Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw remains one of the world's most important and popular writers. His plays are regularly performed around the world, from the boards of Broadway and the West End to regional, community, and college stages. The three plays selected here are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre: Man and Superman: a four-act comedy for serious people, staged in part at Royal court in 1905, it is one of the early works of Modernism to take an ancient myth and restage it in contemporary mode (and its influence extends across world literature, palpable in writings from Mann to Joyce). Its story of how a sensitive woman compels a superman-figure to adjust to her needs and those of the real world provides an updated commentary on Nietzsche's still-fashionable notions of ubermensch; and its famous third act introduces a persistent Shavian theme, which goes back as far as earliest religious literature-that the truly damned are those who are happy in hell. John Bull's Other Island takes up that idea: to the visionary, hell may be the ultimate modern dream of efficiency and rational administration, as manifested in a colonial Ireland run by liberal exploiters. Commissioned by WB Yeats to mark the opening of Ireland's National Theatre, the Abbey, the play was promptly refused by its Directors (who disliked its mechanical mockeries of mechanism but may have missed its visionary qualities). It was performed to huge acclaim in London in November 1904 and it made Shaw famous, the supreme example of the Playwright as Thinker and, ever afterwards, one of the most valued commentators on Anglo-Irish relations. Major Barbara: a three-act drama which in classic Shavian style unmasks the motivation of puritan idealists and dedicated industrialists, this work (like the previous two) pits a strong woman against a sardonic, practical man. Having exposed the mendacity of apostles of efficiency, Shaw seems then to submit to their doctrine, arguing that a pure private charity towards the destitute is no adequate substitute. Like the previous two works, this is a problem play, in the course of which the audience sympathy is aroused and then repelled in all directions. The suggestion that it may be acceptable to take money from tainted sources, such as arms manufacturers, caused much debate in 1905—-and even more after the carnage wrought by mechanized guns in World War One.

The three plays in this volume are some of George Bernard Shaw's most popular and frequently performed works. They demonstrate the development of Shavian comedy and contain early formulations of his idea of the Superman, an extraordinary individual who catalyzes the evolution of mankind. Arms and the Man (1894) was Shaw's first commercial success and the first public confirmation that he could make playwriting his profession. It is the first of what Shaw called his "pleasant plays',comedies that critique idealism in general rather than specific social problems (as his earlier plays did). Specifically, Shaw undermines the romance of wartime courage, reckless heroism, and nationalist pride among British spectators while using the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1886 as an exotic veneer. Shaw wrote The Devil's Disciple (1897) for William Terriss, an actor known for his swashbuckling roles who had requested a play that would 'contain every "surefire" melodramatic situation' —mistaken identities, terrifying adventures and last-second escapes, and frequent emotional outpourings.. Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) is Shaw's revision of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra as well as a fusion of the pragmatism and unconventionality of the heroes of Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple into a portrait of jocular, morally serious leadership.

The Genius of George Bernard Shaw is a criticism of George Bernard Shaw’s work that explores his art, aesthetics, philosophy, and revolutionary ideas. Shaw wrote his plays raising and dealing with the problems of individuals, families, society, nations, and the world. It is occasionally stated that Shaw’s support for totalitarianism grew out of his frustration with nineteenth-century liberalism, which ineffectually culminated in a disastrous world war. Yet, close analysis to two of Shaw’s Major Critical Essays from the 1890s shows that even then Shaw expressed a desire for a ruthless man of action unencumbered by the burden of conscience to come on the scene and establish a new world order, to initiate the utopian epoch. Indeed, further analysis of a number of plays from before the war shows the impulse to be persistent and undeniable. Shaw hated disorder, and he wanted to see society managed efficiently by a small caste of technocratic experts who were at the same time, in Karl Popper’s memorable phrase, utopian social engineers. He had very little confidence in the average man and woman, who could not work mentally at the same speed? as the Fabian executive committee, his ideal of what a ruling caste would look like. Shaw’s ideal society, what I am calling his utopian vision, resembles Plato’s ideal city or Comte’s Religion of Humanity more than any society that has presumably ever existed on earth. This need for absolute order and control found many means of expression in both his life and work and was intricately bound up with his longing for perfection. This book is useful for world teachers, students, and research scholars in English in schools, colleges, universities all over the world.

'This is the second volume of a formidable enterprise, and part of a series of publications by the same author that may entitle him to the position as the leading scholar of the Bloomsbury Group...Rosenbaum has managed to write with freshness and insight about Forster's novels, no matter how much they have been analyzed before...The next volume will deal with the effect of that exhibition upon the Group's writing and much more, I am sure, of its early literary history. The work is eagerly awaited.' - Peter Stanksy, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 Edwardian Bloomsbury is a continuation of the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group begun with Victorian Bloomsbury, but it can also be read independently as an account of the Group's interrelated writings during the first decade of the twentieth century.

A sweeping drama of the life and times of one of America's most innovative woman directors

This book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb’s ground-breaking pre-World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality, redistribution and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era’s leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb’s famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 – a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State – this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.

This book combines the insights of thirteen Shavian scholars as they examine the themes of marriage, relationships and partnerships throughout all of Bernard Shaw’s major works. It also connects Shaw’s own experiences of love and marriage to the themes that emerge in his works, showing how his personal relationships in and out of matrimonial bonds change the ways his characters enter and exit marriages and misalliances. While providing a wealth of new analysis, this collection of essays also leaves lingering questions for the reader to spark continuing dialogue in both individual and academic settings.

Bertolini provides close, subtle readings of six of Shaws major plays: Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctors Dilemma, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan. He also devotes a full chapter to the one-act plays.