Back to Methuselah · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw.
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Eve
major
Also known as Eve Adam, Eve Creation, Eve The Voice, Eve Shuddering, Eves
Eve watches a fawn rot into worms and coins the word that will haunt her species: dead. Lonely enough to be flattered by a whispering snake in an amethyst hood, she is the restless, curious half of the first marriage, always asking why. Her willingness to listen to the Serpent's talk of birth and renewal sets the whole evolutionary argument of the play in motion.
Adam
major
Also known as Adam Eve, Adam Horrified, Adam That, Adam Who, Adam Nothing, Adam Chance, Adam Liar, Adam Struck, Adams
Adam scratches a living from the garden, fretting over Eve's safety and disgusted by the corpse she shows him. He is the cautious, literal partner—the one who buries what he cannot explain rather than asking what it might become. His resistance to the Serpent's seductive talk of death and rebirth makes him the counterweight against which Eve's curiosity and Cain's violence are measured.
Lilith
supporting
Also known as Lilith
Lilith never strides onstage in the opening act, yet her shadow falls across every conversation about will, birth, and the power to dream things that never were. She is the older, wilder female principle—the one who would not submit, who dared to eat strange things and demand what she wanted. Her presence haunts the play's central claim that life can be reshaped by sheer insistence, making her the silent ancestor of every character who refuses to accept the world as given.
The Serpent
supporting
Also known as the old serpent, The Serpent Adam
The Serpent slithers out of the johnswort in a magnificent amethyst hood, flattering Eve and licking her neck while whispering the vocabulary of mortality. She is the play's first artist and first philosopher, boasting that she dreams things that never were and asks why not. Her seduction of Eve is not malice but sheer creative appetite, and it launches the long Shaw argument that imagination, not obedience, is what makes life worth living.
Cain
supporting
Also known as Cain Adamson, Cain Adamson Charles Napoleon, Cain Undutiful, Cain Murder, Cain Rising, Cain The Voice, Cain The Devil, Cain Selfish, Cain Mother
Cain kicks aside the garden hurdle and arrives armed, oiled, and bristling, a self-assertive son who knows he is unforgiven. He defends killing Abel as the logical end of Abel's own inventions—blood, fire, the altar—and despises Adam's drudgery as the coward's way. His restless violence and his refusal to accept his parents' world make him the play's first portrait of the human appetite for adventure that will not be contained by any garden.
Abel
minor
Also known as Abel
Adam and Eve's son, murdered by his brother Cain.
Franklyn Barnabas
major
Also known as Franklyn, Franklyn Mr. Joyce Burge, Franklyn Interrupting, Franklyn Gently, Franklyn Shaking, Franklyn Severely, Franklyn Mr. Haslam, Franklyn One, Franklyn The, Franklyn Astonished, Franklyn Man, Franklyn Queen Victoria, Frank
Franklyn Barnabas, brother of the biologist Conrad, hosts a country-house gathering where he argues that the Church, the state, and every human institution are stunted by the brevity of life. He confesses he left the pulpit after twenty years because he was not within a hundred and fifty years of the wisdom he pretended to. His cheerful, relentless insistence that longevity would remake civilization is the intellectual engine of the play's middle acts, and his patience with ordinary men like Haslam shows the humane side of his radical creed.
Conrad Barnabas
major
Also known as Conrad, Dr. Conrad Barnabas, Dr. Barnabas, Conrad Rising, Conrad Beaten, Conrad Impatiently, Conrad Why, Conrad God, Conrad Pshaw, Conrad To Savvy, Conrad Aha, the great Conrad Barnabas, the Conrad
Conrad Barnabas is the tweed-clad, low-toned brother whose biological convictions collide with his brother Franklyn's clerical eloquence. He sends Savvy his latest book only to learn she has left every page uncut, a small humiliation that sharpens his impatience with the young and the comfortable. His fixation on extending life past its present brevity drives the brothers' joint gospel and gives the play its central wager: that three hundred years might be enough to make a person worth being.
Mr. Barnabas
supporting
Also known as Barnabas, the Brothers Barnabas, Barnabas Alarmed, Barnabas Ingratitude, Barnabas Rising, Barnabas No, Barnabas Yah, Barnabas Hoarse, Barnabas Stuff, Barnabas Interrupting, Barnabas Choking, Doctor Barnabas
Mr. Barnabas moves through the brothers' orbit as a fond but prickly elder, defending his sons' reputations while guarding his own standing as the era's foremost authority on the duration of human life. When a newspaper hints that underwater breathing will upset his figures, he flies into alarm and marches off to confront the American who dared challenge his Act. His vanity and genuine paternal pride make him both comic and touching, a small portrait of how the old order absorbs new ideas.
