Study Guide to The Major Plays of George Bernard Shaw
eBook - ePub

Study Guide to The Major Plays of George Bernard Shaw

Intelligent Education

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Study Guide to The Major Plays of George Bernard Shaw

Intelligent Education

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by George Bernard Shaw, who is second only to Shakespeare in the eyes of British tradition. Titles in this study guide include Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, Candida, The Devil's Disciple, The Man of Destiny, Misalliance, Androcles and the Lion, and Heartbreak House.

As a playwright of the early twentieth century, George Barnard Shaw became a prominent figure in revolutionizing comedic drama. Moreover, his reinvigoration of the comedy of manners, drama of moral passion, and symbolic farce helped mold the theatre in his time and beyond. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of George Bernard Shaw's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Study Guide to The Major Plays of George Bernard Shaw an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Study Guide to The Major Plays of George Bernard Shaw by Intelligent Education in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Studienhilfen & Studienführer. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2020
ISBN
9781645424277
Edition
1
image
PREFACE
The aims of this outline and commentary are several:
  1. To present twelve plays of George Bernard Shaw in synopsis: six major plays in detailed summary and six less important plays in compressed summary.
  2. To provide the reader with some description of Shaw’s artistry: The method utilized is to apply a critical comment to the preface and each act of the major plays reviewed (to the whole play in the compressed summaries), followed by an analysis of some of the important characters in these plays. The intention is to show the reader what Shaw is like as a dramatist and to answer questions such as: How does Shaw construct a play? What techniques of dramatic craftsmanship does he favor? What problems of form do his plays present? What methods of characterization does he employ?
  3. To show the developments in Shaw’s thinking: In Bernard Shaw we find a primary example of what the critic Eric Bentley has called “The Playwright as Thinker.” Shaw, as we shall see, is above all a dramatist of ideas. This study guide recognizes the obligation to help the reader in sorting out and placing Shaw’s ideas in the total philosophical scheme that the plays dramatize. Accordingly, the comments emphasize his ideas as ideas, sometimes divorcing them from their dramatic context for the sake of examination. In addition, this study guide presents the plays in the order of their composition so that one may see how Shaw’s thinking (he thinks in and through his plays) and playwriting grew. Over the years Shaw was given to much repetition of idea and reiteration of theme, and the reader must expect a recurrence of familiar material. But it is useful to see Shaw in plays that range from Arms and the Man (1894) to Saint Joan (1923). These mark the limits of the period in which Shaw made his reputation. They provide the time limits of this guide; works composed outside this period are considered in the supplementary biographical and critical sections.
Two considerations are important: First, there is nothing inherently difficult about Shaw’s language. His writing is often rich in allusion and reference, and wherever necessary this guide explains phrasing which may now be obscure. But Shaw’s ideas are complex and at times the discussion presented here may seem overburdened with concepts, notably those on Man and Superman and of Saint Joan, where the issues dealt with are so large. To appreciate Shaw fully, it may be necessary for the reader to go back to the plays themselves and to their prefaces, where the connection of ideas and play will seem less artificial and more organic, less abstract and more immediate.
Second, this guide does not treat Shaw’s non-dramatic works. The closest it comes to his purely expository writing is the summary of the prefaces to the major plays.
The critical comments cannot be exhaustive. They can only call attention to some ways of thinking about a play. They may invite the student to make further inquiry. Possibly he will find some of the review questions and answers helpful to his own thinking. Although these review questions and answers are grouped after the plays; the student may want to consult them as he goes through the outline play by play. Supplied at the close of the guide is a bibliography with suggestions for secondary reading.
image
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
INTRODUCTION TO GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The life of George Bernard Shaw spanned nearly a century. It is important to note that he was born in 1856, before the American Civil War, and died in 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War: a period which witnessed many important changes in civilization. In his years as a writer, Shaw was an active observer of these changes, especially of the emergence of the unsettling twentieth century out of the already complex nineteenth. Moreover, Shaw was a commentator on every aspect of the challenge the new century brought with it. Deeply committed to a description of this challenge, his interests were all-embracing, his mind encyclopedic, his energy unflagging. Altogether Shaw remains not only a significant modern dramatist but also one of the supreme all-round men of letters in English literature. Fashions vary and Shaw has been in and out of critical favor, but his place as one of the leading writers of our time is now secure.
HIS EARLY LIFE
