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Pygmalion
Shaw radically reworks Ovid's tale with a feminist twist: while Henry Higgins successfully teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak and act like a duchess, she adamantly refuses to be his creation. First produced in 1914, it remains one of Shaw's most popular plays. The Definitive Text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence With an Introduction by Nicholas Grene
Plays Unpleasant
With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences� complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. His first play, Widowers� Houses, depicts Harry Trench�s dilemma on learning that the inheritance of his fianc�e comes from her father�s income as a slum landlord. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while he is still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven � who is not inclined to give him up so easily. And in Mrs Warren�s Profession, Vivie Warren is forced to reconsider her own future when she discovers that her mother�s immoral earnings funded her genteel upbringing.
Saint Joan
Dramatizes the trial, career, and execution of Joan of Arc.
Major Barbara
Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire armaments manufacturer, loves money and despises poverty. His estranged daughter Barbara, on the other hand, shows her love for the poor by throwing her energies into her work as a Major in the Salvation Army, and sees her father as another soul to be saved. But when the Army needs funds to keep going, it is Undershaft who saves the day with a large cheque � forcing Barbara to examine her moral assumptions. Are they right to accept money that has been obtained by �Death and Destruction�? Full of lively comedy and sparkling debate, Major Barbara is one of Shaw�s most forward-looking plays, brilliantly testing the tensions between religion, wealth and power, benevolence and equality, and metaphors and realities of war.
Arms and the Man
Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of one of Shaw’s most delightful comedies—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library A Penguin Classic Raina, a young woman with romantic notions of war and an idealized view of her soldier fiancé, is surprised one night by a Swiss mercenary soldier seeking refuge in her bedchamber. The pragmatic Captain Bluntschli proceeds to puncture all of Raina’s illusions about love, heroism, and class. In a second duel of sex, Louka, Raina’s maid, uses her wiles in her attempt to gain power. Optimistic, farcical, absurd, and teeming with sexual energy, Arms and the Man has Shaw inverting the devices of melodrama to glorious effect. This is the definitive text prepared under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw’s preface of 1898.
Caesar and Cleopatra
Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of one of Shakespeare’s most affecting plays—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library A Penguin Classic In a cheeky nod to Shakespeare’s towering reputation, Shaw reinvents two of his historical characters but sets his own play in a period predating both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Shaw’s Cleopatra is a kittenish girl with a streak of cruelty, while his Caesar is a world-weary philosopher-soldier who is as much a stranger in Rome as in the barbaric court of Egypt. With wit, irony, and an undertone of melancholy, Caesar and Cleopatra satirizes Shakespeare’s use of history and comments wryly on the politics of Shaw’s own time. This is the definitive text prepared under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw’s preface of 1900.
Man and Superman
'A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth' After the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the joint ward of two men: the respectable Roebuck Ramsden and John Tanner, author of 'The Revolutionist's Handbook'. Believing marriage would prevent him from achieving his higher intellectual and political ambitions, Tanner is horrified to discover that Ann intends to marry him, and flees to Spain with the determined young woman in hot pursuit. The chase even leads them to the underworld, where the characters' alter egos discuss questions of human nature and philosophy in a lively debate in a scene often performed separately as 'Don Juan in Hell'. In Man and Superman, Shaw combined seriousness with comedy to create a satirical and buoyant exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes. This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. This volume includes Shaw's Preface of 1903 and his appendix, 'The Revolutionist's Handbook', the cast list from the first production of Man and Superman and a list of his principal works.
Man and Superman
Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of the first great twentieth-century English play and a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library A Penguin Classic After the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the joint ward of two men: the respectable Roebuck Ramsden and John Tanner, author of “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” Believing marriage would prevent him from achieving his higher intellectual and political ambitions, Tanner is horrified to discover that Ann intends to marry him, and he flees to Spain with the determined young woman in hot pursuit. The chase even leads them to the underworld, where the charac...
Plays Pleasant
Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of Shaw’s volume of “pleasant” plays, Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library A Penguin Classic One of Bernard Shaw’s most glittering comedies, Arms and the Man is a burlesque of Victorian attitudes to heroism, war and empire. In the contrast between Bluntschli, the mercenary soldier, and the brave leader, Sergius, the true nature of valour is revealed. Shaw mocks deluded idealism in Candida, when a young poet becomes infatuated with the wife of a Socialist preacher. The Man of Destiny is a witty war of words between Napoleon and a “strange lady,” while in the exuberant farce You Never Can Tell a divided family is reunited by chance. Although Shaw intended Plays Pleasant to be gentler comedies than those in their companion volume, Plays Unpleasant, their prophetic satire is sharp and provocative. This is the definitive text prepared under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw’s Preface of 1898.
