# The Apple Cart: every role by lines, words, and stage time > George Bernard Shaw. 23 speaking roles, 22,556 words, about 161 minutes of speech. - URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/the-apple-cart - Last updated: 2026-10-08 **Magnus** has the most to say in The Apple Cart: about 937 lines and 8,186 words, 36.3% of the play. The Apple Cart is Shaw’s political comedy about a king who outwits his cabinet in a future England. Magnus dominates, with more than a third of the words, and speaks in all three sections. Proteus is the next largest part at about an eighth, while Orinthia speaks only in the Interlude, a long duet with Magnus. - Speaking roles: 23 - Scenes: 3 - Words: 22,556 - Speech time: 161 min ## Every role, largest first | Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Magnus | 937 | 8,186 | 36.3% | 58.5 | 3 | | Proteus | 310 | 2,617 | 11.6% | 18.7 | 2 | | Boanerges | 265 | 2,155 | 9.6% | 15.4 | 2 | | Orinthia | 235 | 2,064 | 9.2% | 14.7 | 1 | | Lysistrata | 153 | 1,363 | 6% | 9.7 | 2 | | Vanhattan | 138 | 1,214 | 5.4% | 8.7 | 1 | | Sempronius | 136 | 1,190 | 5.3% | 8.5 | 2 | | Amanda | 102 | 791 | 3.5% | 5.7 | 2 | | Balbus | 76 | 566 | 2.5% | 4.0 | 2 | | Crassus | 74 | 553 | 2.5% | 4.0 | 2 | | Nicobar | 75 | 510 | 2.3% | 3.6 | 2 | | Pamphilius | 66 | 501 | 2.2% | 3.6 | 2 | | The Queen | 56 | 417 | 1.8% | 3.0 | 1 | | Pliny | 46 | 324 | 1.4% | 2.3 | 2 | | Alice | 6 | 52 | 0.2% | 0.4 | 1 | | Male Ministers Except Proteus | 2 | 15 | 0.1% | 0.1 | 1 | | The Young Lady | 1 | 6 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | | The Male Cabinet | 1 | 5 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | | Male Ministers | 1 | 4 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | | The Other Male Ministers | 1 | 4 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | | All The Other Men | 1 | 2 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | | The Men | 1 | 2 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | | All The Rest | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | ## Who speaks in which scene Words each role speaks in each scene (scene: words). Scenes: Act 1 = Act 1; Int = Interlude; Act 2 = Act 2. - **Magnus**: Act 1 (4,453), Int (1,869), Act 2 (1,864) - **Proteus**: Act 1 (1,932), Act 2 (685) - **Boanerges**: Act 1 (1,782), Act 2 (373) - **Orinthia**: Int (2,064) - **Lysistrata**: Act 1 (1,095), Act 2 (268) - **Vanhattan**: Act 2 (1,214) - **Sempronius**: Act 1 (1,170), Int (20) - **Amanda**: Act 1 (691), Act 2 (100) - **Balbus**: Act 1 (425), Act 2 (141) - **Crassus**: Act 1 (441), Act 2 (112) - **Nicobar**: Act 1 (399), Act 2 (111) - **Pamphilius**: Act 1 (462), Act 2 (39) ## The longest speeches | Speech | Scene | Words | Lines | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Magnus: “Naturally I want to avert a conflict in which success would damage me and failure disable me. But you tell me that I can do so only by signing pledges which would make me a mere Lord Chamberlain, without even the despotism which he exercises over the theatre. I should sink below the level of the meanest of my subjects, my sole privilege being that of being shot at when some victim of misgovernment resorts to assassination to avenge himself. How am I to defend myself? You are many: I oppose you single-handed. There was a time when the king could depend on the support of the aristocracy and the cultivated bourgeoisie. Today there is not a single aristocrat left in politics, not a single member of the professions, not a single leading personage in big business or finance. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, more able and better educated than ever. But not one of them will touch this drudgery of government, this public work that never ends because we cannot finish one job without creating ten fresh ones. We get no thanks for it because ninety-nine hundredths of it is unknown to the people, and the remaining hundredth is resented by them as an invasion of their liberty or an increase in their taxation. It wears out the strongest man, and even the strongest woman, in five or six years. It slows down to nothing when we are fresh from our holidays and best able to bear it, and rises in an overwhelming wave through some unforeseen catastrophe when we are on the verge of nervous breakdown from overwork and fit for rest and sleep only. And this drudgery, remember, is a sweated trade, the only one now left in this country. My civil list leaves me a poor man among multimillionaires. Your salaries can be earned ten times over in the city by anyone with outstanding organizing or administrative ability. History tells us that the first Lord Chancellor who abandoned the woolsack for the city boardroom struck the nation with amazement: today the nation would be equally amazed if a man of his ability thought it worth his while to prefer the woolsack even to the stool of an office boy as a jumping-off place for his ambition. Our work is no longer even respected. It is looked down on