He was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856, the youngest of three children and the only son of a shabby-genteel, incompatible couple. His formal schooling was irregular and a source of misery to him. He always said he learned more outside of school-from some of his uncles and from a friend of the family, a musician devoted to Mrs. Shaw who herself was a singer who encouraged her son to cultivate all the arts. Besides playing and hearing music at home. Shaw frequented the opera and the Dublin concert halls. He went often to the art galleries and the theatre and was a great reader of good literature. These pursuits helped to sustain him in the trying years of his youth, after the separation of his parents, and while he was working as an office boy to a land agent and living with his father.
LIFE IN LONDON
In 1876 Shaw joined his mother (now living and working in London) and tried earning his livelihood by writing. He wrote criticism intermittently, then five novels in succession. All of them were rejected by publishers; but, in 1884-1887, four of them appeared serially in literary magazines, attracting interest if not money. London was superior to Dublin as a center of intellectual and literary activity and Shaw devoted himself fully now to many new interests. He became a member of the newly formed British Fabian Socialist Society whose members were working for the gradual improvement of the harsh conditions under which the lower classes lived in industrial society. Shaw joined debating clubs, lectured on social questions, and read extensively at the British Museum Reading Room. In these years he managed to become a regular and eventually well-known reviewer of books, music, art, and drama.
FIRST PLAYS
In 1885 Shaw took the first step in his career of dramatist by writing a play about slum landlords. It did not reach the stage until 1892 and then it was produced by the new Independent Theatre Society, sponsors of untried and often controversial works for which a commercial production was out of the question. Three years before, the Society had given the first performance in England of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a major play by the idol-smashing Norwegian, and Shaw had written the first (and still important) book on Ibsen in our language, The Quintessence of Ibsenism. In it Shaw showed that Ibsen was introducing something new in the theatre and could be considered a revolutionary modern: he (Ibsen) was writing plays with a purpose, not just entertaining, time-killing confections.
Though his success was uncertain, Shaw became increasingly serious now about his own playwriting. By 1900 he wrote nine plays (and many non-dramatic pieces), four of which are treated below: Arms and the Man, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, and Caesar and Cleopatra. At first, these plays were generally more successful outside England, and only gradually did Shaw make an impression on the managers of London’s commercial theatres. Undoubtedly all this activity took a toll on his health. In 1898 Shaw suffered a physical breakdown and decided to quit journalism and public speaking. Not that he abandoned interest in the cause of social reform. This he maintained in his dramatic and critical writing, notably in the prefaces of the published editions of his plays, for which he gained an audience not always given to theatre going. In the same year he married a well-to-do Irishwoman several years his senior, Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend. She nursed him back to health, shared his interests, and spent her life from then on in providing Shaw with companionship and an atmosphere conducive to work.
THE MIDDLE PLAYS
1905 was an important year for Shaw-the success in London of his ambitious Man and Superman (written 1901-1903) and the beginning of the next phase of his advancing theatrical career. His earlier plays were now revived and studied for their meaning; his international reputation grew; and his new plays were welcomed. Ten of them followed between 1905 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Of interest here are Major Barbara, Androcles and the Lion, Misalliance, Pygmalion, and the play he began in 1913, Heartbreak House. During the war Shaw courted public disfavor by suggesting that warfare was questionable. But he continued to write, and in 1921 he brought out his longest play, one ripe in philosophical and metaphysical speculation: Back to Methuselah. In 1923 appeared the immensely successful historical play Saint Joan (discussed in this guide). In 1925 Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the money from which he donated to a scheme for promoting the study of Scandinavian literature in English.
LATER LIFE
By this time Shaw was nearly seventy and a world figure, famous for his socialism, vegetarianism, his abstention from liquor and tobacco, his outspoken opinions and his eccentric dress. The plays that followed until 1940 were varied in their subject matter, uneven in their artistry, and yet astonishing coming from a man who might well have seen fit to retire. But Shaw chose to keep writing (even for the films) to make a world tour, to be interviewed on every conceivable question, to compile a collected edition of his works, and to write a book on politics in 1944. His last play was produced in 1947. His wife had died in 1943 and Shaw said he often felt lost without her. In 1950, in the garden at his remote Ayot St. Lawrence home, Shaw fell and after a siege of illness died on November 2. He wrote fifty-eight plays, of varying length. He wrote five novels and some short stories, at least two full-length books on politics and social organization, and several on art, literature, music. His numerous critical essays and journalistic writings have not yet been fully collected.
THE MAN
