What do you think?
Rate this book
Selected Short Plays
In each of these fifteen short plays, Bernard Shaw displays an immense skill in achieving an immediate dramatic impact - a skill that he recognized as being greatly dependent on the talent of the actors and actresses with whom he worked. Though some of the sketches are slight, others offer short but intense scrutinies of the morality and sensibility of the age. Together they demonstrate a range of moods - comedy, satire, farce and social protest - through which the more familiar Shavian themes emerge, among them the inadequacies of the contemporary government and the "inflated" reputation enjoyed by Shakespeare.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
George Bernard Shaw
2,271 books4,183 followersGeorge Bernard Shaw stands as one of the most prolific and influential intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a man whose literary output was matched only by his fervent commitment to social reform. Rising from a modest background in Dublin to become a global icon of letters, Shaw redefined the purpose of the stage, transforming it from a place of mere entertainment into a forum for rigorous intellectual debate and moral inquiry. His unique "Shavian" style—characterized by sharp-witted dialogue, paradoxical reasoning, and a relentless assault on Victorian hypocrisy—ensured that his voice resonated far beyond the footlights. As a playwright, critic, and philosopher, he remains a singular figure in history, being one of only two individuals to have been honored with both a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Academy Award. This rare crossover of high-art recognition and mainstream cinematic success speaks to his versatility and the enduring relevance of his narratives. His dramatic work, which includes over sixty plays, often tackled the most pressing issues of his day, from the rigid structures of the British class system to the complexities of gender roles and the ethical dilemmas of capitalism. In masterpieces like Pygmalion, he used the science of phonetics to demonstrate the artificiality of class distinctions, a theme that would later reach millions through the musical adaptation My Fair Lady. In Man and Superman, he delved into the philosophical concepts of the "Life Force" and the evolution of the human spirit, while Major Barbara forced audiences to confront the uncomfortable relationship between religious idealism and the industrial military complex. Beyond his theatrical achievements, Shaw was a foundational force in political thought, serving as a leading light of the Fabian Society. His advocacy for gradual socialist reform, rather than violent revolution, helped shape the trajectory of modern British politics and social welfare. He was instrumental in the creation of the London School of Economics, an institution that continues to influence global policy and economic theory. Shaw was also a formidable critic, whose reviews of music and drama set new standards for the profession, characterized by an uncompromising honesty and a deep knowledge of the arts. His personal lifestyle was as distinctive as his writing; a committed vegetarian, teetotaler, and non-smoker, he lived with a disciplined focus that allowed him to remain productive well into his ninth decade. He was a man of contradictions, often engaging in provocative public discourse that challenged the status quo, even when his views sparked intense controversy. His fascination with the "Superman" archetype and his occasional support for authoritarian figures reflected a complex, often elitist worldview that sought the betterment of humanity through radical intellectual evolution. Despite these complexities, his core mission was always rooted in a profound humanitarianism and a desire to expose the delusions that prevented society from progressing. He believed that the power of the written word could strip away the masks of respectability that hid social injustice, and his plays continue to be staged worldwide because the human foibles he satirized remain as prevalent today as they were during his lifetime. By blending humor with gravity and intellect with accessibility, Shaw created a body of work that serves as both a mirror and a compass for modern civilization. His legacy is not just in the scripts he left behind, but in the very way we think about the intersection of art, politics, and the individual’s responsibility to the collective good. He remains the quintessential public intellectual, a man who never feared to speak his mind or to demand that the world become a more rational and equitable place.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 5, 2016
The Admirable Bashville:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
How He Lied To Her Husband:-
I seem to have lost a review of this play, a most favourite one, that I remember - vividly - writing, only a few weeks ago about this play, and while this is not the first time it has happened it is difficult to think of how it could have.
This play is one of the most delightful ones penned by the writer and it is completely unlike anything anyone (outside old British social life) might imagine. One of the most wonderful plays by Mr. Shaw, full of quite unexpected turns when one is in the world of literature but quite normal in real life, which is what makes it hilarious and sobering.
A very talented and romantic poet who is in love with a beautiful woman, who wishes nothing as much as seeing her every evening for a session of theater and dinner or at least reading poetry to her that is written for her, in praise of her exquisite beauty, and is ever ready to do anything his love might demand of him.
Only, she is married, and to a very rich man who gives her everything she could wish for materially and socially but is no romantic poet, or at any rate not a man of words. On the other hand he is not stingy about providing her with an expensive social lifestyle with dinners, parties, artists invited and theater and carriages, jewellery. And so on. Still, he is no poet. Is he literate, is hard to remember from the play. Does he appreciate her beauty more than in terms of his own pleasure, one doubts to begin with.
