1 notes on Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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1

notes on Edward Albee's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
English 11 / Mr. Foster

Interviewer: When did the title Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occur to you?

Albee: There was a saloon—it's changed its name now—on Tenth Street, between Greenwich Avenue
and Waverly Place, . . . [where] they had a big mirror on the downstairs bar in this saloon where
people used to scrawl graffiti. . . . I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw "Who's afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it
cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the
big bad wolf...who's afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather
typical, university intellectual joke. (Flanagan 52)

I am very concerned with the fact that so many people turn off because it is easier; that they don't
stay fully aware during the course of their lives, in all the choices they make: social, economic,
political, aesthetic. They turn off because it's easier. But I find that anything less than absolutely full,
dangerous participation is an absolute waste of some rather valuable time. . . . I am concerned with
being as self-aware, and open to all kinds of experience on its own terms—I think those conditions,
given half a chance, will produce better self-government, a better society, a better everything else.—
Edward Albee (Roudané 45)

the characters

[George and Martha] are uncomfortable with themselves but comfortable with each other.—Taybra
Marchese '12

[George and Martha] are six-year-olds with alcohol.—Dylan Bruening '11

George is a 46-year-old history professor at a small New England college; he has not
become as successful as he, or his wife, might have hoped: he is not the head of the history
department, much less a dean or other prominent administrator. Like his wife, he drinks
heavily.

Martha, six years older than her husband, George, is the daughter of the college president.
Especially when she's been drinking, she is capable of "unrestrained malice and unstoppable
powers of emotional destruction," Charles Isherwood writes. "She has a tongue that could
flay a horse at ten paces"; the habitual target of her malice and rage is George.

Nick, a new biology professor, is handsome and ambitious; he is a former champion college
boxer. He and his wife, Honey (a wealthy preacher's daughter whom George dismisses as
a "simp" but who turns out to be a character with her own painful secrets) are George and
Martha's guests for one long, turbulent, alcohol-soaked evening.
2

notes & questions to consider

ACT ONE—FUN AND GAMES
1-86 Signet
3-95 NAL 2005

NOTE—peritonitis
5 Signet
5 NAL
"Inflammation of the peritoneum," a membrane lining the abdominal cavity (Random House
Webster's College Dictionary; 2nd. ed., 1999).

~~ REVISING THE PLAY (I)
18-19 Signet
19-20 NAL 2005
For the 2005 Broadway revival, Albee made significant changes in the text; if you have the
2005 edition, please read the passages in this handout that document the most extensive
alterations. The words in bold type below were omitted in the revision:

GEORGE (Moves a little toward the door, smiling slightly)
All right, love ... whatever love wants. (Stops) Just don't start on the bit, that's all.

MARTHA
The bit? The bit? What kind of language is that? What are you talking about?

GEORGE
The bit. Just don't start in on the bit.

MARTHA
You imitating one of your students, for God's sake? What are you trying to do?
WHAT BIT?

GEORGE
Just don't start in on the bit about the kid, that's all.

MARTHA
What do you take me for?

GEORGE
Much too much.

MARTHA (Really angered)
Yeah? Well, I'll start in on the kid if I want to.

GEORGE
Just leave the kid out of this.

MARTHA (Threatening)
He's mine as much as he is yours. I'll talk about him if I want to.
3

GEORGE
I'd advise against it, Martha.

MARTHA
Well, good for you. (Knocks) C'mon in. Get over there and open the door.

GEORGE
You've been advised.

MARTHA
Yeah . . . sure. Get over there!

GEORGE (Moving toward door)
All right, love ... whatever love wants. Isn't it nice the way people have manners,
though, even in this day and age? [The scene continues]

~~ REVISING THE PLAY (II)
29 Signet
31 NAL 2005
When Albee revised the play in 2005, he omitted the words in bold type below:

MARTHA (To GEORGE)
Honestly, George, you burn me up!

GEORGE (Happily)
All right.

MARTHA
You really do, George.

GEORGE
O.K., Martha ... O.K. Just ... trot along.

MARTHA
You really do.

GEORGE
Just don't shoot your mouth off ... about ... you-know-what.

MARTHA (Surprisingly vehement)
I'll talk about any goddamn thing I want to, George!

