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 expose of the...

One of Bernard Shaw'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 'strange lady', while in the exuberant farce You Never Can Tell a divided family is reunited by chance. Although Shaw intended Plays Pleasant to be gentler...

Tells the tale of Androcles, a slave who is saved by the requited mercy of a lion.

Shaw's brilliantly witty exposure of the British class system
Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle--'an east-end dona with an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers'--for Mrs Patrick Campbell, with whom he had a passionate but unconsummated affair. From the outset the play was a sensational success, although Shaw, irritated by its popularity at the expense of his artistic intentions, dismissed it as a potboiler. The Pygmalion of legend falls in love with his perfect female statue and persuades Venus to bring her to life so that he can marry her. But Shaw radically...

Arms and the Man, optimistic, farcical, absurd, and teeming with sexual energy, has Shaw inverting the devices of melodrama to glorious effect.

Caesar and Cleopatra satirizes Shakespeare's use of history and comments wryly on the politics of Shaw's own time, but the undertone of melancholy makes it one of his most affecting plays.

Candida centers on a romantic triangle and parodies courtly love and the domestic drama of Ibsen. It abounds with classical allusions, the fervor of a religious revival, and poetic inspiration and aspirations.

Raises doubts on how seriously we can take Shaw as a political thinker. This title states that despite writing in the 1930s, he has little to say of the nature of totalitarianism. It shows that although he satirises Fascist dictators in Geneva, the satire is disappointingly mild.

Includes titles such as Buoyant Billions: A comedy of no manners, Farfetched Fables in which Shaw's thoughts simplified; Shakes vs. Shav in which puppets portray Shaw and Shakespeare - the play comprises a comic argument between the two playwrights, an intellectual Punch and Judy; and, Why She Would Not, his final play.