This compendium summarizes the prefatory essay (“The Author’s Apology”) and the four-act play Mrs Warren’s Profession as presented in the supplied text.

Context and polemic
George Bernard Shaw wrote the prefatory Apology to explain both the theatrical history of Mrs Warren’s Profession (suppressed for years and performed only after an eight‑year delay) and the moral and political purpose of the play. Shaw delights in the public uproar it provoked among theatre critics and denunciations that confuse dramatic representation with real life. He insists that the play is not an invitation to vice but a deliberate “problem play”: theatre used as moral and social argument. Its purpose, he argues, is to force audiences to take their consciences to the playhouse and to confront social causes of vice—most notably poverty and the economic absence of decent options for women—rather than to scapegoat individual prostitutes.

Critique of censorship and hypocrisy
Shaw gives a sustained, tightly reasoned attack on the Lord Chamberlain’s Censorship and on the press which supports a double standard: sensationalized depictions of illicit sex that titillate are licensed, while earnest, problem‑driven depictions that expose social causes are suppressed. He supplies striking anecdotal contrasts—plots licensed which make rape or simulated assault an accepted device, while plays that would show the repulsiveness and consequences of venereal disease or exploitation are barred. Shaw contends censorship inevitably filters out original, epoch‑making work and protects conventional, complacent art; he proposes instead accountability through public regulation (analogous to the County Council control that improved music‑hall standards), and trusts audiences and market discipline to penalize genuinely offensive enterprise.

Dramatic content—characters and plot
The play itself is domestic and naturalistic. Principal characters: Mrs Kitty Warren (middle‑aged, self‑made, managing mistress of a profitable continental hotel/house‑of‑commerce), her daughter Vivie (22, Cambridge‑educated, practical, determined to earn her own living), Sir George Crofts (a coarse, wealthy associate), Mr Praed (a genial artist), Frank Gardner (a frivolous young suitor), and the Rev. Samuel Gardner (Frank’s obtuse father). Over four acts Shaw stages: first acquaintance at the Surrey cottage; Vivie’s insistence on professional independence; social interplay and flirtations with Frank and Crofts; Crofts’ disclosure of Kitty’s continuing commercial involvement and his own expectation of marriage to Vivie; the climactic mother‑daughter confrontation in Chancery Lane where Vivie, informed and implacable, rejects both her mother’s profession and her mother’s claim on her life; and Vivie’s resolution to support herself in law.

Significance and method
Shaw’s work exemplifies his thesis: drama as moral instrument—cold, logical, and unromantic—capable of displacing sentimental myths. Mrs Warren’s Profession indicts a society that offers working‑class women only two kinds of immorality (starvation and sexual commerce) and challenges readers and spectators to confront institutional responsibility rather than moralistic outrage at individuals.