Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗

woman, Eliza. Just because I’m not her lawful husband. And she knows it, too. Catch her marrying me! Come on, Eliza. Slip your father half a crown to go home on. An unmarried man has to deaden his senses much more than a married one.

PS (17)

DOOLITTLE: Well, I’m willing to marry her. It’s me that suffers by it. I’m a slave to that woman, Eliza. Just because I ain’t her lawful husband. [Lovably] Come on, Eliza. Slip your father half a crown to go home on.

The first extract gives a sense of the extent of Doolittle’s misery at not being married to the woman with whom he lives. He says that he has no hold over her, and that he is obliged to buy her presents in order to keep her, because he has no legal rights. His final line (“An unmarried man…”) is tinged with a melancholy that we might not normally associate with the jovial “Lerner” Doolittle, but it is absolutely consistent with Shaw’s arguably more elegiac Doolittle. The replacement speech still contains reference to “slavery,” but it is not explained, losing the opportunity for a darker moment.

The subject of Doolittle’s relationships, especially with Eliza’s current “stepmother,” was originally discussed more explicitly. Particularly important is the indication in RS that Eliza is aware that her parents were not married: when Mrs. Pearce asks Eliza about her parents, she replies, “I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother, and my father isn’t a marrying sort of man if you know what I mean” (RS, 1-3-23). Lerner simplified this to “I ain’t got no parents” (PS, 30), almost as if she is simply an orphan, yet the original is more revealing, because we learn about Eliza’s insecure upbringing. It also discloses that she is aware her parents were not married, something her father later claims (to Pickering and Higgins, albeit in RS only) that she does not know. Again, the cut line derives from Shaw, who mentions Eliza’s “sixth stepmother” but does not have the comment about Doolittle not being “a marrying sort of man.”43

The encounter (a couple of scenes later) between Higgins and Doolittle is white-hot. Deciding how to carve this scene must have been quite a challenge for Lerner: money changes hands for Eliza and Doolittle “sells” his daughter, which paints him in an unpleasant light, yet he has to remain a likeable rogue. One theme that Lerner originally explored more extensively was the “undeserving poor,” a label that Doolittle gives himself early on in the scene. An example is the line “They charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving” (RS, 1-5-33), which was later removed; here, Doolittle explains why he needs money. Later, he rejects Higgins’s offer to train him to be a preacher: “Not me, Governor, thank you kindly … it’s a dog’s life any way you look at it. Undeserving poverty’s my line” (RS, 1-5-34, derived from Pygmalion, 55). Soon afterwards, when Pickering says that he assumes Doolittle was married to Eliza’s mother and is firmly put straight on the subject, Doolittle adds: “No, [i]t’s only the middle class way. My way has always been the undeserving way. But don’t say nothing to Eliza. She don’t know” (RS, 1-5-35). This reintroduces the reality of Eliza’s background hinted at in the previous scene, and underlines the fact that she is illegitimate while more generally showing that she was brought up with a different sense of morality than the place in which she now finds herself (the additions are not from Shaw).

Consistent with the changes made to act 1, scene 5, the relationship between Eliza and Doolittle is much darker in the rehearsal version of the Ascot scene too, even though he is physically absent. Eliza originally had a long speech (deriving from Pygmalion), dealing with the news that her father is an alcoholic (RS, 1-7-58). Mrs. Eynsford Hill expresses sympathy, but Eliza replies that “it never did him no harm” and assures her that he did not “keep it up regular.” Doolittle only did it “on the burst … from time to time,” and Eliza points out that he was “always more agreeable” afterwards. Her mother would send him out to drink himself happy if he was out of work. Eliza’s motto is simply that “if a man has a bit of conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober. … A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy.” This statement represents Shaw at his most acute.44 The comment not only exposes Eliza’s social status, it also gives a shocking insight into the emotional conditions in which she was raised. PS removes this element of the scene, retaining reference to Doolittle’s drinking habits only in passing for a joke (“Drank! My word! Something chronic,” 106). In consequence, PS maintains light comedy throughout the Ascot scene rather than adding new insights.

Doolittle’s final appearance, in the Covent Garden scene in act 2, was also changed, specifically during his last exchange with Eliza. This confrontation is an invention of the musical, though it does have an equivalent in Pygmalion through Doolittle’s presence in the final scene. (In the play, Freddy, Mrs. Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza all depart for his wedding; crucially, Eliza does not attend the ceremony in the musical, and Lerner implies a final rift between them.) During rehearsals, Lerner excised several lines showing the “philosophical” Doolittle. He says that he was “free” and “happy” and didn’t want to be interfered with. He had no relatives, but now he has “fifty, and not a decent week’s wages among the lot of them.” He used to live for himself, but now he’s “middle class” and has to “live for others.” He concludes: “The next one to touch me will be your blasted professor. I’ll have to learn to speak middle-class language from him instead of speaking proper English” (RS, 2-3-17). This is an interesting speech that depicts Doolittle’s fate as part of a