by our men of genius as dirty work. What great actor would exchange his stage? what great barrister his court? what great preacher his pulpit? for the squalor of the political arena in which we have to struggle with foolish factions in parliament and with ignorant voters in the constituencies? The scientists will have nothing to do with us; for the atmosphere of politics is not the atmosphere of science. Even political science, the science by which civilization must live or die, is busy explaining the past whilst we have to grapple with the present: it leaves the ground before our feet in black darkness whilst it lights up every corner of the landscape behind us. All the talent and genius of the country is bought up by the flood of unearned money. On that poisoned wealth talent and genius live far more luxuriously in the service of the rich than we in the service of our country. Politics, once the centre of attraction for ability, public spirit, and ambition, has now become the refuge of a few fanciers of public speaking and party intrigue who find all the other avenues to distinction closed to them either by their lack of practical ability, their comparative poverty and lack of education, or, let me hasten to add, their hatred of oppression and injustice, and their contempt for the chicaneries and false pretences of commercialized professionalism. History tells us of a gentleman-statesman who declared that such people were not fit to govern. Within a year it was discovered that they could govern at least as well as anyone else who could be persuaded to take on the job. Then began that abandonment of politics by the old governing class which has ended in all Cabinets, conservative no less than progressive, being what were called in the days of that rash statesman Labor Cabinets. Do not misunderstand me: I do not want the old governing class back. It governed so selfishly that the people would have perished if democracy had not swept it out of politics. But evil as it was in many ways, at least it stood above the tyranny of popular ignorance and popular poverty. Today only the king stands above that tyranny. You are dangerously subject to it. In spite of my urgings and remonstrances you have not yet dared to take command of our schools and put a stop to the inculcation upon your unfortunate children of superstitions and prejudices that stand like stone walls across every forward path. Are you well advised in trying to reduce me to your own slavery to them? If I do not stand above them there is no longer any reason for my existence at all. I stand for the future and the past, for the posterity that has no vote and the tradition that never had any. I stand for the great abstractions: for conscience and virtue; for the eternal against the expedient; for the evolutionary appetite against the day’s gluttony; for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science from professionalism, for everything that you desire as sincerely as I, but which in you is held in leash by the Press, which can organize against you the ignorance and superstition, the timidity and credulity, the gullibility and prudery, the hating and hunting instinct of the voting mob, and cast you down from power if you utter a word to alarm or displease the adventurers who have the Press in their pockets. Between you and that tyranny stands the throne. I have no elections to fear; and if any newspaper magnate dares offend me, that magnate’s fashionable wife and marriageable daughters will soon make him understand that the King’s displeasure is still a sentence of social death within range of St. James’s Palace. Think of the things you dare not do! the persons you dare not offend! Well, a king with a little courage may tackle them for you. Responsibilities which would break your backs may still be borne on a king’s shoulders. But he must be a king, not a puppet. You would be responsible for a puppet: remember that. But whilst you continue to support me as a separate and independent estate of the realm, I am your scapegoat: you get the credit of all our popular legislation whilst you put the odium of all our resistance to ignorant popular clamor on me. I ask you, before you play your last card and destroy me, to consider where you will be without me. Think once: think twice: for your danger is, not that I may defeat you, but that your success is certain if you insist.” | Act 1 | 1,178 | 118 | | Lysistrata: “Just so! Breakages, Limited! just so! Listen to me, sir; and judge whether I have not reason to feel everything you have just said to the very marrow of my bones. Here am I, the Powermistress Royal. I have to organize and administer all the motor power in the country for the good of the country. I have to harness the winds and the tides, the oils and the coal seams. I have to see that every little sewing machine in the Hebrides, every dentist’s drill in Shetland, every carpet sweeper in Margate, has its stream of driving power on tap from a switch in the wall as