# Short Plays — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Plays by George Bernard Shaw.

- [Eliza Shakespeare](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/eliza_shakespeare.md): She slips through the shadows of Shakespeare's London, a figure whose identity flickers between sovereign and muse, leaving even the Bard uncertain whom he addresses. Her presence forces a collision between royal authori
- [O'Flaherty](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/o_flaherty.md): O'Flaherty stands trapped between two irreconcilable loyalties: the British army that decorated him and the rebel mother who raised him to pray for England's ruin. His easy charm and evasions cannot disguise the panic be
- [Cashel Byron](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/cashel_byron.md): Cashel moves through the world with a boxer's blunt honesty and an unexpected gift for blank verse, equally at home trading blows with Zulu kings and trading barbs with aristocrats. His love for Lydia Carew pulls him tow
- [Gregory Juno](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/gregory_juno.md): Gregory is a self-described good man who promised his dying mother he would never make love to a married woman, a promise he is currently breaking with agonizing awareness. His paralysis is both comic and genuinely painf
- [Lydia Carew](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lydia_carew.md): Lydia owns Wiltstoken and everything in it, yet her wealth and wisdom have only taught her how isolated she is, surrounded by suitors who bore her and books that fail to satisfy. When Cashel Byron crashes into her solitu
- [Mrs. Lunn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/mrs_lunn.md): Mrs. Lunn is attractive, witty, and disarmingly honest about the pleasure she takes in dangerous flirtation, even as she insists she does not wish to be wicked. Her clear-eyed observation that virtue holds only when the 
- [Blanco Posnet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/blanco_posnet.md): Blanco is the outlaw every man in the territory wants hanged, and the play opens with him already caught, already defiant, already spoiling for a fight with anyone holding a Bible or a badge. His contempt for respectable
- [Lord Reginald Fitzambry](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lord_reginald_fitzambry.md): Reginald is a pampered young man of twenty-two whose parliamentary seat exists only because his father is a Duke, and whose chief talent is vamping popular tunes at the piano. Terrified that his shady share-buying will b
- [Georgina Mitchener](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/georgina_mitchener.md): Georgina runs the domestic side of the suffragette campaign, fielding phone calls, calming panics, and keeping the Prime Minister's household in order while the men around her lose their heads. Her calm practicality cont
- [Captain Edstaston](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/captain_edstaston.md): Edstaston arrives at the Winter Palace as a model of English propriety, engaged to the jealous Claire and determined to behave like a gentleman in a country that has no interest in gentlemen. Catherine takes one look at 
- [Sir Pearce Madigan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/sir_pearce_madigan.md): Sir Pearce is the local landlord and a British general, delighted to host the famous O'Flaherty V.C. on leave and to hear his own recruiting rhetoric echoed back as gratitude. What he gets instead is O'Flaherty's cheerfu
- [Lord Augustus Highcastle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lord_augustus_highcastle.md): Augustus presides over a government office where he issues contradictory orders, refuses his clerk a raise on patriotic grounds, and boasts into the telephone about the secret document listing anti-aircraft emplacements 
- [General Mitchener](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/general_mitchener.md): Mitchener presides over the War Office on the first of April, 1911, opening letters at his writing table while a chained suffragette howls outside and his own orderly slouches with contempt. He snatches a revolver at the
- [Henry Apjohn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/henry_apjohn.md): Apjohn belongs to the small crowd of admirers competing for Lydia's hand in Shaw's blank-verse burlesque of the prize ring, where a poet's claims to a lady sit awkwardly beside a prizefighter's. His suit is the genteel a
- [Great Catherine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/great_catherine.md): Catherine rules the Winter Palace with the caprice of a woman who has plenty of character and, as Shaw cheerfully puts it, no morals, keeping court as a species of harlequinade in which she is both monarch and clown. She
- [Anastasia Vulliamy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/anastasia_vulliamy.md): Anastasia moves through The Fascinating Foundling as the object of a benevolent plot that treats her less as a person than as a problem to be solved by arrangement. Her turning on her assailant in 'outraged majesty' — th
- [Young Strapper](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/young_strapper.md): Strapper Kemp is a young fighter in Cashel Byron's orbit, learning the trade in a play that sets the ring against the drawing room and finds the ring considerably more honest. He is the apprentice figure — loyal, game, a
- [Elder Daniels](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/elder_daniels.md): Elder Daniels represents the piety of the Western town that has caught Blanco Posnet, and his authority is the sort that speaks comfortably of judgment while the sheriff handles the rope. He is a man of God in a place wh
- [Squarcio](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/squarcio.md): Squarcio is a working killer in a Renaissance fiefdom where murder is a trade and a wager between lords can turn an assassin into a bodyguard. When Count Ferruccio reveals that the Baron will break Squarcio on the wheel 
- [Patiomkin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/patiomkin.md): Prince Patiomkin is the Empress's lover and most powerful courtier, a man who justifies his excesses by the sheer scale of his personality. Drunk and reckless, he hauls the protesting Captain Edstaston into Catherine's b
- [Lord Chamberlain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lord_chamberlain.md): The Lord Chamberlain presides over the stage with the confidence of a man who believes regulation and taste are the same thing. His pronouncements on actors, authors, and the dangers of the drama reveal a censor more con
- [Claire](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/claire.md): Claire is Edstaston's fiancée, caught in the whirl of a Russian court where her English composure is tested at every turn. Jealous of the Empress's proximity to her intended, she wavers between wounded vanity and fierce 
- [Catherine Dashkoff](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/catherine_dashkoff.md): The Princess Dashkoff is a courtier whose sense of imperial dignity is constantly offended by Patiomkin's antics and Catherine's tolerance of them. When she denounces the drunken prince as an insult to the throne, the Em
- [Ermyntrude](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/ermyntrude.md): Ermyntrude is a woman of expensive habits and frank appetites, raised in a rectory but formed for luxury. When her father's income collapses, she refuses to descend to what he calls respectable poverty and announces she 
- [Teresa](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/teresa.md): In O'Flaherty V.C., Teresa is the mother whose son Dennis returns home a decorated British Army recruit, and her neighbors' contempt for the uniform is a wound she carries alongside her love for him. She wants to hold he
- [Saint Barbara](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/saint_barbara.md): A saintly figure in The Glimpse of Reality, invoked in a religious context.
