Androcles and the Lion

BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman&rsquo;s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes such as Music in London 1890&ndash;1894 (3 vols, 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols, 1931). He also wrote five novels and some shorter fiction, including The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales and Cashel Byron&rsquo;s Profession, both published in Penguin&rsquo;s Bernard Shaw Library. 
 
He conducted a strong attack on the London theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His plays fall into several categories: &lsquo;Plays Pleasant&rsquo;; &lsquo;Plays Unpleasant&rsquo;; comedies; chronicle-plays; &lsquo;metabiological Pentateuch&rsquo; (Back to Methuselah, a series of plays); and &lsquo;political extravaganzas&rsquo;. Bernard Shaw died in 1950.

Androcles and the Lion is a 1912 play written by George Bernard Shaw. 
 
Androcles and the Lion is Shaw's retelling of the tale of Androcles, a slave who is saved by the requited mercy of a lion. In the play, Shaw makes Androcles out to be one of many Christians being led to the Colosseum for torture. Characters in the play exemplify several themes and takes on both modern and supposed early Christianity, including cultural clash between Jesus' teachings and traditional Roman values.

Heartbreak House

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. 
 
 
Dan H. Laurence has edited Shaw's Collected Letters and Collected Plays with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. 
David Hare is an internationally-renowned playwright. Works include Plenty, The Judas Kiss, and The Blue Room.

When Ellie Dunn joins a house-party at the home of the eccentric Captain Shotover, she causes a stir with her decision to marry for money rather than love, and the Captain's forthright daughter Hesione protests vigorously against the pragmatic young woman's choice. Opinion on the matter quickly divides and a lively argument about money and morality, idealism and realism ensues as Hesione's rakish husband, snobbish sister and Ellie's fiancé - a wealthy industrialist - enter the debate. Written between 1916 and 1917 as war raged across Europe, Heartbreak House is a telling indictment of the generation responsible for the First World War. With its bold combination of high farce and bitter tragedy, Shaw's play remains an uncannily prophetic depiction of a society on the threshold of an abrupt awakening.

Plays Unpleasant

Four radical plays which challenge the beliefs of the audience

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. 
 
 
Dan H. Laurence has edited SHAW'S COLLECTED LETTERS and COLLECTED PLAYS with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. 
David Edgar has written widely on theatre and his original plays include DESTINY, MAYDAYS and PENTECOST.

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 fiancée 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.

Major Barbara

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. Dan H. Laurence has edited Shaw's Collected Letters and Collected Plays with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. Margery Morgan is an Emeritus Reader in English of Lancaster University.

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.

Man and Superman

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. 
Dan H. Laurence has edited Shaw's COLLECTED LETTERS and COLLECTED PLAYS with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. 
Professor Stanley Weintraub teaches at the Institute of Arts and Humanistic Studies at Penn State University.

Shaw began writing MAN AND SUPERMAN in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. 
As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes.

Saint Joan

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. Dan H. Laurence (series editor) has edited Shaw's Collected Letters and Collected Plays with their Prefaces. Imogen Stubbs is an actress and has played leading roles on stage, television and in film. Joley Wood has taught Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin.

One of Shaw's most unusual and enduringly popular plays. With SAINT JOAN (1923) Shaw reached the height of his fame and Joan is one of his finest creations; forceful, vital, and rebelling against the values that surround her. The play distils Shaw's views on the subjects of politics, religion and creative evolution.

Plays Pleasant

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. Dan H. Laurence (series editor) has edited Shaw's Collected Letters and Collected Plays with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. Bill Mc Cormack is Professor of Literary History at Goldsmith's College, London.

One of Bernard Shaw&rsquo;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 &lsquo;strange lady&rsquo;, 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.

Pygmalion

'Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf . . . you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba' 
 
Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own. 
 
With an Introduction by NICHOLAS GRENE

Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival of British drama. 
Dan H. Laurence has edited Shaw's COLLECTED LETTERS and COLLECTED PLAYS with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. 
Nicholas Grene is Professor of English at the University of Dublin.

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own.

The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, Geneva

Plays Political

While some of Shaw&rsquo;s earlier plays are still performed, his later plays, such as the ones in this volume, are barely known. As the collective title indicates, the themes here are political; yet, frankly, it is doubtful how seriously we can now take Shaw as a political thinker. Despite writing in the 1930s, he has little to say of the nature of totalitarianism: although he satirises Fascist dictators in &ldquo;Geneva&rdquo;, the satire is disappointingly mild. Neither did Shaw appear to foresee (on the evidence of these plays, at least) the imminent collapse of the British Empire.But it is Shaw the dramatist rather than Shaw the political philosopher who still holds our attention &ndash; even in plays as explicitly political as these. He had a sharp intellect and a quirky sense of humour, and his dialogue still glints and sparkles: he couldn&rsquo;t write a dull line if he tried. No matter how serious the themes he addresses, the crispness of his writing and his lightness of touch still scintillate.Shaw seems, perhaps unfairly, out of fashion nowadays. But even in these lesser-known works, he demonstrates his matchless ability, still undimmed, to provoke and to entertain.

Misalliance and the Fascinating Foundling

This volume features the play Misalliance, which explores the incongruities of human nature and family life, and Shaw's one-act burlesque, The Fascinating Foundling.