punctually as the great thundering dynamos of our big industrial plants. I do it; but it costs twice as much as it should. Why? Because every new invention is bought up and suppressed by Breakages, Limited. Every breakdown, every accident, every smash and crash, is a job for them. But for them we should have unbreakable glass, unbreakable steel, imperishable materials of all sorts. But for them our goods trains could be started and stopped without battering and tearing the vitals out of every wagon and sending it to their repair shops once a week instead of once a year. Our national repair bill runs up to hundreds of millions. I could name you a dozen inventions within my own term of office which would have effected enormous economies in breakages and breakdowns; but these people can afford to pay an inventor more for his machine or his process or whatever it may be than he could hope to make by a legitimate use of it; and when they have bought it they smother it. When the inventor is poor and not good at defending himself they make bogus trials of his machine and report that it is no use. I have been shot at twice by inventors driven crazy by this sort of thing: they blamed me for it—as if I could stand up against this monster with its millions and its newspapers and its fingers in every pie. It is heartbreaking. I love my department: I dream of nothing but its efficiency: with me it comes before every personal tie, every happiness that common women run after. I would give my right hand to see these people in the bankruptcy court with half their business abolished and the other half done in public workshops where public losses are not private gains. You stand for that, sir; and I would be with you to the last drop of my blood if I dared. But what can I do? If I said one word of this in public, not a week would pass in the next two years without an article on the inefficiency and corruption of all Government departments, especially departments managed, like mine, by females. They would dig up the very machines they have buried, and make out that it is my fault that they have never been brought into use. They would set their private police to watch me day and night to get something against my private character. One of their directors told me to my face that by lifting up his finger he could get my windows broken by the mob; and that Breakages, Limited, would get the job of putting in new glass. And it is true. It is infamous; it is outrageous; but if I attempt to fight them I shall be hounded out of public life, and they will shove Mouldly Mike into the Cabinet to run my department in their interests: that is, to make such a failure of it that Joe will have to sell it to Breakages, Limited, at scrap iron prices. I—I—oh, it is beyond bearing.” | Act 1 | 629 | 63 | | Magnus: “Some day perhaps Nature will graft the roses on the cabbages and make every woman as enchanting as you; and then what a glorious lark life will be! But at present, what I come here for is to enjoy talking to you like this when I need an hour’s respite from royalty: when my stupid wife has been worrying me, or my jolly lumps of children bothering me, or my turbulent Cabinet obstructing me: when, as the doctors say, what I need is a change. You see, my dear, there is no wife on earth so precious, no children so jolly, no Cabinet so tactful that it is impossible ever to get tired of them. Jemima has her limitations, as you have observed. And I have mine. Now if our limitations exactly corresponded I should never want to talk to anyone else; and neither would she. But as that never happens, we are like all other married couples: that is, there are subjects which can never be discussed between us because they are sore subjects. There are people we avoid mentioning to one another because one of us likes them and the other doesn’t. Not only individuals, but whole sorts of people. For instance, your sort. My wife doesn’t like your sort, doesn’t understand it, mistrusts and dreads it. Not without reason; for women like you are dangerous to wives. But I don’t dislike your sort: I understand it, being a little in that line myself. At all events I am not afraid of it; though the least allusion to it brings a cloud over my wife’s face. So when I want to talk freely about it I come and talk to you. And I take it she talks to friends of hers about people of whom she never talks to me. She has men friends from whom she can get some things that she cannot get from me. If she didn’t do so she would be limited by my limitations, which would end in her hating me. So I always do my best to make her men friends feel at home with us.” | Interlude | 354 | 36 | | Orinthia: “Give me a goddess’s work to do; and I will do it. I will even stoop to a queen’s work if you will share the throne with me. But do not pretend that people become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great, if the great things come along. But they are great just the same when the great things do not come along. If