Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction

By George Bernard Shaw

“Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction” is a play by George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright who became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction is a short play by Bernard Shaw. It is a comic mock-melodrama, written to raise funds for charity.
Late at night, Phyllis, the maid, is combing the hair of her employer, Lady Magnesia FitzTollemache. Phyllis expresses foreboding and the fear that she will never see her beloved mistress again. Magnesia retires to sleep, serenaded by a heavenly choir singing "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey". A murderous figure enters, brandishing a dagger. Before he can stab Magnesia she wakes, and recognises her husband.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avia Artis
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9788382265897

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London in 1876. He initially wrote novels then went on to achieve fame through his career as a journalist, critic and public speaker. A committed and active socialist, he was one of the leaders of the Fabian Society. He was a prolific and much lauded playwright and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1950.

Book preview

PASSION, POISON, AND PETRIFACTION

OR THE FATAL GAZOGENE

In a bed-sitting room in a fashionable quarter of London a lady sits at her dressing-table, with her maid combing her hair. It is late. and the electric lamps are glowing. Apparently the room is bedless, but there stands against the opposite wall to that at which the dressing-table is placed a piece of furniture that suggests a bookcase without carrying conviction. On the same side is a chest of drawers of that disastrous kind which, recalcitrant to the opener until she is provoked to violence, then suddenly come wholly out and defy all her efforts to fit them in again. Opposite this chest of drawers, on the lady's side of the room, is a cupboard. The presence of a row of gentleman's boots beside the chest of drawers proclaims that the lady is married. Her own boots are beside the cupboard. The third wall is pierced midway by the door, above which is a cuckoo clock. Near the door a pedestal bears a portrait bust of the lady in plaster. There is a fan on the dressing-table, a hatbox and rug strap on the chest of drawers, an umbrella and a bootjack against the wall near the bed. The general impression