Perhaps no member of the first audiences of Major Barbara would have enjoyed this joke more than the real-life, Australian-born professor of Greek upon whom Shaw modeled the character of Cusins, Gilbert Murray, O.M. (1866–1957). Another social group was more privately insulted by Shaw when he wrote to Murray, apropos Cusins, “handsome of me not to make you a Rhodes scholar, by the way” (50). Murray himself described his portrayal in the play as a caricature, but Harley Granville Barker, who first played the role at the Court Theatre in 1905, went to great lengths to make it a true-to-life representation of the man, even to the extent of borrowing a pair of Murray's own spectacles for the production. The passages of verse recited by Cusins in the play are quotations, with minor variants, of Murray's translation of Euripides's The Bacchae. Charles A. Carpenter's expertly edited and handsomely produced...

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