas) – Douglas Alexander Clarke-Smith

Producer – George More O’Farrell

Settings and costumes – Peter Bax

Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play How He Lied to Her Husband

1/ Bernard Shaw’s article contributed to a Scottish broadsheet newspaper The Glasgow Herald

26th April 1898

Sir,—In the very able and interesting review with which you have honoured my Plays Pleasant und Unpleasant, your reviewer asks the following question. “Why does Mr. Shaw so object to the use of apostrophe as to disfigure his pages with theyd and youd?” The answer is that I did so to avoid disfiguring the pages. It is admitted on all hands that the Scotch printers who have turned out the book (Messrs Clark, of Edinburgh) have done their work admirably; but no human printer could make a page of type look well if it were peppered in all directions with apostrophes. I am sorry to say that literary men never seem to think of the immense difference these details make in the appearance of a block of letterpress, in spite of the lessons of that great author and printer, William Morris, who thought nothing of rewriting a line solely to make it “justify” prettily in print. If your reviewer will try the simple experiment of placing an open Bible, in which there are neither apostrophes nor inverted commas, besides his own review of my plays, which necessarily bristle with quotation marks, I think he will admit at once that my plan of never using an apostrophe when I can be avoided without ambiguity transfigures the pages instead of disfiguring them. He will, I feel confident, never again complain of youd because a customary ugliness has been wiped out of it. I have used the apostrophe in every case where its omission could even momentarily mislead the reader; for example, I have written she’d and I’ll to distinguish them from shed and ill. But I have made no provision for the people who cannot understand dont unless it is printed don’t. If a man is as stupid as that, he should give up reading altogether.

[G. Bernard Shaw]

2/ Bernard Shaw’s article contributed to the Society of Authors’ quarterly journal The Author

1st April 1902

NOTES ON THE CLARENDON PRESS RULES FOR COMPOSITORS AND READERS

Spelling generally

I always use the American termination or for our. Theater, somber, center, etc., I reject only because they are wantonly anti-phonetic: theatre, sombre, etc., being nearer the sound. Such abominable Frenchifications as programme, cigarette, etc., are quite revolting to me. Telegram, quartet, etc., deprive them of all excuse. I should like also to spell epilogue epilog, because people generally mispronounce it, just as they would mispronounce catalogue if the right sound were not so familiar. [also Shakespear and shew instead of Shakespeare and show] That is the worst of unphonetic spelling: in the long run people pronounce words as they are spelt; and so the language gets senselessly altered.

Contractions

The apostrophies in ain’t, don’t, haven’t, etc., look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan’t should be sha’’n’t, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted.

Hyphens

I think some of the hyphens given are questionable. Smallpox is right; and small pox is right; but small-pox is, I should say, certainly wrong. A hyphen between an adverb and a verb, or an adjective and a noun, is only defensible when the collocation would be ambiguous without it. The rule given that compound words of more than one accent should be hyphened is, like most rules, a mere brazening-out of a mistake.

Punctuation

Stops are clearly as much the author’s business as words. The rules given here are very properly confined to matters of custom in printing. I wish, however, that the Clarendon Press, or some other leading house, would make a correct rule for the punctuation of quotations between inverted commas. The common practice is to put the points belonging to the sentence in which the quotation occurs inside the inverted commas instead of outside. For example: Was he wise to say “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die?” The correct, but less usual punctuation is: Was he wise to say “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die”?

Italics

This is deplorable. To the good printer the occurrence of two different founts on the same page is at best an unavoidable evil. To the bad one, it is an opportunity of showing off the variety of his stock: he is never happier than when he is setting up a title-page in all the founts he possesses. Not only should titles not be printed in italic; but the customary ugly and unnecessary inverted commas should be abolished. Let me give a specimen. 1. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 2. I was reading “The Merchant of Venice.” 3. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. The man who cannot see that No. 1 is the best looking as well as the sufficient and sensible form should print or write nothing but advertisements of lost dogs or ironmongers’ catalogues: literature is not for him to meddle with.

On the whole, and excepting expressly the deplorable heresy about italics, these Clarendon Press rules will serve the turn of the numerous authors who have no ideas of their own on the subject, or who are still in their apprenticeship, or who, as English gentlemen, desire to do, not the sensible and reasonable thing, but the thing that everybody else does. At the same time, the poverty of the rules shews how far we still are from having an accurate speech notation. To the essayist and the scientific writer this may not greatly matter; but to the writer of fiction, especially dramatic fiction, it is a serious drawback, as the desperate phonetics of our dialect novels show. Now the Clarendon Press prints for the essayist and the professor much more than for the fictionist. I therefore suggest that some well-known printer of novels should be asked for a copy of his rules, if he has any. A Scotch printer for preference, as the Scotch intellect likes to know what it is doing.

[G. Bernard Shaw]

3/ To an English actor, theatre director, critic, playwright, Shakespearean scholar and intimate friend Harley Granville Barker

12th August 1904