# Misalliance: every role by lines, words, and stage time

> George Bernard Shaw. 15 speaking roles, 26,476 words, about 189 minutes of speech.

- URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/misalliance
- Last updated: 2026-10-08

**Tarleton** has the most to say in Misalliance: about 696 lines and 5,883 words, 22.2% of the play. Misalliance is Shaw’s one-act comedy set in a country house where an airplane crash brings unexpected visitors. It plays as one continuous scene. Tarleton, the talkative host, is the largest role, with more than a fifth of the words. Hypatia, Lord Summerhays, Mrs. Tarleton, and Johnny each hold about a tenth, so the rest of the load is widely shared.

- Speaking roles: 15
- Scenes: Continuous
- Words: 26,476
- Speech time: 189 min

## Every role, largest first

| Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Tarleton | 696 | 5,883 | 22.2% | 42.0 | 1 |
| Hypatia | 413 | 3,423 | 12.9% | 24.5 | 1 |
| Lord Summerhays | 390 | 3,209 | 12.1% | 22.9 | 1 |
| Mrs. Tarleton | 333 | 2,809 | 10.6% | 20.1 | 1 |
| Johnny | 310 | 2,752 | 10.4% | 19.7 | 1 |
| Percival | 257 | 2,087 | 7.9% | 14.9 | 1 |
| Bentley | 234 | 1,912 | 7.2% | 13.7 | 1 |
| Lina | 207 | 1,673 | 6.3% | 12.0 | 1 |
| Gunner | 179 | 1,547 | 5.8% | 11.1 | 1 |
| The Man | 129 | 1,113 | 4.2% | 8.0 | 1 |
| The Aviator | 5 | 38 | 0.1% | 0.3 | 1 |
| Bentley’s Voice | 2 | 15 | 0.1% | 0.1 | 1 |
| John Tarleton’s Voice. | 1 | 8 | 0% | 0.1 | 1 |
| The Passenger | 1 | 5 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 |
| Hypatia’s Voice Outside | 1 | 2 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 |