There is the whole setting - the very beautiful and wealthy Aurora who is married to a common businessman although able to have a social life of consorting with various artists and so forth.
And then the play begins to unfold. The husband, the very practical and very much bourgeois man who has provided his wife with everything she could ever wish for in terms of wealth and social life, has now rumoured to have found out about the poet and the wife. Someone has told the husband about the poet's writing extensive poetry every day about the wife, and the love (still platonic in fact) that is the soil for the poetry to grow from, and so on. And the wife has come to know about the husband having been informed, and she is frantic in worry about what will happen.
The poet who is in love with her, writing poems to her, willing to do anything for her, whether taking her our to theater every evening or stay in and amuse her or be shot by her husband or elope with her, whatever destiny might have in store for the love of his very exhilarated heights of romance. The poet is willing to do anything she wishes, while his own noble instinct is to accept the blame and confront the husband with the truth and walk off into the sunset with his beloved beautiful Aurora.
What comes next is the typical Shaw sequence of twists and turns that leaves one helpless in hilarious laughter while totally in sympathy with the poor poet. I have no intention of spoiling the delight of reading further by saying another word about what comes next, for those that have not read this yet. Any attempt to describe it will spoil it for the reader, so I shall desist.
Thursday, November 20, 2008.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Passion, Poison And Petrifaction:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Glimpse Of Reality:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Dark Lady Of The Sonnets:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Overruled:-
A couple in need of refreshing or rethinking a marriage in the comparatively restricted era a century ago when divorce was possible but socially not easy to live with, would likely take time away to think it over. If they of reasonable means it could mean going around the world on a pleasure cruise separately, and of course an earlier generation might simply have arranged separate bedrooms or - if they were higher or lower than middle class - have separate intimate lives with others outside the marriage a la French (upper class? not necessarily), too. But this era, beginning of open thinking and lives, and a bit more honesty, would prompt them to more honest solutions towards saving the marriage honestly or do whatever it is honestly.
Now if George Bernard Shaw is going to consider this question he naturally comes up with two couples that have gone their separate ways around the world and have not only come across one half of the other each but fallen in love, and to throw in more fun they have very different attitudes. One falls in love desperately but is shocked at the beloved wife of another takes it as not so difficult or immoral as long as they don't do anything physical, and another has exactly the opposite position.
Of course, post our first encounter with the first pair of lovers in quandary of what if whether, soon the two couples meet, the men discuss, and it is all funny if more intellectually when reading, but competent performers (one can imagine David Niven, Cary Grant, and women to match) might make audience roll in aisles with pain due to laughter too.
Of course, real life couples do not have so neat or happy solutions, there is far more pain and mess, but all the more reason to look to literature and its more visual experiences of theater and film and now television for some relief, some smiles, laughter, and forgetting of pains. In this as ever Shaw succeeds albeit with a bit more intellectual level than say Jeeves, or perhaps one might compare them on par, but this one certainly could serve the purpose.
Monday, February 24, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Music-Cure:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Great Catherine:-
Shaw is no worshiper of great persona of history, and The Great Catherine of Russia does not escape his caricature. She is shown here as a barbaric ruler of a barbaric huge powerful nation, charmed by sophistication of a mere lowly officer of the British embassy in her empire.
Every caricature has some truth distorted, and here the fact is Russia was and is a huge nation spreading from eastern one third of Europe to the very eastern edge of Asia, and as a matter of fact Alaska belongs to US only because the 99 year old lease was lost during the revolution. The great wilderness of Siberia would be a nation large enough to be among first ten if it were independent, and neighbouring Yakutia joins it in the large wilderness of deep heart of Russia. So the populace is varied, there are well over a dozen languages and many faiths. Uniting all this is no joke, and the greater of the Russian monarchs did it by commanding loyalty from their subjects as Catherine the Great did.
And yes, they did look to west for bringing some sophistication to the vast wilderness, and the court language was French, spoken even among themselves by the upper class, often at home as well. That their heart stays Russian can be no doubt, but they were no barbarians of this caricature, post Peter the Great who built St Petersburg.
Thursday, January 23, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Inca Of Perusalem:-
Shaw lived and wrote during times of great turbulence of more than world scale, of scale of history as well as world. Feudal era passing and ideas of equality of all humans (- then they said men, forgetting women are not always included, so almost a foot behind women followed with demands and questions re their equal rights, fought in most western nations with great rigorous opposition from men and often women who saw their privileges in riding on men's coattails slipping away if they had to be independent -) not only being put forth but seeming to take root, flourish, fly, and already establish in various places, with great revolutions needed to bring them to fore taking place in others.
