Talking Machines: Shaw, Phonography, and Pygmalion

From the beginning of Shaw’s career as a publishing playwright, he struggled to imprint the sound of his characters’ speech on the page. Convinced that the Roman alphabet was incapable of delivering crucial paralinguistic information to actors and readers, Shaw hoped that the new manual and mechanical phonographic writing technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would serve as more satisfactory mediums for his “word-music.” Drawing on media history and theory, the author argues that Shaw’s actual and imagined uses of phonetic shorthands and sound recording devices as theatrical media mark his drama, his dramaturgy, and his vision of the author-actor relationship as products of the modern machine age. While Shaw sometimes indulged in the techno-fantasy of a gramophone-like actor who would mechanically reproduce his authorial inscriptions, the author contends that the ideal Shavian actor is both a talking machine and an exceptionally vital human being. The author reads Pygmalion, along with Shaw’s writings on dramatic authorship and acting, as critical meditations on the complex processes and mixed consequences of conceptualizing spoken language, its notation, and its performance as mere data.