## The longest speeches

| Speech | Words | Lines |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lina: “Then you, Lord Summerhays, come to me; and all you have to say is to ask me not to mention that you made love to me in Vienna two years ago. I forgave you because I thought you were an ambassador; and all ambassadors make love and are very nice and useful to people who travel. Then this young gentleman. He is engaged to this young lady; but no matter for that: he makes love to me because I carry him off in my arms when he cries. All these I bore in silence. But now comes your Johnny and tells me I’m a ripping fine woman, and asks me to marry him. I, Lina Szczepanowska, marry him!!!!! I do not mind this boy: he is a child: he loves me: I should have to give him money and take care of him: that would be foolish, but honorable. I do not mind you, old pal: you are what you call an old—ouf! but you do not offer to buy me: you say until we are tired—until you are so happy that you dare not ask for more. That is foolish too, at your age; but it is an adventure: it is not dishonorable. I do not mind Lord Summerhays: it was in Vienna: they had been toasting him at a great banquet: he was not sober. That is bad for the health; but it is not dishonorable. But your Johnny! Oh, your Johnny! with his marriage. He will do the straight thing by me. He will give me a home, a position. He tells me I must know that my present position is not one for a nice woman. This to me, Lina Szczepanowska! I am an honest woman: I earn my living. I am a free woman: I live in my own house. I am a woman of the world: I have thousands of friends: every night crowds of people applaud me, delight in me, buy my picture, pay hard-earned money to see me. I am strong: I am skilful: I am brave: I am independent: I am unbought: I am all that a woman ought to be; and in my family there has not been a single drunkard for four generations. And this Englishman! this linendraper! he dares to ask me to come and live with him in this rrrrrrrabbit hutch, and take my bread from his hand, and ask him for pocket money, and wear soft clothes, and be his woman! his wife! Sooner than that, I would stoop to the lowest depths of my profession. I would stuff lions with food and pretend to tame them. I would deceive honest people’s eyes with conjuring tricks instead of real feats of strength and skill. I would be a clown and set bad examples of conduct to little children. I would sink yet lower and be an actress or an opera singer, imperilling my soul by the wicked lie of pretending to be somebody else. All this I would do sooner than take my bread from the hand of a man and make him the master of my body and soul. And so you may tell your Johnny to buy an Englishwoman: he shall not buy Lina Szczepanowska; and I will not stay in the house where such dishonor is offered me. Adieu.” | 558 | 56 |
| Tarleton: “I don’t mean his books. Read his letters to his family. Read any man’s letters to his children. They’re not human. They’re not about himself or themselves. They’re about hotels, scenery, about the weather, about getting wet and losing the train and what he saw on the road and all that. Not a word about himself. Forced. Shy. Duty letters. All fit to be published: that says everything. I tell you there’s a wall ten feet thick and ten miles high between parent and child. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve girls in my employment: girls and young men. I had ideas on the subject. I used to go to the parents and tell them not to let their children go out into the world without instruction in the dangers and temptations they were going to be thrown into. What did every one of the mothers say to me? “Oh, sir, how could I speak of such things to my own daughter?” The men said I was quite right; but they didn’t do it, any more than I’d been able to do it myself to Johnny. I had to leave books in his way; and I felt just awful when I did it. Believe me, Summerhays, the relation between the young and the old should be an innocent relation. It should be something they could talk about. Well, the relation between parent and child may be an affectionate relation. It may be a useful relation. It may be a necessary relation. But it can never be an innocent relation. You’d die rather than allude to it. Depend on it, in a thousand years it’ll be considered bad form to know who your father and mother are. Embarrassing. Better hand Bentley over to me. I can look him in the face and talk to him as man to man. You can have Johnny.” | 313 | 32 |
| Tarleton: “Well, who denies it? You’re quite right, my boy. I don’t mind confessing to you all that the circumstances that condemned me to keep a shop are the biggest tragedy in modern life. I ought to have been a writer. I’m essentially a man of ideas. When I was a young man I sometimes used to pray that I might fail, so that I should be justified in giving up business and doing something: something first-class. But it was no good: I couldn’t fail. I said to myself that if I could only once go to my Chickabiddy here and show her a chartered accountant’s statement proving that I’d made £20 less than last year, I could ask her to let me chance Johnny’s and Hypatia’s future by going into literature. But it was no good. First it was £250 more than last year. Then it was £700. Then it was £2,000. Then I saw it was no use: Prometheus was chained to his rock: read Shelley: read Mrs. Browning. Well, well, it was not to be. Lord Summerhays: I ask you to excuse me for a few moments. There are times when a man needs to meditate in solitude on his destiny. A chord is touched; and he sees the drama of his life as a spectator sees a play. Laugh if you feel inclined: no man sees the comic side of it more than I. In the theatre of life everyone may be amused except the actor. There’s an idea in this: an idea for a picture. What a pity young Bentley is not a painter! Tarleton meditating on his destiny. Not in a toga. Not in the trappings of the tragedian or the philosopher. In plain coat and trousers: a man like any other man. And beneath that coat and trousers a human soul. Tarleton’s Underwear!” | 310 | 31 |