I never did anything but sit in this room and powder my face and tell you what a clever fool you are, I should still be heavens high above the millions of common women who do their domestic duty, and sacrifice themselves, and run Trade departments and all the rest of the vulgarities. Has all the tedious public work you have done made you any the better? I have seen you before and after your boasted strokes of policy; and you were the same man, and would have been the same man to me and to yourself if you had never done them. Thank God my self-consciousness is something nobler than vulgar conceit in having done something. It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me. If you want deeds, go to your men and women of action, as you call them, who are all in a conspiracy to pretend that the mechanical things they do, the foolhardy way they risk their worthless lives, or their getting up in the morning at four and working sixteen hours a day for thirty years, like coral insects, make them great. What are they for? these dull slaves? To keep the streets swept for me. To enable me to reign over them in beauty like the stars without having anything to do with their slavery except to console it, to dazzle it, to enable them to forget it in adoring dreams of me. Am I not worth it? Look into my eyes and tell the truth. Am I worth it or not?” | Interlude | 335 | 34 | | Sempronius: “Now you have hit the really funny thing about my father. All that about the lonely woods and the rest of it—what you call Nature—didn’t exist for him. It had to be something artificial to get at him. Nature to him meant nakedness; and nakedness only disgusted him. He wouldn’t look at a horse grazing in a field; but put splendid trappings on it and stick it into a procession and he just loved it. The same with men and women: they were nothing to him until they were dressed up in fancy costumes and painted and wigged and titled. To him the sacredness of the priest was the beauty of his vestment, the loveliness of women the dazzle of their jewels and robes, the charm of the countryside not in its hills and trees, nor in the blue smoke from its cottages in the winter evenings, but of its temples, palaces, mansions, park gates, and porticoed country houses. Think of the horror of that island to him! A void! a place where he was deaf and dumb and blind and lonely! If only there had been a peacock with its tail in full bloom it might have saved his reason; but all the birds were gulls; and gulls are not decorative. Our King could have lived there for thirty years with nothing but his own thoughts. You would have been all right with a fishing rod and a golf ball with a bag of clubs. I should have been as happy as a man in a picture gallery looking at the dawns and sunsets, the changing seasons, the continual miracle of life ever renewing itself. Who could be dull with pools in the rocks to watch? Yet my father, with all that under his nose, was driven mad by its nothingness. They say that where there is nothing the king loses his rights. My father found that where there is nothing a man loses his reason and dies.” | Act 1 | 331 | 34 | | Magnus: “Perhaps I had better explain. I quite appreciate the frank and magnanimous spirit—may I say the English spirit?—in which my little concession has been received, especially by you, Mr. Boanerges. But in truth it leaves matters just where they were; for I should never have dreamt of entering on a campaign of recrimination such as the Prime Minister suggested. As he has reminded you, my own character is far too vulnerable. A king is not allowed the luxury of a good character. Our country has produced millions of blameless greengrocers, but not one blameless monarch. I have to rule over more religious sects than I can count. To rule them impartially I must not belong to any of them; and they all regard people who do not belong to them as atheists. My court includes several perfectly respectable wives and mothers whose strange vanity it is to be talked about as abandoned females. To gain the reputation of being the king’s mistress they would do almost anything except give the unfortunate monarch the pleasure of substantiating their claim. Side by side with them are the ladies who are really unscrupulous. They are so careful of their reputations that they lose no opportunity of indignantly denying that they have ever yielded to solicitations which have in fact never been made to them. Thus every king is supposed to be a libertine; and as, oddly enough, he owes a great part of his popularity to this belief, he cannot deny it without deeply disappointing his subjects.” | Act 1 | 256 | 26 | | Orinthia: “I cannot understand it. All men are fools and moral cowards when you come to know them. But you are less of a fool and less of a moral coward than any man I have ever known. You have almost the makings of a first rate woman in you. When I leave the earth and soar up to the regions which are my real eternal home, you can follow me: I