Savvy Barnabas
supporting
Also known as Savvy, Miss Savvy, Miss Barnabas, Savvy Who, Savvy Oh, Savvy Barnabas, Savvy To Haslam, Savvy Disappointed, Savvy Horace
Savvy Barnabas enters her father's study like weather, kissing Conrad, calling Haslam by his first name, and strolling to the hearthrug as if it were hers. Her unceremonious manners scandalize Franklyn, who mourns his mother's grace and fears his daughter is becoming a demoralized Socialist, while Conrad insists she is simply eighteen and should be left alone. She matters because she embodies the generational fracture the brothers' gospel must somehow address: the young have no time to form a conscience, and Savvy is the play's most vivid proof.
Haslam
supporting
Also known as Mr. Haslam, The Clerical Gentleman Mr. Haslam, Haslam Beaming, Mr. Haslam Bill, Bill, poor old Bill, the Reverend Bill Haslam, Haslam Oh
Haslam arrives at the Barnabas house an unwelcome guest, admits he was shoved into the Church by family convenience, and cheerfully concedes that if he had nine hundred years he would chuck the whole shop. His bird that sings 'stick it or chuck it' becomes the play's wry refrain for a man who cannot take his own vocation seriously because life is too short for seriousness. He is the audience's surrogate: ordinary, good-humored, and slowly drawn into the brothers' argument that only longer life could make a real conscience possible.
Burge
supporting
Also known as Burge Stung, Burge Yes, Burge Stuff, Burge Lubin, Burge - Lubin, Mr. Burge, Burge God, Burge Good God, Burge The Liberal Party, Burge Fiercely, Burge Starting . Lubin
Burge appears in the play's futuristic frame as the President of the British Islands, a stout, silk-smocked figure who treats government as a series of pleasant evasions and delegates the boring duties to his Accountant General. He needles Barnabas about the American's book, shrugs off the coming crisis in the Act, and prefers being liked to being right. His easy charm and shallow pragmatism represent the political order the Barnabas gospel must overcome, and his scenes with Barnabas are the play's sharpest comedy of administrative evasion.
Lubin
supporting
Also known as Mr. Lubin, Lubin Recovering, Lubin Oh, Lubin Thank God, Lubin Rising, Lubin Savvy, Henry Hopkins Lubin, Lubin Discovering Conrad
Lubin moves through the political scenes as Burge's foil, less genial and more wary, the kind of man who asks what a grand idea will cost and who will pay for it. He is unconvinced by the brothers' talk of extended life and treats their gospel as one more scheme to be managed rather than believed. His skepticism gives the play its necessary friction, forcing the Barnabas vision to answer to the ordinary instincts of men who expect to die on schedule.
Joyce Burge
minor
Also known as Mr. Joyce Burge, The Parlor Maid Mr. Joyce Burge
A prominent politician who interacts with the Barnabas circle.
Confucius
supporting
Also known as Confucius Gravely, Confucius Rising, Confucius Answering, Confucius The Archbishop
Confucius arrives in the final plays as a figure of immense reputation and uncertain doctrine, one of the great dead whose wisdom the living have inherited without ever testing it. His authority rests on maxims and tradition rather than on any demonstrated grasp of what philosophy actually is, a gap Shaw's preface dwells on when he accuses even Shakespeare of mistaking pessimism for thought. He matters because he embodies the play's central wager: that a civilization can inherit a name without inheriting a method, and that the difference only shows when someone asks the sage a question he has never had to answer.
The Elderly Gentleman
major
Also known as The Elderly Gentleman Good Lord, The Elderly Gentleman Gracious Powers, The Elderly Gentleman Illuminated, The Elderly Gentleman Exhausted, The Elderly Gentleman Puzzled, The Elderly Gentleman Scrambling
He comes to the future world as an emissary of standing, accustomed to being listened to, and is promptly assigned a nurse and forbidden to speak with fully adult natives lest he die of discouragement. His outrage is genuine and increasingly ridiculous: he insists on his rank, his health, his decency, while the words themselves have quietly stopped meaning anything. His collapse into song and antics is the play's sharpest comedy and its sharpest argument, since his inability to converse with a woman centuries his senior exposes how little of his authority was ever his own.