GEORGE
O.K. O.K. Vanish.

MARTHA
Any goddamn thing I want to! (Practically dragging HONEY out with her) C'mon.... [The
scene continues]

NOTE—Illyria
40 Signet
4

Illyria is an archaic name for the former Yugoslavia, territory that, like Carthage, was
conquered after repeated assaults by the Romans from 156 BC to 78-77 BC (Roudané 94).
However, it is also the setting of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's most melancholic romantic
comedy. Like Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare's play prominently features heavy-drinking
characters, particularly Sir Toby Belch, who is by turns charmingly witty and vicious.

NOTE—Penguin Island
40 Signet
43 NAL
The reference is to Anatole France's novel, a satirical look at French history in which a city is
destroyed, in part, by its own decadence (Roudané 95).

NOTE—New Carthage
40 Signet
43 NAL
Albee's reference to Carthage might tacitly allude to Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage
famous from the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem about the founding of Rome.
In Virgil's account, Dido is beautiful, powerful, and doomed. Dido's treacherous brother
killed her husband, she flees to Tunisia in the north of Africa to establish a new kingdom.
She falls in love with Aeneas (himself a refugee after the fall of Troy), and they have an
affair; after Aeneas leaves (at the urging of the gods, who tell him he must fulfill his destiny
as the founder of Rome), the despondent queen kills herself: atop a funeral pyre, she
pierces herself with Aeneas's sword. As you read the play, you might ask yourself why
Albee alludes to a passionate relationship ending in bitterness, despair, and self-destruction.
For some historical information about Carthage, see the note at the end of the handout.

George's umbrella
57 Signet
62 NAL
First, a plot question: what prompts George to grab the toy shotgun and aim it at his wife?
Second, two interpretive questions: What does this episode reveal or reinforce about
George? And what might a shotgun that issues not bullets or buckshot but a parasol
symbolize about the character wielding it?

ACT TWO—WALPURGISNACHT
87-181 Signet
99-192 NAL 2005

NOTE—what does "Walpurgisnacht" mean?

In old German lore, St. Walburga, a British missionary, worked in an eighth-century convent
that became one of the chief centers of civilization in Germany. She is often associated with
Walpurgisnacht, the May Day festival in which witches reveled in an orgiastic, ritualized
Sabbath on Brocken, the tallest peak in the Harz Mountains. . . . [D]emon spirits are
exorcized from villages and villagers by a rite in which a cacophony of loud noises, incense,
and holy water are used to achieve purgation. (Roudané 103-104).

George vs. Nick
89-117 Signet
Alan Schneider, director of the first Broadway production, said of the long conversation
between George and Nick
5

I thought of it as kind of a chess game—all the scenes between them were chess games in
which the two men who had contempt for each other would win a pawn, and we actually
structured the scene around winning pawns. . . . There's a kind of parry and thrust on a
very subtle level, but each one's aware of it. (73-74)

Dies Irae
117 Signet
131 NAL
Latin for "day of wrath," the Dies Irae (DEE-ace EE-ray) is "a Latin hymn on the Day of
Judgment, commonly sung in a Requiem mass" (Random House Webster's College
Dictionary; 2nd. ed., 1999).

~~ REVISING THE PLAY (III)
123 Signet
137 NAL 2005
When Albee revised the play in 2005, he omitted the words in bold type below:

HONEY (GEORGE hands her a brandy)
Oh, goodie! Thank you. (To NICK) Of course I do, dear.

GEORGE (Pensively)
I used to drink brandy.

MARTHA (Privately)
You used to drink bergin, too.

GEORGE (Sharp)
Shut up, Martha!

MARTHA (Her hand over her mouth in a little girl gesture)
Ooooooops.

NICK (Something having clicked, vaguely)
Hm?

GEORGE (Burying it)
Nothing ... nothing.

MARTHA (She, too)
You two men have it out while we were gone? . . . [The scene continues]

NOTE—daguerrotype
126 Signet
141 NAL
"An obsolete photographic process, invented in 1839, in which a picture made on a silver
surface sensitized with iodine is developed by exposure to mercury vapor"; the process is
named for its inventor, Louis Daguerre (1789-1851); Random House Webster's College
Dictionary; 2nd. ed., 1999.

