You Never Can Tell

Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon is a thoroughly modern woman. Eighteen years before the play opens she left her husband and carried her children off abroad, where she raised them on the most advanced principles — feminism, free thought, the rational household — and where, on principle, she never once told them who their father was. Now she has brought her grown family home to an English seaside resort, where the whole comic machinery is set whirring by the smallest of accidents: her youngest needs a tooth pulled, the dentist is a charming, impecunious young man named Valentine, and Valentine's flinty old landlord turns out to be — by the most outrageous of chances — the children's own estranged father, Fergus Crampton.

The collision comes at a luncheon, where the children meet, without knowing it, the father they have never seen. Around this reunion Shaw arranges his delights: the irrepressible twins Dolly and Philip, quick-tongued and fearless with every adult who crosses them; the dentist Valentine, who falls headlong at first sight for the cool, rational, fiercely self-possessed Gloria and pursues her in a "duel of sex" fought as a battle of wills; and, presiding over the whole affair, the waiter William, gentlest and most knowing figure in the play, whose answer to every crisis — "you never can tell, sir" — gives the comedy its title and its philosophy.

Beneath the seaside sparkle, You Never Can Tell is a play about the collision of the new and the old: the New Woman and her rational upbringing against the wounded authority of the old patriarch, with each shown to be partly right and wholly insufficient. What dissolves the deadlock is something neither creed has accounted for — Gloria, the perfectly rational product of the perfectly rational household, falls in love against every principle she has been given, and love overrides theory where argument never could.

Written in 1896–97 and gathered into Shaw's Plays Pleasant, You Never Can Tell takes the most worn-out machinery of the Victorian stage — the long-lost father, the chance reunion, the powerful outsider who arrives to settle everything — and turns it to thoroughly Shavian ends, with a warmth beneath the wit that his harder plays rarely allowed. This edition presents the complete play in clean, readable typesetting for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.