| Hypatia: “Oh, lots. That’s part of the routine of life here: the very dullest part of it. The young man who comes a-courting is as familiar an incident in my life as coffee for breakfast. Of course, he’s too much of a gentleman to misbehave himself; and I’m too much of a lady to let him; and he’s shy and sheepish; and I’m correct and self-possessed; and at last, when I can bear it no longer, I either frighten him off, or give him a chance of proposing, just to see how he’ll do it, and refuse him because he does it in the same silly way as all the rest. You don’t call that an event in one’s life, do you? With you it was different. I should as soon have expected the North Pole to fall in love with me as you. You know I’m only a linen-draper’s daughter when all’s said. I was afraid of you: you, a great man! a lord! and older than my father. And then what a situation it was! Just think of it! I was engaged to your son; and you knew nothing about it. He was afraid to tell you: he brought you down here because he thought if he could throw us together I could get round you because I was such a ripping girl. We arranged it all: he and I. We got Papa and Mamma and Johnny out of the way splendidly; and then Bentley took himself off, and left us—you and me!—to take a walk through the heather and admire the scenery of Hindhead. You never dreamt that it was all a plan: that what made me so nice was the way I was playing up to my destiny as the sweet girl that was to make your boy happy. And then! and then!” | 308 | 31 |
| Mrs. Tarleton: “Drainage!! She’d tried three systems in her castle; and she was going to do away with them all and try another. I didn’t know which way to look when she began talking about it: I thought they’d all have got up and gone out of the room. But not a bit of it, if you please. They were all just as bad as she. They all had systems; and each of them swore by her own system. I sat there with my cheeks burning until one of the duchesses, thinking I looked out of it, I suppose, asked me what system I had. I said I was sure I knew nothing about such things, and hadn’t we better change the subject. Then the fat was in the fire, I can tell you. There was a regular terror of a countess with an anaerobic system; and she told me, downright brutally, that I’d better learn something about them before my children died of diphtheria. That was just two months after I’d buried poor little Bobby; and that was the very thing he died of, poor little lamb! I burst out crying: I couldn’t help it. It was as good as telling me I’d killed my own child. I had to go away; but before I was out of the door one of the duchesses—quite a young woman—began talking about what sour milk did in her inside and how she expected to live to be over a hundred if she took it regularly. And me listening to her, that had never dared to think that a duchess could have anything so common as an inside! I shouldn’t have minded if it had been children’s insides: we have to talk about them. But grown-up people! I was glad to get away that time.” | 302 | 31 |
| Lord Summerhays: “Smash it. Don’t hesitate: it’s an ugly thing. Smash it: hard. Feel better now? I know only one person alive who could drive me to the point of having either to break china or commit murder; and that person is my son Bentley. Was it he? As the car stopped I heard a yell which is only too familiar to me. It generally means that some infuriated person is trying to thrash Bentley. Nobody has ever succeeded, though almost everybody has tried. Bentley is a problem which I confess I have never been able to solve. He was born to be a great success at the age of fifty. Most Englishmen of his class seem to be born to be great successes at the age of twenty-four at most. The domestic problem for me is how to endure Bentley until he is fifty. The problem for the nation is how to get itself governed by men whose growth is arrested when they are little more than college lads. Bentley doesn’t really mean to be offensive. You can always make him cry by telling him you don’t like him. Only, he cries so loud that the experiment should be made in the open air: in the middle of Salisbury Plain if possible. He has a hard and penetrating intellect and a remarkable power of looking facts in the face; but unfortunately, being very young, he has no idea of how very little of that sort of thing most of us can stand. On the other hand, he is frightfully sensitive and even affectionate; so that he probably gets as much as he gives in the way of hurt feelings. You’ll excuse me rambling on like this about my son.” | 288 | 29 |