NOTE—Sacre du Printemps
6

129 Signet
144 NAL
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky's 1913 Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring),
written as a ballet, Anthony Rudel writes,

shocked the world . . . when it premiered on May 39, 1913. . . . The world premiere was
held at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, danced by Diaghilev's Ballet Russe,
conducted by Pierre Montuex, with choreography by Nijinsky. On that opening night riots
broke out as the audience was startled, some negatively, by the radical sound and vision
being unveiled before them. Right from the start, laughter, catcalls, and shouting erupted,
so loud the music couldn't be heard; however, the visceral excitement and staggering
brilliance of the ballet overcame the initial raction and place the score in the mainstream. It
is a critically significant piece of twentieth-century art. . . . Percussive, rhythmic, and
propulsive are all apt descriptions of the music, as it is filled with a variety of sounds
capturing the barbarity of nature. (Rudel 322-323).

Rudel's comments about the plot of the ballet might help you appraise the significance of
Albee's allusion. In "Part I—The Adoration of the Earth,"

at the bottom of a sacred hill Slavonic tribes gather to celebrate spring. A witch tells
fortunes followed by a wild dancing game ending in exhaustion, with more ritual games
played between the members of two tribes, Old wise men arrive interrupting the festivities,
the sage then kisses the earth, and the first part ends with a frenzied dance.
In "Part II—The Sacrifice" young virgins dance at the foot of the hill to choose the victim
to be "honored" by being sacrificed. She dances her final dance as the other maidens
glorify her. The wise men return to witness her dance, ending with the sacrifice of the
chosen. (323)

~~ REVISING THE PLAY (IV)
135-137 Signet
151-152 NAL 2005
When Albee revised the play in 2005, he omitted the words in bold type below:

GEORGE
I will not be made mock of!

NICK
He will not be made mock of, for Christ's sake. (Laughs)
(HONEY joins in the laughter, not knowing exactly why)

GEORGE
I will not!
(All three are laughing at him)
(Infuriated) THE GAME IS OVER!

MARTHA (Pushing on)
Imagine such a thing! A book about a boy who murders his mother and kills his
father, and pretends it's all an accident!

HONEY (Beside herself with glee)
An accident!
7

NICK (Remembering something related)
Hey ... wait a minute ...

MARTHA (Her own voice now)
And you want to know the clincher? You want to know what big brave Georgie said to
Daddy?

GEORGE
NO! NO! NO! NO!

NICK
Wait a minute now ...

MARTHA
Georgie said ... but Daddy ... I mean ... ha, ha, ha, ha ... but Sir, it isn't a novel at
all ... (Other voice) Not a novel? (Mimicking GEORGE's voice) No, sir ... it isn't a
novel at all ...

GEORGE (Advancing on her)
You will not say this! [The scene continues]

Later in the scene (137/152), Martha no longer says, "IT HAPPENED! TO ME! TO ME!" In
the revised text, she simply says, "COWARD!"

NOTE—bucolic
142 Signet
158 NAL
According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, bucolic, also known as
pastoral, "imitates rural life, usually the life of an imaginary Golden Age, in which the loves
of shepherds and shepherdesses play a prominent part" (603). While the term technically
refers to a genre of poetry, it has come to be used more broadly to refer to any narrative
about country life. "In modern English, the term [bucolic] has a slightly humorous
connotation" (86).

~~ REVISING THE PLAY (V)
155 Signet
172 NAL 2005
When Albee revised the play in 2005, he omitted all the words in bold type in George's
following speech:

GEORGE (Calmly, matter-of-factly)
I'm numbed enough ... and I don't mean by liquor, though maybe that's part of the
process—a gradual, over-the-years going to sleep of the brain cells—I'm numbed
enough, now, to be able to take you when we're alone. I don't listen to you ... or when I do
listen to you, I sift everything. I bring everything down to reflex response, so I don't really
hear you, which is the only way to manage it. But you've taken a new tack, Martha,
over the past couple of centuries—or however long it's been I've lived in this
house with you—that makes it just too much ... too much. I don't mind your dirty
underthings in public ... well, I do mind, but I've reconciled myself to that ... but
you've moved bag and baggage into your own fantasy world now, and you've
started playing variations on your own distortions, and as a result ...
8

MARTHA
Nuts!

