Howard Brazee wrote: > True, but the works are still the authoritative source. The "Bible" > so to speak. When George Bernard Shaw tells us that Eliza married > Freddy, it doesn't mean he's correct - because he didn't put it in the > _Pygmalion_. (Or My Fair Lady, where Freddy of the movie later > became Sherlock Holmes). He was just speculating the way we do. > Ordinarily, true. But in this specific case, probably not. The original 1911 Pygmalion ends with Eliza walking out, and Shaw wound up writing just the afterword you speak of to deal with the fallout. He had to revise the ending for the first movie version (actually, he had conceived the play as a sort of imaginary film script to begin with, so when he got the chance he was eager to make an actual film of it.)--rather, he revised it in, o, something like 1917 IIRC--and that made a hash of the afterword. Given that the original play is *impossible* to stage (because of the cinematic elements), and that the afterword followed so closely to original, there is some justification for treating the whole as one imaginative work. Certainly, it is generally published that way. This, of course, is quite different from asking Faulkner whatever happened to the Bundren clan after they sent Darl to the asylum & finished burying Addie & came home with a new wife/mother. There isn't any afterword in that case, and no further mention of them in Yocnapatawpha. (It is different again from asking Brecht which is the real Galileo or the real Mother Courage. For one thing, the revisions show what Brecht thought; for another, it is irrelevent.) Snarkhunter