John Bull's Other Island

Shaw&rsquo;s story is rife with such &lsquo;beyond opinions&rsquo;, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, a Dubliner in London, and a socialist living in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. In one sense, as a Protestant choosing to live in London, he is a John Bull, yet he remains Irish &ndash; an Irish Bull, something alluded to in his one play set in Eire, John Bull&rsquo;s Other Island.

The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and Fanny's First Play

&lsquo;A tearing, flaring, revivalist drama&rsquo; was how Desmond MacCarthy described The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. Set in America&rsquo;s Wild West and aptly subtitled &lsquo;A Sermon in Crude Melodrama&rsquo;, this single-act play concerns the conversion of a horse thief desperate to &lsquo;keep the devil&rsquo; in him and die game. Published in 1909, it brought Shaw into conflict with the Lord Chamberlain of England, who banned it on the grounds of alleged blasphemy, and it was twelve years before the play was performed in a London theatre. In an interview Shaw commented, &lsquo;I am sorry that Fanny&rsquo;s First Play has destroyed the cherished legend that I am an unpopular playwright &hellip; for the first time I have allowed a play of mine to run itself to death &hellip; And the worst of it is it will not die.&rsquo; First performed in 1911, the play is a delightful farce in which Shaw debates some of his favourite subjects: middle-class morality, marriage, parents and children and women&rsquo;s rights. And, deliberately concealing his authorship, Shaw took the opportunity to satirize contemporary drama critics who, he claimed, &lsquo;do not know dramatic chalk from dramatic cheese when it is no longer labelled for them.&rsquo;

"in Good King Charles's Golden Days"; Buoyant Billions; Farfetched Fables; Shakes Versus Shav; Why She Would not

Last Plays

In Good King Charles's Golden Days: a true history that never happened. A discussion play; the issues of nature, power and leadership are debated between King Charles II ('Mr Rowley'), Isaac Newton, George Fox and the artist Godfrey Kneller. 
Buoyant Billions: a comedy of no manners. 
Farfetched fables. Shaw's thoughts simplified. 
Shakes vs. Shav. Puppets portray Shaw and Shakespeare. The play comprises a comic argument between the two playwrights, an intellectual Punch and Judy. 
Why She Would Not. His final play.

Too True to be Good, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, The Millionairess

Plays Extravagant

This is a collection of the plays of George Bernard Shaw that includes &quot;The Millionairess&quot;, &quot;Too True to be Good&quot; and &quot;The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles&quot;.

Selected Short Plays

This selection comprises: &quot;THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE&quot; &quot;HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND&quot; &quot;PASSION, POISON AND PETRIFACTION&quot; &quot;THE GLIMPSE OF REALITY&quot; &quot;THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS&quot; &quot;OVERRULED&quot; &quot;THE MUSIC-CURE&quot; &quot;GREAT CATHERINE&quot; &quot;THE INCA OF PERUSALEM&quot; &quot;O'FLAHERTY V.C.&quot; &quot;AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT&quot; &quot;ANNAJANSKA, THE BOLSHEVIK EMPRESS&quot; &quot;VILLAGE WOOING&quot; &quot;THE SIX OF CALAIS&quot; and &quot;CYMBELINE REFINISHED&quot;.

Back to Methuselah

BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. Although essentially shy, he created the persona of G. B. S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities. 
 
After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman&rsquo;s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes such as Music in London 1890&ndash;1894 (3 vols, 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols, 1931). He also wrote five novels and some shorter fiction, including The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales and Cashel Byron&rsquo;s Profession, both published in Penguin&rsquo;s Bernard Shaw Library. 
 
He conducted a strong attack on the London theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His plays fall into several categories: &lsquo;Plays Pleasant&rsquo;; &lsquo;Plays Unpleasant&rsquo;; comedies; chronicle-plays; &lsquo;metabiological Pentateuch&rsquo; (Back to Methuselah, a series of plays); and &lsquo;political extravaganzas&rsquo;. Bernard Shaw died in 1950.

Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) is a 1921 series of five plays and a preface by George Bernard Shaw. The five plays are: 
 
In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden); The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day; The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170; Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000; As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920 
 
The plays were published with a preface titled The Infidel Half Century, and first performed in 1922 by the New York Theatre Guild at the Garrick Theatre.

The Doctor's Dilemma

Shaw's humorous satire of the medical profession.

George Bernard Shaw

Dan Laurence

Michael Billington

Shaw believed that theatre audiences of the 1890s deserved more than the hollow spectacle and sham he saw displayed on the London stage. But he also recognized that people wanted to be entertained while educated, and to see purpose mixed with pleasure. In these three plays of ideas, Shaw employed traditional dramatic forms - Victorian melodrama, the history play and the adventure story - to turn received wisdom upside down. Set during the American War of Independence, The Devil's Disciple exposes fake Puritanism and piety, while Caesar and Cleopatra, a cheeky riposte to Shakespeare, redefines heroism in the character of the ageing Roman leader. And in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, an expedition in Morocco is saved from disaster by a lady explorer's skilful manipulation of the truth.

George Bernard Shaw

Books by George Bernard Shaw

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter