Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

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13 (p. 625) “Was there no heartbreak in that for your father?”: Shotover’s humiliation here in the confession of how his daughter Addy’s leaving home broke his heart shows how deeply Shaw has embedded King Lear in Heartbreak House; just as Lear’s denial of his own mortality manifests itself in his incestuous impulse to keep his daughter Cordelia to himself, so too does Captain Shotover’s resistance to crashing the ship of state on the rocks manifest itself in his spiritual marriage to Ellie, who, as befits the dream-like state of the action, can be both his daughter and his wife. The issue of Ellie’s marrying the older Mangan, a man her adored father’s age, is Shaw’ s version of the first part of King Lear, where Cordelia must first reject her father’s demands on her.