- [Feemy Evans](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/feemy_evans.md): In The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet, Feemy moves among the posse and the saloon crowd as a woman whose past gives her little standing but plenty of knowledge about what men do when they think no one is watching. She is dr
- [Phyllis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/phyllis.md): In Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, Phyllis is the ingenue whose romantic entanglements and perilous circumstances drive the farcical machinery of the plot. She is earnest where the play is absurd, which makes her the 
- [Mrs. Bompas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/mrs_bompas.md): In How He Lied to Her Husband, Mrs. Bompas is the wife whose head is turned by the attentions of a would-be poet, and whose husband's discovery of the affair turns her romantic self-image into a domestic crisis. She is v
- [Ferruccio](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/ferruccio.md): In The Glimpse of Reality, Ferruccio rides into bandit country looking for the man hired to assassinate him, and his furious pride makes him a target even as it makes him dangerous. His father's cynical wager has turned 
- [General Strammfest](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/general_strammfest.md): In Annajanska, the Grand Duchess, Strammfest is the officer charged with managing a volatile political situation and a young woman who refuses to play the part expected of her. He is a man of duty and protocol whose conf
- [Bashville](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/bashville.md): Bashville serves as Lydia's doorkeeper and champion, standing between her and unwelcome suitors with a fist as ready as his verse. He is secretly a poet, and his devotion to his mistress runs deeper than duty, though he 
- [Gregory Sibthorpe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/gregory_sibthorpe.md): Gregory Sibthorpe belongs to the world of Overruled, where married couples discover that their spouses have been conducting parallel flirtations abroad. His composure as a husband is tested when the very conventions he r
- [Magnesia Adolphus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/magnesia_adolphus.md): Magnesia Adolphus moves between two men, Adolphus and Fitz, in a household where romance and farce are indistinguishable. She declares her love transferable, dedicating to one the caresses and domestic drudgery she once 
- [Lieutenant Schneidekind](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lieutenant_schneidekind.md): Lieutenant Schneidekind serves under General Strammfest, absorbing the General's alarm over the Grand Duchess Annajanska's elopement and defection to the Revolution. Where Strammfest rages and threatens, Schneidekind sta
- [Strega](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/strega.md): A character in The Glimpse of Reality, a witch or wise woman.
- [Sensation Adolphus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/sensation_adolphus.md): Adolphus Bastable arrives at the Fitztollemache household in triumph over his new clothes, only to be drawn into a domestic scene of jealousy and poisoned gazogene. He is the rival Fitz would gladly see dead, yet he drin
- [Varinka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/varinka.md): A servant girl in Great Catherine, involved in the court's antics.
- [Lord Worthington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lord_worthington.md): A suitor in The Admirable Bashville, competing for Lydia's hand.
- [Mr. Lunn](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/mr_lunn.md): Mr. Lunn belongs to the quartet of spouses in Overruled whose foreign flirtations collide when they return home. He is part of the machinery by which Shaw tests whether married people can be honest about their wandering 
- [Queen Elizabeth](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/queen_elizabeth.md): In Shaw's preface she embodies his belief that queens are only worth writing when an actress of virtuoso range can fill them, and that the playwright tailors the part to the performer rather than to history. Within the p
- [Mercer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/mercer.md): A character in The Fascinating Foundling, a legal or official figure.
- [Balsquith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/balsquith.md): He belongs to the harried government of Press Cuttings, dodging tapped telephones and martial law while trying to explain why Sandstone has resigned and why the cordon strategy has collapsed. His running argument with Mi
- [Fitz Dastard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/fitz_dastard.md): He inhabits Shaw's burlesque of Victorian melodrama, where the dramatis personae are, as the preface admits, of the stage stagey, challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them. His villainy is a deliberate overc
- [Lucian](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/lucian.md): A character in The Admirable Bashville, a poet or suitor.
- [Mistress Mary Fitton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/bell_mistress_mary_fitton.md): She moves between court and tavern as the woman whose identity has tantalized centuries of readers, and in Shaw's play she is no passive muse but a sparring partner who gives as good as she gets. Her tension with Shakesp
- [The Inca](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_plays_se/characters/the_inca.md): He is the play's central absurdity, a monarch reduced to odd jobs and aliases, negotiating with an English princess who mistakes him for a servant and a fortune-hunter. His pride and his poverty collide in every scene, a

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