GEORGE
Yes ... you have.

MARTHA
Nuts!

GEORGE
Well, you can go on like that as long as you want to. And when you're done... [The scene
continues]

~~ REVISING THE PLAY (VI)
174 Signet
191 NAL 2005
When Albee revised the play in 2005, he truncated the end of Act Two. The play originally
ended with a lengthy exchange between George and Honey indicated by the words in bold
in the following passage:

GEORGE
"And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to
accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ... eventually ... fall."

(He laughs, briefly, ruefully ... rises, with the book in his hand. He stands still ... then,
quickly, he gathers all the fury he has been containing within himself ... he shakes ... he
looks at the book in his hand and, with a cry that is part growl, part howl, he hurls it at the
chimes. They crash against one another, ringing wildly. A brief pause, then HONEY
enters)

HONEY
(The worse for the wear, half asleep, still sick, weak, still staggering a little ...
vaguely, in something of a dream world)
Bells. Ringing. I've been hearing bells.

GEORGE
Jesus!

HONEY
I couldn't sleep ... for the bells. Ding-dong, bong ... it woke me up.

GEORGE (Quietly beside himself)
Don't bother me.

HONEY (Confused and frightened)
I was asleep, and the bells started ... they BOOMED! Poe-bells ... they were Poe-
bells ... Bing-bing-bong-BOOM!

GEORGE
BOOM!
9

HONEY
I was asleep, and I was dreaming of ... something ... and I heard the sounds
coming, and I didn't know what it was.

GEORGE (Never quite to her)
It was the sound of bodies ...

HONEY
And I didn't want to wake up, but the sound kept coming ...

GEORGE
... go back to sleep ...

HONEY
... and it FRIGHTENED ME!

GEORGE (Quietly ... to MARTHA, as if she were in the room)
I'm going to get you ... Martha.

HONEY
And it was so ... cold. The wind was ... the wind was so cold! And I was lying
somewhere, and the covers kept slipping away from me, and I didn't want them
to....

GEORGE
Somehow, Martha.

HONEY
... and there was someone there ...!

GEORGE
There was no one there.

HONEY (Frightened)
And I didn't want someone there ... I was ... naked ...!

GEORGE
You don't know what's going on here, do you?

HONEY (Still with her dream)
I DON'T WANT ANY ... NO ...!

GEORGE
You don't know what's been going on around here while you've been having your
snoozette, do you.

HONEY
NO! ... I DON'T WANT ANY ... I DON'T WANT THEM ... GO 'WAY.... (Begins to cry) I
DON'T WANT ... ANY ... CHILDREN .... I ... don't ... want ... any ... children. I'm
afraid! I don’t want to be hurt.... PLEASE!
10

GEORGE (Nodding his head ... speaks with compassion)
I should have known.

HONEY (Snapping awake from her reverie)
What! What?

GEORGE
I should have known ... the whole business ... the headaches ... the whining ... the
...

HONEY (Terrified)
What are you talking about?

GEORGE (Ugly again)
Does he know that? Does that ... stud you're married to know about that, hunh?

HONEY
About what? Stay away from me!

GEORGE
Don't worry, baby ... I wouldn't.... Oh, my God, that would be a joke, wouldn't it!
But don't worry, baby. HEY! How would you do it? Hunh? How do you make your
secret little murders stud-boy doesn't know about, hunh? Pills? PILLS? You got a
secret supply of pills? Of what? Apple jelly? WILL POWER?

HONEY
I feel sick.

GEORGE
You going to throw up again? You going to lie down on the cold tiles, your knees
pulled up under your chin, your thumb stuck in your mouth ...?

HONEY (Panicked)
Where is he?

GEORGE
Where's who? There's nobody here, baby.

HONEY
I want my husband! I want a drink!

GEORGE
Well, you just crawl over to the bar and make yourself one.
(From off-stage comes the sound of MARTHA's laughter and the crashing of
dishes)
(Yelling) That's right! Go at it!

HONEY
I ... want ... something....

GEORGE