So he wrote of things to come, things being thought and discussed, things seeming to come true, and human follies and natures and interactions making the live tragedies and horrors seem not only bearable but funny and hilarious, as often they must have been. Inca Of Perusalem is one such play.
The princess of the realm is modest and unable to insist on being treated with the due respect she ought to be paid by average and avaricious hotel managers, and it takes a smart and formidable young woman to set things right, so of course the princess cannot help employing her albeit she is a bit scared of the new maid. Then there is the question of the Inca who has sent a proposal to the princess on behalf of his son, and an emissary to meet her, in reality to inspect her to see if she is fit to be queen some day.
Only of course, as the readers know by now being accustomed to the device a century after such authors set the precedent, the emissary is Inca incognito and the young woman he meets and is browbeaten by and smitten by is the maid. Both however are smart, so everything turns out fine. Meanwhile the readers - and audience in theater if that is how one comes across this - have had fun.
Monday, February 24, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
O'Flaherty V.C.:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Augustus Does His Bit:-
Only Mr. Shaw could do this - live during harrowing, exciting, uncertain times when future seemed brilliant one moment and bleak another, when a huge war was complicated by a revolution in a huge, huge nations sprawled across eastern half of Europe and all of north Asia, when kingdoms fell down and royal families were assassinated and aristocrats fled their homes and countries and lived lives of penury in greatly strained circumstances and still tried to maintain their haughty demeanor, when middle and upper classes were uncertain if their own servants would rise up and slay them all over when asleep, and colonial rules were beginning to totter with independence movements gaining momentum - only he could live through all this, and take a look at it with a seemingly close focus and paint a seemingly sarcastic, ridiculing portrait of his own side, and yet come out making a reader and a viewer adoring the very people we were all laughing at a moment ago.
The short play is set in the battlefield of the first world war somewhere in the background, with a typical slightly dense upper- upper middle class Augustus attempting to do his best for his nation, saying all the right things with complete sincerity and yet be naive enough to be fooled by a woman of upper class who has arrived to spy, to take away important papers that lie openly on his desk in the belief that everyone shall be British and play cricket, and not lie or spy while looking like a lady or a gentleman.
But it is all right after all - she is merely there to win a bet with his boss, which she does very easily, and leaves the bumbling Englishman to take care of the affairs pretty much representative of his ilk, his nation - and to do all right after all.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress:-
A comedy look at the revolution where instead of the gore and massacres of real events there is a princess of the realm travelling dressed up as an officer of the military, which leads people to conclude she is kidnapped by the officer; what she intends is to take over the revolution, and since the various people now serving the revolution and attempting to adapt to the new order of the day of everyone supposedly being equal are at heart still very much devoted to her, there is every chance she will succeed, and so become the Bolshevik Empress.
January 21, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Village Wooing:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Six Of Calais:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Cymbeline Refinished:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
How He Lied To Her Husband:-
I seem to have lost a review of this play, a most favourite one, that I remember - vividly - writing, only a few weeks ago about this play, and while this is not the first time it has happened it is difficult to think of how it could have.
This play is one of the most delightful ones penned by the writer and it is completely unlike anything anyone (outside old British social life) might imagine. One of the most wonderful plays by Mr. Shaw, full of quite unexpected turns when one is in the world of literature but quite normal in real life, which is what makes it hilarious and sobering.
A very talented and romantic poet who is in love with a beautiful woman, who wishes nothing as much as seeing her every evening for a session of theater and dinner or at least reading poetry to her that is written for her, in praise of her exquisite beauty, and is ever ready to do anything his love might demand of him.
Only, she is married, and to a very rich man who gives her everything she could wish for materially and socially but is no romantic poet, or at any rate not a man of words. On the other hand he is not stingy about providing her with an expensive social lifestyle with dinners, parties, artists invited and theater and carriages, jewellery. And so on. Still, he is no poet. Is he literate, is hard to remember from the play. Does he appreciate her beauty more than in terms of his own pleasure, one doubts to begin with.
There is the whole setting - the very beautiful and wealthy Aurora who is married to a common businessman although able to have a social life of consorting with various artists and so forth.
And then the play begins to unfold. The husband, the very practical and very much bourgeois man who has provided his wife with everything she could ever wish for in terms of wealth and social life, has now rumoured to have found out about the poet and the wife. Someone has told the husband about the poet's writing extensive poetry every day about the wife, and the love (still platonic in fact) that is the soil for the poetry to grow from, and so on. And the wife has come to know about the husband having been informed, and she is frantic in worry about what will happen.