The Veiled Woman
supporting
Also known as Woman Zozim Zoo Cain Adamson Charles Napoleon, The Woman, Zoo, Mrs. Zoo, Zoo Interrupting, Zoo Oh, Zoo Dissolve
Veiled and robed, she passes behind the temple columns with a majesty that makes Napoleon stop in his tracks, then dismantles his Man of Destiny rhetoric without raising her voice. She is guardian, oracle, and something closer to a field of force than a person, and she treats the envoy's ritual as a performance she is willing to skip for a sensible man. Her importance lies in that double register: she can play the pythoness for credulous visitors and speak as a peer to anyone who sees through it, which makes her the play's model of what a long-lived mind actually looks like.
Martellus
supporting
Also known as Martellus Calling, Martellus Rising, Martellus Impossible, Martellus Rises, Martellus Enslaved, Martellus Contemplating the Figures
Martellus works in a world where art has outlived the passions that once drove it, shaping figures meant to represent what the long-lived have become rather than what they once desired. His exchanges with Pygmalion turn on the question of whether sculpture should flatter the new humanity or hold it to account, and he is willing to be difficult about it. He matters because he gives the play's abstract argument about evolution a workshop and a pair of hands, and because his quarrels with a fellow artist are the closest the future comes to ordinary human friction.
Pygmalion
supporting
Also known as Pygmalion, Poor Pygmalion, Carry Pygmalion, Pyg, Poor old Pyg
Pygmalion shares Martellus's workshop and his century, and the two of them bicker like colleagues anywhere, except that the stakes are the self-image of a species that no longer dies on schedule. He is the more pliant of the pair, more willing to make what the age asks for, and his name carries the weight of the old myth whether he wants it or not. He matters because the play needs someone inside the future's art to show that even the long-lived still disagree about beauty, purpose, and who gets to decide.
Arjillax
supporting
Also known as Arjillax Frowning, Arjillax Ask Martellus
Arjillax moves among the administrators and guardians of the long-lived world, where authority is exercised through fields, rules, and quiet discouragement rather than through force. His concerns are procedural and territorial in the way any governing mind's are, and he treats the arrival of short-lived visitors as a problem of regulation rather than a wonder. He matters because he shows what government becomes when the governed no longer die: patient, impersonal, and almost unrecognizable as politics, which is precisely the point Shaw is making about institutions that outlive their reasons.
Charles Darwin
supporting
Also known as Darwin, the prophet Darwin, Charles
Shaw treats Darwin less as a man than as a cultural force: the thinker whose theory of natural selection swept through a British public that had ignored his grandfather Erasmus's subtler philosophy of will. Darwin's advantage, in Shaw's telling, was concreteness — pigeon fanciers, gardeners, and farm laborers already understood selection from without, so his doctrine of accident and survival needed no metaphysics to land. He matters to the book's opening argument because Shaw must first explain how evolution became a popular creed before he can push past it toward the Life Force and Creative Evolution.
The Archbishop
minor
Also known as Mr. Archbishop, The Archbishop Who has caught the infection of her indignation
A high-ranking church official in the future society, grappling with the new ideas.
The Accountant General
minor
Also known as the Accountant General, The Accountant General
A bureaucratic official in the future government, concerned with practical matters.
Zozim
minor
Also known as Zozim, the hopelessly puzzled Zozim
A character in the future who interacts with the Elderly Gentleman.
Napoleon
minor
Also known as Napoleon Psha, Napoleon Forcibly, Napoleon Retreating, Cain Adamson Charles Napoleon
The historical emperor, appearing as a character in the future world.
Ecrasia
minor
Also known as Ecrasia Impossible
A beautiful but intellectually limited woman in the distant future.
Strephon
minor
Also known as Strephon Rising, Strephon Crying, Strephon Hush
A young man in the distant future, part of the new generation.
The Newly Born
minor
Also known as The Newly Born Yells, The Newly Born Indignant, the Newly Born
A child born in the distant future, representing the next stage of evolution.
The Oracle
minor
Also known as The Oracle
A wise and ancient figure in the distant future, offering guidance.
The Female Figure
minor
Also known as The Female Figure Ozymandias, Ozymandias
A statue in the distant future, representing an ancient ruler.
The Male Figure
minor
Also known as The Male Figure Crawling
A statue in the distant future, representing an ancient ruler.
Mrs. Lutestring
minor
Also known as Mrs. Lutestring Conrad Barnabas, Mrs. Lutestring Mr. President, Mrs. Lutestring Rising
A character in the future, connected to the Barnabas legacy.
The British Envoy
minor
Also known as The Envoy, The Envoy Very, The Envoy Whew
A diplomatic official in the future world.
The Negress
minor
Also known as The Negress Mr. President
A character in the future, part of the political scene.
Mr. President
minor
Also known as Mr. President
The president in the future world, dealing with political matters.
Daddy
minor
Also known as Old Daddy Long Legs
A term of address for an older character in the future.