| The Man: “No. That’s just it: I’ve no business to do. Do you know what my life is? I spend my days from nine to six—nine hours of daylight and fresh air—in a stuffy little den counting another man’s money. I’ve an intellect: a mind and a brain and a soul; and the use he makes of them is to fix them on his tuppences and his eighteenpences and his two pound seventeen and tenpences and see how much they come to at the end of the day and take care that no one steals them. I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and give change, and fill cheques and stamp receipts; and not a penny of that money is my own: not one of those transactions has the smallest interest for me or anyone else in the world but him; and even he couldn’t stand it if he had to do it all himself. And I’m envied: aye, envied for the variety and liveliness of my job, by the poor devil of a bookkeeper that has to copy all my entries over again. Fifty thousand entries a year that poor wretch makes; and not ten out of the fifty thousand ever has to be referred to again; and when all the figures are counted up and the balance sheet made out, the boss isn’t a penny the richer than he’d be if bookkeeping had never been invented. Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the very worst.” | 259 | 26 |
| Johnny: “If Kipling wants to remember, let him remember. If he had to run Tarleton’s Underwear, he’d be jolly glad to forget. As he has a much softer job, and wants to keep himself before the public, his cry is, “Don’t you forget the sort of things I’m rather clever at writing about.” Well, I don’t blame him: it’s his business: I should do the same in his place. But what he wants and what I want are two different things. I want to forget; and I pay another man to make me forget. If I buy a book or go to the theatre, I want to forget the shop and forget myself from the moment I go in to the moment I come out. That’s what I pay my money for. And if I find that the author’s simply getting at me the whole time, I consider that he’s obtained my money under false pretences. I’m not a morbid crank: I’m a natural man; and, as such, I don’t like being got at. If a man in my employment did it, I should sack him. If a member of my club did it, I should cut him. If he went too far with it, I should bring his conduct before the committee. I might even punch his head, if it came to that. Well, who and what is an author that he should be privileged to take liberties that are not allowed to other men?” | 245 | 25 |
| Gunner: “Don’t you be alarmed, ma’am. I know what is due to you as a lady and to myself as a gentleman. I regard you with respect and affection. If you had been my mother, as you ought to have been, I should have had more chance. But you shall have no cause to be ashamed of me. The strength of a chain is no greater than its weakest link; but the greatness of a poet is the greatness of his greatest moment. Shakespeare used to get drunk. Frederick the Great ran away from a battle. But it was what they could rise to, not what they could sink to, that made them great. They weren’t good always; but they were good on their day. Well, on my day—on my day, mind you—I’m good for something too. I know that I’ve made a silly exhibition of myself here. I know I didn’t rise to the occasion. I know that if you’d been my mother, you’d have been ashamed of me. I lost my presence of mind: I was a contemptible coward. But I’m not the man I was then. This is my day. I’ve seen the tenth possessor of a foolish face carried out kicking and screaming by a woman. You crowed pretty big over me. You hypnotized me. But when you were put through the fire yourself, you were found wanting. I tell you straight I don’t give a damn for you.” | 244 | 25 |
| Percival: “Well, but does that matter, do you think? Patsy fascinates me, no doubt. I apparently fascinate Patsy. But, believe me, all that is not worth considering. One of my three fathers (the priest) has married hundreds of couples: couples selected by one another, couples selected by the parents, couples forced to marry one another by circumstances of one kind or another; and he assures me that if marriages were made by putting all the men’s names into one sack and the women’s names into another, and having them taken out by a blindfolded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have here in England. He said Cupid was nothing but the blindfolded child: pretty idea that, I think! I shall have as good a chance with Patsy as with anyone else. Mind: I’m not bigoted about it. I’m not a doctrinaire: not the slave of a theory. You and Lord Summerhays are experienced married men. If you can tell me of any trustworthy method of selecting a wife, I shall be happy to make use of it. I await your suggestions. Apparently neither of you has anything to suggest. Then Patsy will do as well as another, provided the money is forthcoming.” | 212 | 22 |

## Questions actors ask

### Who has the most lines in Misalliance?

Tarleton, with about 696 lines and 5,883 words, 22.2% of everything spoken in the play. Hypatia is next, with about 413 lines (12.9%).

### How long is Misalliance?

The full text has 26,476 spoken words, about 189 minutes at 140 words a minute before pauses, scene changes, and cuts. Most productions cut the text, so running times vary.

### How many speaking roles are in Misalliance?

15 named roles speak in this edition, in one continuous text with no scene breaks. 5 of them have less than 2% of the words, which is why small parts are often doubled.

## How we count

Counts are computed from the full text of the [Standard Ebooks edition](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-bernard-shaw/misalliance) (public domain; retrieved 2026-10-08). Words are every spoken word, with stage directions removed. Lines are verse lines as printed, plus prose at 10 words a line, because prose has no fixed line breaks; editions differ, so other sources give slightly different line counts. Time is words at 140 words a minute, before pauses and stage business. A role is counted in a scene when it speaks there. To count a script that is not in the library, paste it into the [script line counter](https://www.offbook.com/tools/script-line-counter).