The poet who is in love with her, writing poems to her, willing to do anything for her, whether taking her our to theater every evening or stay in and amuse her or be shot by her husband or elope with her, whatever destiny might have in store for the love of his very exhilarated heights of romance. The poet is willing to do anything she wishes, while his own noble instinct is to accept the blame and confront the husband with the truth and walk off into the sunset with his beloved beautiful Aurora.
What comes next is the typical Shaw sequence of twists and turns that leaves one helpless in hilarious laughter while totally in sympathy with the poor poet. I have no intention of spoiling the delight of reading further by saying another word about what comes next, for those that have not read this yet. Any attempt to describe it will spoil it for the reader, so I shall desist.
Thursday, November 20, 2008.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Passion, Poison And Petrifaction:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Glimpse Of Reality:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Dark Lady Of The Sonnets:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Overruled:-
A couple in need of refreshing or rethinking a marriage in the comparatively restricted era a century ago when divorce was possible but socially not easy to live with, would likely take time away to think it over. If they of reasonable means it could mean going around the world on a pleasure cruise separately, and of course an earlier generation might simply have arranged separate bedrooms or - if they were higher or lower than middle class - have separate intimate lives with others outside the marriage a la French (upper class? not necessarily), too. But this era, beginning of open thinking and lives, and a bit more honesty, would prompt them to more honest solutions towards saving the marriage honestly or do whatever it is honestly.
Now if George Bernard Shaw is going to consider this question he naturally comes up with two couples that have gone their separate ways around the world and have not only come across one half of the other each but fallen in love, and to throw in more fun they have very different attitudes. One falls in love desperately but is shocked at the beloved wife of another takes it as not so difficult or immoral as long as they don't do anything physical, and another has exactly the opposite position.
Of course, post our first encounter with the first pair of lovers in quandary of what if whether, soon the two couples meet, the men discuss, and it is all funny if more intellectually when reading, but competent performers (one can imagine David Niven, Cary Grant, and women to match) might make audience roll in aisles with pain due to laughter too.
Of course, real life couples do not have so neat or happy solutions, there is far more pain and mess, but all the more reason to look to literature and its more visual experiences of theater and film and now television for some relief, some smiles, laughter, and forgetting of pains. In this as ever Shaw succeeds albeit with a bit more intellectual level than say Jeeves, or perhaps one might compare them on par, but this one certainly could serve the purpose.
Monday, February 24, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Music-Cure:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Great Catherine:-
Shaw is no worshiper of great persona of history, and The Great Catherine of Russia does not escape his caricature. She is shown here as a barbaric ruler of a barbaric huge powerful nation, charmed by sophistication of a mere lowly officer of the British embassy in her empire.
Every caricature has some truth distorted, and here the fact is Russia was and is a huge nation spreading from eastern one third of Europe to the very eastern edge of Asia, and as a matter of fact Alaska belongs to US only because the 99 year old lease was lost during the revolution. The great wilderness of Siberia would be a nation large enough to be among first ten if it were independent, and neighbouring Yakutia joins it in the large wilderness of deep heart of Russia. So the populace is varied, there are well over a dozen languages and many faiths. Uniting all this is no joke, and the greater of the Russian monarchs did it by commanding loyalty from their subjects as Catherine the Great did.
And yes, they did look to west for bringing some sophistication to the vast wilderness, and the court language was French, spoken even among themselves by the upper class, often at home as well. That their heart stays Russian can be no doubt, but they were no barbarians of this caricature, post Peter the Great who built St Petersburg.
Thursday, January 23, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Inca Of Perusalem:-
Shaw lived and wrote during times of great turbulence of more than world scale, of scale of history as well as world. Feudal era passing and ideas of equality of all humans (- then they said men, forgetting women are not always included, so almost a foot behind women followed with demands and questions re their equal rights, fought in most western nations with great rigorous opposition from men and often women who saw their privileges in riding on men's coattails slipping away if they had to be independent -) not only being put forth but seeming to take root, flourish, fly, and already establish in various places, with great revolutions needed to bring them to fore taking place in others.
So he wrote of things to come, things being thought and discussed, things seeming to come true, and human follies and natures and interactions making the live tragedies and horrors seem not only bearable but funny and hilarious, as often they must have been. Inca Of Perusalem is one such play.
The princess of the realm is modest and unable to insist on being treated with the due respect she ought to be paid by average and avaricious hotel managers, and it takes a smart and formidable young woman to set things right, so of course the princess cannot help employing her albeit she is a bit scared of the new maid. Then there is the question of the Inca who has sent a proposal to the princess on behalf of his son, and an emissary to meet her, in reality to inspect her to see if she is fit to be queen some day.