The Maiden
minor
Also known as The Maiden Impatiently
A young woman in the future, part of the new generation.
The Pythoness
minor
Also known as The Pythoness
A prophetic figure in the distant future.
The Englishman
minor
Also known as That great Englishman Simon de Montfort, Simon
A historical figure referenced in the narrative.
Lamarck
minor
Also known as poor Lamarck
The early evolutionist whose ideas are contrasted with Darwin's.
Weismann
minor
Also known as Weismann
A biologist whose theories on heredity are discussed.
Samuel Butler
minor
Also known as Butler, Only Samuel Butler
A writer and thinker whose ideas on evolution are referenced.
Karl Marx
minor
Also known as Marx
The socialist philosopher, discussed in relation to Darwinism.
Goethe
minor
Also known as Goethe
The German poet and scientist, an early evolutionist.
Ibsen
minor
Also known as Saint Henrik Ibsen
The playwright, mentioned in the context of creative evolution.
Shakespeare
minor
Also known as Shakespeare
The playwright, referenced as an artist-prophet.
Michelangelo
minor
Also known as Michelangelo, Raphaels
The Renaissance artist, mentioned in the context of art and evolution.
Beethoven
minor
Also known as Beethoven
The composer, mentioned as an artist-prophet.
Nietzsche
minor
Also known as Nietzsche
The philosopher, discussed in relation to the Superman and evolution.
Christ
minor
Also known as Christ
The religious figure, discussed in the context of legends and evolution.
Muhammad
minor
Also known as Muhammad
The religious founder, mentioned in the context of legends.
Satan
minor
Also known as Satan
The devil, referenced in the context of religious legends.
Methuselah
minor
Also known as old Methuselah
The biblical figure known for his long life, central to the book's theme.
Elijah
minor
Also known as Elijah
The biblical prophet, referenced in the context of longevity.
Enoch
minor
Also known as Enoch
A biblical figure who walked with God, referenced for his longevity.
Adam Smith
minor
Also known as Adam Smith
The economist, mentioned in the context of political economy.
Robert Owen
minor
Also known as Owen
The social reformer, mentioned in the context of socialism.
Charles Bradlaugh
minor
Also known as Bradlaugh
A secularist and politician, mentioned in the context of freethought.
Tyndall
minor
Also known as Tyndall
A physicist, mentioned in the context of scientific materialism.
Helmholtz
minor
Also known as Helmholtz
A scientist, mentioned in the context of physics and evolution.
Malthus
minor
Also known as Malthus
The economist, whose population theory influenced Darwin.
Paley
minor
Also known as Paley
The theologian, known for the watchmaker analogy, critiqued in the book.
Linnaeus
minor
Also known as Linnaeus
The botanist, mentioned as an early classifier of life.
Erasmus Darwin
minor
Also known as Erasmus
Charles Darwin's grandfather, an early evolutionist poet and scientist.
Lorenz Oken
minor
Also known as Oken
A German naturalist, mentioned as an early evolutionist.
Metchnikoff
minor
Also known as Metchnikoff
A biologist, mentioned in the context of longevity research.
Voltaire
minor
Also known as Conspuez Voltaire
The French philosopher, mentioned in the context of religious criticism.
Shelley
minor
Also known as Shelley
The poet, mentioned in the context of creative evolution.
Blanco Posnet
minor
Also known as Blanco Posnet
A character from another Shaw play, referenced in the preface.
Old Nobodaddy
minor
Also known as Nobodaddy
A name for God, used in a critical context.
Joseph Popham
minor
Also known as Joe, Joseph, Popham, Bolge Bluebin, Bolge Bluebin Barlow
A character mentioned in the preface, possibly a historical figure.
Ambrose
minor
Also known as Ambrose
A character mentioned in the preface.
Nunk
minor
Also known as Nunk
A character mentioned in the preface.
Lord Dunreen
minor
Also known as Dunreen
A character mentioned in the preface.
Sir Fuller Eastwind
minor
Also known as old Eastwind, Eastwind
A character mentioned in the preface.
Father Addis
minor
Also known as Father Addis
A character mentioned in the preface.
Ethel
minor
Also known as Eth
A character mentioned in the preface.
Mimi
minor
Also known as Molly
A character mentioned in the preface.
Chloe
minor
Also known as Chloe
A character mentioned in the preface.
Cleopatra-Semiramis
minor
Also known as Cleopatra - Semiramis
A historical figure referenced in the preface.
Parry
minor
Also known as Parry
A character mentioned in the preface.
Wells
minor
Also known as Wells
H.G. Wells, mentioned in the context of evolution and society.
