George Bernard Shaw
his plays
BY
HENRY L. MENCKEN
BOSTON AND LONDON
JOHN W. LUCE & CO.
1905
Copyright, 1905, by
John W. Luce & Company
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
CONTENTS
- [Preface.]
- [By Way of Introduction.]
- [The Shaw Plays:]
- [Mrs. Warren’s Profession.]
- [Arms and the Man.]
- [The Devil’s Disciple.]
- [Widowers’ Houses.]
- [The Philanderer.]
- [Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.]
- [Cæsar and Cleopatra.]
- [A Man of Destiny.]
- [The Admirable Bashville.]
- [Candida.]
- [How He Lied to Her Husband.]
- [You Never Can Tell.]
- [Man and Superman.]
- [John Bull’s Other Island.]
- Major Barbara.
- [The Novels and Other Writings:]
- The Irrational Knot, Love Among the Artists, Cashel Byron’s Profession, An Unsocial Socialist, On Going to Church, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, etc.
- [Biographical and Statistical.]
- [Shakespeare and Shaw.]
PREFACE
This is a little handbook for the reading tables of Americans interested enough in the drama of the day to have some curiosity regarding the plays of George Bernard Shaw, but too busy to give them careful personal study or to read the vast mass of reviews, magazine articles, letters to the editor, newspaper paragraphs and reports of debates that deal with them. Every habitual writer now before the public, from William Archer and James Huneker to “Vox Populi” and “An Old Subscriber” has had his say about Shaw. In the pages following there is no attempt to formulate a new theory of his purposes or a novel interpretation of his philosophies. Instead, the object of this modest book is to bring all of the Shaw commentators together upon the common ground of admitted fact, to exhibit the Shaw plays as dramas rather than as transcendental treatises, and to describe their plots, characters, and general plans simply and calmly, and without reading into them anything invisible to the naked eye.