can speak to you as I can speak to no one else; and you can say things to me that would just make your stupid wife cry. There is more of you in me than of any other man within my reach. There is more of me in you than of any other woman within your reach. We are meant for one another: it is written across the sky that you and I are queen and king. How can you hesitate? What attraction is there for you in your common healthy jolly lumps of children and your common housekeeper wife and the rabble of dowdies and upstarts and intriguers and clowns that think they are governing the country when they are only squabbling with you? Look again at me, man: again and again. Am I not worth a million such? Is not life with me as high above them as the sun is above the gutter?” | Interlude | 227 | 23 | | Vanhattan: “Well, is it? We found that culture enshrined in British material works of art: in the stately country homes of your nobility, in the cathedrals our common forefathers built as the country houses of God. What did you do with them? You sold them to us. I was brought up in the shade of Ely cathedral, the removal of which from the county of Cambridge to New Jersey was my dear old father’s first big professional job. The building which stands on its former site is a very fine one: in my opinion the best example of reinforced concrete of its period; but it was designed by an American architect, and built by the Synthetic Building Materials Trust, an international affair. Believe me, the English people, the real English people who take things as they come instead of reading books about them, will be more at home with us than they are with the old English notions which our tourists try to keep alive. When you find some country gentleman keeping up the old English customs at Christmas and so forth, who is he? An American who has bought the place. Your people get up the show for him because he pays for it, not because it is natural to them.” | Act 2 | 211 | 22 | | Amanda: “I’ll tell you. He opened his campaign with a great Saturday night speech against me in the Home Lovers’ Hall to five thousand people. In that same hall a week later, I faced a meeting of the very same people. I didn’t argue. I mimicked him. I took all the highfalutin passages in his speech, and repeated them in his best manner until I had the whole five thousand laughing at him. Then I asked them would they like me to sing; and their Yes nearly lifted the roof off. I had two songs. They both had choruses. One went “She lets me go out on Saturday night, on Saturday night, on Saturday night”—like that. The other went “Boo! Hoo! I want Amanda’s Teddy bear to play with.” They sang it under the windows of his hotel next time he came. He cancelled his meeting and left. And that’s how England is governed by yours truly, sir. Lucky for England that Queen Amanda is a good sort, in spite of some surface faults.” | Act 1 | 174 | 18 | | Vanhattan: “France and Germany? These queer old geographical expressions which you use here from old family habit do not trouble us. I suppose you mean by Germany the chain of more or less Soviet Republics between the Ural Mountains and the North Sea. Well, the clever people at Moscow and Berlin and Geneva are trying to federate them; and it is fully understood between us that if we don’t object to their move they will not object to ours. France, by which I take it you mean the Government at New Timgad, is too busy in Africa to fuss about what is happening at the ends of your little Channel Tube. So long as Paris is full of Americans, and Americans are full of money, all’s well in the west from the French point of view. One of the great attractions of Paris for Americans is the excursion to Old England. The French want us to feel at home here. And so we do. Why shouldn’t we? After all, we are at home here.” | Act 2 | 173 | 18 | ## Small roles that can be doubled These pairs of small roles never speak in the same scene, so one actor could play both. Check entrances and silent appearances in your script before you cast it this way. - The Queen and Alice - The Queen and The Young Lady - The Queen and The Male Cabinet - Alice and Male Ministers Except Proteus - Alice and Male Ministers - Alice and The Other Male Ministers - Alice and All The Other Men - Alice and The Men - Alice and All The Rest - Male Ministers Except Proteus and The Young Lady - Male Ministers Except Proteus and The Male Cabinet - The Young Lady and Male Ministers ## Questions actors ask ### Who has the most lines in The Apple Cart? Magnus, with about 937 lines and 8,186 words, 36.3% of everything spoken in the play. Proteus is next, with about 310 lines (11.6%). ### How long is The Apple Cart? The full text has 22,556 spoken words, about 161 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 The Apple Cart? 23 named roles speak in this edition, across 3 scenes. 11 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/the-apple-cart) (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).