Because he was so prominent a figure for so many years, the public thought it knew Shaw well. To the superficial eye he seemed an intellectual entertainer given to the expression of often outrageous opinions redbearded and winking with glee at the shambles he made of the ordinary man’s idea of the world and its institutions. To be sure, Shaw delighted in this reputation. In fact, he kept it alive, he admitted, to better accomplish the work he found necessary to his very existence. He lured the public into listening to him and made it laugh. Thereby he hoped to get it to pay him serious attention as a moral and social philosopher. This may seem something of a paradox, a kind of contradiction or apparent contradiction, and paradox is the key to the man and the plays. Appearing a jester, Shaw was fundamentally serious, idealistic, visionary, religious, and even mystical. He was a passionate man, too, but his passions were not ordinary ones. He seemed, for example, to have no place in his life for romantic love. Instead he devoted himself to the improvement of the world around him by the method he knew best, lecturing it in the theatre and on the page.
THE AIM IN THE THEATRE
Shaw considered himself an idealist with a mission. “Though my trade is that of a playwright,” he wrote, “my vocation is that of a prophet.” He would not write a line purely for idle entertainment, he warned, because it went against his soul to do so. He was not an enemy of entertainment or scornful of success. But he described himself as a Puritan reformer who used the drama as a weapon to oppose the worship by men of outworn creeds and conventions. As a Socialist, he was committed to a program for the betterment of society, and for that purpose he did not use the theatre alone. But Shaw found that the stage made an effective pulpit or platform and the theatre provided a ready-made audience. He did not mind being thought didactic or a crank as long as it was understood that he meant what he said. His comedy, he hoped, would be cleansing and his humor health-giving. As a man of the theatre, he was practical, shrewd, firm, businesslike, and unsentimental. In his life and his work Shaw was essentially a rationalist with much of the poet in him. As he has one of his characters put it, he wanted “Life with a blessing,” and he dedicated himself to showing that it can be achieved by scrupulous self-criticism and by close examination of the world around oneself. Shaw was not a naive optimist or, though he had his dark moods, an unthinking pessimist. He believed that one has to work for one’s dreams, and the better the dream, the better the man. His religion was that of the Life Force (see below, Man and Superman), the surrendering oneself to the hard will of the universe that compels one to strive, to fret away one’s petty complaints, and to keep striving.
THE TEMPER OF THE PLAYS
All this might lead one to think that the plays are formidable, but they are not. They are, largely speaking, serious comedies of modern life that make a discussion of issues relevant to living in the twentieth century. Not that they are glumly or clinically analytical. They are philosophical in their reach, witty and ironic in temper, and their thematic interest and comic energy derive from the interplay of characters and ideas. Shaw frequently enjoys identifying a character with a particular idea and then exploding this idea from under him by showing up its inadequacy as a guide to life or its falseness as an item of belief. Thus, in the first play of the outline, Arms and the Man, Sergius is made to see that his notions of love and war have made a fool of him and that Bluntschli, in his more realistic appraisal of things, living without illusions is the man who suffers less. When Shaw approves of an idea or set of ideas, he usually makes his hero or heroine the exponent of it. The contest in his major plays is between a hero of dynamic vision or insight and the characters or system that oppose all he stands for. In the conflict that is the substance of the play, the hero must win over or defeat his antagonists by irrefutable logic, sheer wit, or courageous commitment to a course of action. Dick Dudgeon (The Devil’s Disciple) puts down his adversaries by a combination of daring and unconventionality; Caesar (Caesar and Cleopatra) is a superior being because he is an idealist with ideals that he can show to be practical and workable. But the opposing system can win and the hero a philosophic man or genius, be defeated. In Saint Joan, one of Shaw’s several history plays and his only tragedy, the heroine is tragically overcome because the world is not ready for her. Sometimes the defeat is not so drastic, as in Man and Superman, where the man of moral passion, Tanner, is brought willingly to heel by the woman who pursues him. We may have, then, depending upon the victory or defeat of the hero, pure comedy, pure tragedy, or tragicomedy.
FORM OF THE PLAYS
It is not always easy to pigeonhole a Shaw play in an accepted category of drama. At the outset of his playwriting career Shaw constructed his drama on the model of the neatly structured French “well made play.” But by 1900 he was already looking for a freer form and before long Shaw virtually invented a new form, the drama of discussion or ideas with comic, tragic, or farcical overtones, mixing all three when he saw the occasion. Shaw’s originality lies in his taking the discussion play of life, (modern or otherwise), in its purest form, as made popular by Ibsen and some English adaptors, and infusing in it the spirit of English comedy as practiced from the seventeenth century to his own day. In many of Shaw’s plays, one feels the presence of earlier English comic writers like the Elizabethan Ben Jonson, Goldsmith and Sheridan of the eighteenth century, or the novelist Dickens of the nineteenth. Shaw is specific enough in alerting us to his models. He ranges far afield, beyond England, in fact, invoking the satiric spirit of Aristophanes or Moliere. But if we read Shaw carelessly, his insistence upon the logic, consistency, and reality or his situations, characters, and themes may divert us from seeing that in their techniques, his plays are anything but “realistic” imitations of life. Despite their discussion of social or moral dilemmas, they are not as earthbound as these terms might apply. They ar...

Table of contents