Only of course, as the readers know by now being accustomed to the device a century after such authors set the precedent, the emissary is Inca incognito and the young woman he meets and is browbeaten by and smitten by is the maid. Both however are smart, so everything turns out fine. Meanwhile the readers - and audience in theater if that is how one comes across this - have had fun.
Monday, February 24, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
O'Flaherty V.C.:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Augustus Does His Bit:-
Only Mr. Shaw could do this - live during harrowing, exciting, uncertain times when future seemed brilliant one moment and bleak another, when a huge war was complicated by a revolution in a huge, huge nations sprawled across eastern half of Europe and all of north Asia, when kingdoms fell down and royal families were assassinated and aristocrats fled their homes and countries and lived lives of penury in greatly strained circumstances and still tried to maintain their haughty demeanor, when middle and upper classes were uncertain if their own servants would rise up and slay them all over when asleep, and colonial rules were beginning to totter with independence movements gaining momentum - only he could live through all this, and take a look at it with a seemingly close focus and paint a seemingly sarcastic, ridiculing portrait of his own side, and yet come out making a reader and a viewer adoring the very people we were all laughing at a moment ago.
The short play is set in the battlefield of the first world war somewhere in the background, with a typical slightly dense upper- upper middle class Augustus attempting to do his best for his nation, saying all the right things with complete sincerity and yet be naive enough to be fooled by a woman of upper class who has arrived to spy, to take away important papers that lie openly on his desk in the belief that everyone shall be British and play cricket, and not lie or spy while looking like a lady or a gentleman.
But it is all right after all - she is merely there to win a bet with his boss, which she does very easily, and leaves the bumbling Englishman to take care of the affairs pretty much representative of his ilk, his nation - and to do all right after all.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress:-
A comedy look at the revolution where instead of the gore and massacres of real events there is a princess of the realm travelling dressed up as an officer of the military, which leads people to conclude she is kidnapped by the officer; what she intends is to take over the revolution, and since the various people now serving the revolution and attempting to adapt to the new order of the day of everyone supposedly being equal are at heart still very much devoted to her, there is every chance she will succeed, and so become the Bolshevik Empress.
January 21, 2014.
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Village Wooing:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
The Six Of Calais:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Cymbeline Refinished:-
....................................................................................
....................................................................................
Want to Read
June 27, 2020#4
THE INCA [reddening]. Take care, madam! This brooch was designed by the Inca himself. Allow me to explain the design. In the centre, the shield of Arminius. The ten surrounding medallions represent the ten castles of His Majesty. The rim is a piece of the telephone cable laid by His Majesty across the Shipskeel canal. The pin is a model in miniature of the sword of Henry the Birdcatcher.
#9
PATIOMKIN. Thas true. Drungn ruffian. Took dvantage of my being drunk. Said: take me to Lil angel Mother. Take me to beaufl Empress. Take me to the grea'st woman on earth. Thas whas he said. I took him. I was wrong. I am not sober.
CATHERINE. Men have grown sober in Siberia for less, Prince.
THE INCA [reddening]. Take care, madam! This brooch was designed by the Inca himself. Allow me to explain the design. In the centre, the shield of Arminius. The ten surrounding medallions represent the ten castles of His Majesty. The rim is a piece of the telephone cable laid by His Majesty across the Shipskeel canal. The pin is a model in miniature of the sword of Henry the Birdcatcher.
#9
PATIOMKIN. Thas true. Drungn ruffian. Took dvantage of my being drunk. Said: take me to Lil angel Mother. Take me to beaufl Empress. Take me to the grea'st woman on earth. Thas whas he said. I took him. I was wrong. I am not sober.
CATHERINE. Men have grown sober in Siberia for less, Prince.
August 21, 2015
Amusing. George Bernard Shaw's plays helped to define the intellectual revival of British theater.
"Village Wooing," first produced in 1934, opens here Nov 25. http://www.chamber-theatre.com/perfor...
"I have learnt not to expect too much from life. That is the real secret of cheerfulness, because I am always getting agreeable surprises instead of desolating disappointments." — Character A, Village Wooing
"Village Wooing," first produced in 1934, opens here Nov 25. http://www.chamber-theatre.com/perfor...
"I have learnt not to expect too much from life. That is the real secret of cheerfulness, because I am always getting agreeable surprises instead of desolating disappointments." — Character A, Village Wooing
Read
April 17, 2013Now, I understand why he won the Nobel Prize.
April 28, 2009
The wittiest playwright to ever live...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews