True of Voice: Shaw, Florence Farr, and George J. Lees The Voice

This article investigates the origins of Bernard Shaws interest in the voice and traces the effects on his work. Conducting a contextual analysis of The Voice (1870), a singing handbook issued by his surrogate father George J. Lee, it finds that many ideas that the book contains resurface in other places in Shaws writing life, and describes how Shaws early attention to what Barthes calls the grain of the voice thus became an obsession. Describing an interplay between the precise mechanics of vocal production against the necessary freedoms of the body, and the potentially revelatory origins of the human voice against the dynamics of vocal coaching, Shaws conception of the voice in practice is illuminated by dialogue with actress Florence Farr, played out not only in Pygmalion, Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan but answered by the ritual vocalizations of Farrs Egyptian plays. Tracing Pygmalions connection with Lees coaching for musicians allows space, potentially, for Eliza as female vocalist to move from mechanized automaton to the singers gendered semi-autonomy.