Shaw believed that theatre audiences of the 1890s deserved more than the hollow spectacle and sham he saw displayed on the London stage. 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.
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. Michael Billington (introducer) has been Drama Critic of the Guardian since 1971.
Shaw believed that theatre audiences of the 1890s deserved more than the hollow spectacle and sham he saw displayed on the London stage. 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.
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. Michael Billington (introducer) has been Drama Critic of the Guardian since 1971.
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. Michael Billington (introducer) has been Drama Critic of the Guardian since 1971.
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
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