Plays Pleasant

by George Bernard Shaw

Overview

Plays Pleasant (1898) comprises four comedies intended to amuse audiences but also to provoke them. Arms and the Man, set in the Balkan mountains, satirizes the romantic view of war and military heroism. Candida presents the complicated relationship between a vicar, his wife, and her young admirer. You Never Can Tell is a light, witty look at an aging suffragette and her family. The Man of Destiny features Napoleon Bonaparte at odds with English mores.

Author Biography: Goerge Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and political problems with a razor-sharp tongue. He won the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature. Dan H. Laurence is series editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin. W. J. McCormack is professor of literary history at Goldsmith's College, London.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788835844433
Publisher:	E-BOOKARAMA
Publication date:	05/03/2023
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is one of the world’s greatest literary figures. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he left school at fourteen and in 1876 went to London, where he began his literary career with a series of unsuccessful novels. In 1884 he became a founder of the Fabian Society, the famous British socialist organization. After becoming a reviewer and drama critic, he published a study of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1891 and became determined to create plays as he felt Ibsen did: to shake audiences out of their moral complacency and to attack social problems. However, Shaw was an irrepressible wit, and his plays are as entertaining as they are socially provocative. Basically shy, Shaw created a public persona for himself: G.B.S., a bearded eccentric, crusading social critic, antivivisectionist, language reformer, strict vegetarian, and renowned public speaker. The author of fifty-three plays, hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, and several books, Shaw is best known for Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

Dan H. Laurence (series editor; 1920–2008) was series editor for the works of George Bernard Shaw in Penguin. Formerly a New York University faculty member, Mr. Laurence left his tenured position in 1970 to dedicated his life to the collection and curation of Shaw's life, work, and letters. He served as the official literary advisor to Shaw's estate and published four volumes of his correspondence.

W. J. McCormack (introducer) is a professor of literary history at Goldsmith’s College, London.

Table of Contents

Plays PleasantIntroduction
Chronology
Preface
Arms and the Man: An Anti-romantic Comedy
Candida: A Mystery
The Man of Destiny: A Fictitious Paragraph of History
You Never Can Tell: A Comedy
Composition and Cast Lists
Principal Works of Bernard Shaw

Editorial Reviews

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“[Shaw] did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity.” —Thomas Mann
 
“Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him.” —Michael Holroyd
 
“In his works Shaw left us his mind. . . . Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense.” —The Sunday Times
 
“He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr. Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.” —The Independent
 
“His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits—and still are.” —The Daily Mail

From the Publisher