This is a little handbook for the reading tables of Americans
interested enough in the drama of the day to have some curiosity
regarding the plays of George Bernard Shaw, but too busy to give them
careful personal study or to read the vast mass of reviews, magazine
articles, letters to the editor, newspaper paragraphs and reports of
debates that deal with them. Every habitual writer now before the
public, from William Archer and James Huneker to “Vox Populi” and “An
Old Subscriber” has had his say about Shaw. In the pages following
there is no attempt to formulate a new theory of his purposes or a
novel interpretation of his philosophies. Instead, the object of this
modest book is to bring all of the Shaw commentators together upon the
common ground of admitted fact, to exhibit the Shaw plays as dramas
rather than as transcendental treatises, and to describe their plots,
characters, and general plans simply and calmly, and without reading
into them anything invisible to the naked eye.
The order in which the plays are considered is not the chronological
one, and some readers may think that it is not the logical one.
Inasmuch as an exposition of the reasons that urged its adoption would
waste a great deal of space, the point will not be argued. The brief
biography of the dramatist is based upon the most accurate available
eulogies, denunciations, reminiscences, and manuscripts. So, too, the
historical data regarding the plays and other publications.
The reputation of Mr. Shaw as a playwright has so far exceeded his
renown as a novelist, a socialist, a cart-tail orator, a journeyman
reformer, a vegetarian, and a critic of literature and the arts,
that his novels and other minor works have been noticed but briefly.
But this is not to be taken as evidence that they do not merit
acquaintance. Even the worst of Shaw is well worth study.