The Music Cure

By George Bernard Shaw

“The Music Cure” 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.


The Music Cure is a short comedy sketch by George Bernard Shaw.
Lord Reginald Fitzambey, Under-Secretary of State for War, is in a distressed state. He explains to his doctor that, knowing the British army would soon be put on a vegetarian diet, he bought shares in the Macaroni Trust. Brought before a parliamentary committee for profiteering, Fitzambey had tried to explain that macaroni was a normal investment. Now he is highly sensitised to anything distressing. His doctor prescribes rest and offers him opium pills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avia Artis
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9788382266047

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born into a lower-class family in Dublin, Ireland. During his childhood, he developed a love for the arts, especially music and literature. As a young man, he moved to London and found occasional work as a ghostwriter and pianist. Yet, his early literary career was littered with constant rejection. It wasn’t until 1885 that he’d find steady work as a journalist. He continued writing plays and had his first commercial success with Arms and the Man in 1894. This opened the door for other notable works like The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.

Book preview

THE MUSIC CURE

Lord Reginald Fitzambry, a fashionably dressed, rather-pretty young man of 22, is prostrate on a sofa in a large hotel drawing room, crying convulsively. His doctor is trying to soothe him. The doctor is about a dozen years his senior; and his ways are the ways of a still youthful man who considers himself in smart society as well as professionally attendant on it. The drawing room has tall central doors, at present locked. If anyone could enter under these circumstances, he would find on his left a grand piano with the keyboard end towards him, and a smaller door beyond the piano. On his right would be the window, and, further on, the sofa on which the unhappy youth is wallowing, with, close by it, the doctor's chair and a little table accommodating the doctor's hat, a plate, a medicine bottle, a half emptied glass, and a bell call.

THE DOCTOR. Come come! be a man. Now really this is silly. You mustnt give way like this. I tell you nothing's happened to you. Hang it all! it's not the end of the world if you did buy a few shares—

REGINALD. [interrupting him frantically] I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I am ready to give them up. Oh, I never meant any harm in