Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

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2 (p. 6) though I already knew all about Alnaschar and Don Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another romantic hero mocked by reality: Shaw lists three fictional romantic heroes: In “The Barber’s Fifth Brother,” a tale from The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Alnaschar is a dreamer who invests in glassware in a scheme to become rich and marry the vizier’s daughter, but then shatters the glass in a rage against his imaginary wife; Don Quixote is the idealistic romantic hero of the satirical romance of that name by Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1 616); Simon Tappertit, in Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), is a locksmith’s apprentice given to ambitious and romantic delusions.