Bernard Shaw

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Shaw’s comic drama follows Androcles, a mild tailor who removes a thorn from a lion and later tames it, alongside a band of Christian prisoners (notably Lavinia, Ferrovius, and the debauched Spintho) paraded for execution in the Roman arena. In the Coliseum Spintho is eaten, Ferrovius—overcome by martial fury—slays several gladiators, and Androcles’ rapport with the lion forces a sudden reversal of imperial attitudes. Shaw frames the episode as allegory and polemic: persecutions serve opportunistic elites, exposing popular cruelty, clerical opportunism and the seductions of militarism.

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In a north‑east London parsonage the energetic Christian‑Socialist clergyman James Morell, his wife Candida and their household are upset when the shy young poet Eugene Marchbanks falls passionately in love with Candida.
Marchbanks denounces Morell’s preaching as hollow, Morell grows jealous and demands that Candida choose between them.
Candida declares she will give herself to “the weaker of the two”; Morell accepts and Eugene departs, restoring the household though leaving its relations altered.

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A five‑act drama (with prefatory notes) portraying Julius Caesar’s arrival in Egypt, his rescue and political shaping of the young Cleopatra amid palace intrigue, military clashes and assassinations, and his pragmatic, ambiguous exercise of power before departing and arranging Mark Antony’s role. The author’s appended commentary discusses historical anachronisms, sketches principal characters (Cleopatra, Britannus, Caesar) and foregrounds themes of authority, art, progress and the moral paradoxes of greatness.

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The author explains that Great Catherine is a theatrical farce, not a sober historical portrait, written to showcase actors (especially Miss Gertrude Kingston) and the reciprocal art of playwright and performer.
In the opening scenes the drunken, grotesque Prince Patiomkin parades the English Captain Edstaston before Empress Catherine, whose amused, flirtatious handling of him produces comic misunderstandings, mock‑torture and courtly absurdities.
National manners, jealous lovers and satiric wit culminate in Catherine's capricious favor and a final note of ironic sentiment as she turns back to her museum plans.

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Preface: Heartbreak House is Shaw’s diagnosis of cultured, leisured Europe—an idle, hypochondriacal class detached from political power whose neglect, false doctrines, and moral vacuity helped precipitate catastrophic war.
The play dramatizes that microcosm through eccentric household figures (Shotover, Hesione, Lady Utterword, Ellie Dunn, Mangan, Hector, Mazzini) whose vanity, hypocrisy and tangled love‑for‑money bargains expose personal and civic bankruptcy.
A nocturnal assault, a bungled burglary and symbolic explosions underscore the fragility of civility and insist that shirking political responsibility yields ruin.

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Preface: Shaw recounts the playlet's composition for Arnold Daly (1905), defends Mrs Warren's Profession against press censorship, and indicts the social and commercial hypocrisy that attacks plays exposing prostitution. Play: a comic drawing-room farce in which a young poet's love-poems to a married woman (Aurora) are found, leading to confrontations, lies and a theatrical confession that ends in reconciliation and the ironic title How He Lied to Her Husband.

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Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire maker of arms, returns and reignites a family dispute over money, succession and the Undershaft tradition.
Barbara, a Major in the Salvation Army, is torn when Undershaft’s cheque saves the shelter but compromises its principles, and Professor Cusins—hoping to marry her—accepts a post in the firm.
The drama pits money, power and pragmatic paternalism against religion and conscience: Stephen rejects the business for politics while Lady Britomart recoils and Barbara resolves to work within her father's world.

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Ann faints after declaring she will marry Jack; the men fuss, Straker and Mendoza insist on fresh air (brandy is rejected), and Ann quickly revives. Tanner, brusque and self-deprecating, insists he is not happy despite the engagement, announces a modest, legally simple wedding and that any gifts will be sold to fund distribution of the Revolutionist's Handbook, provoking universal laughter.

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Shaw defends Mrs Warren’s Profession and attacks theatrical censorship, arguing the stage must expose social causes of vice rather than pander to sentimental or sensational portrayals.
The play presents Mrs Warren, who rose from poverty by running brothels/hotels, and her daughter Vivie, a Cambridge‑educated woman who rejects both her mother’s trade and gilded offers, choosing independent, honest work.
Shaw indicts social hypocrisy and the compromise of art under censorship, insisting “problem” drama is the proper instrument for moral and political reform.

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Preface: a clinical critique arguing that breaches of monogamy are common but concealed by sincere hypocrisy, socially inculcated jealousy, and disproportionate penalties; honest, comic depiction of sex on stage would supply needed facts for sound moral hygiene.
Play: in the farce Overruled two married couples' mutual flirtations and confusions produce comic misunderstanding rather than catastrophe, exposing the gap between professed principles and actual conduct.

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Shaw’s preface champions phonetic reform and didactic art, citing phoneticians (especially Henry Sweet) as the inspiration for his scientist-hero.
Pygmalion dramatizes Professor Henry Higgins’s experiment in transforming Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, into a socially acceptable “lady,” thereby exposing class prejudice, the social power of speech, and the ethics of scientific intervention in a human life.
After Eliza’s public success she asserts independence (refuses Higgins), ultimately marries Freddy, and the play closes as a commentary on language, class mobility, and personal autonomy.

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Preface: the author explains why he dramatises the Dark Lady as Mary Fitton, recounts Thomas Tyler’s Fitton theory and Frank Harris’s rival portrait, and argues that Shakespeare was a socially aspirant, ironic, and persistently witty dramatist—pessimistic by temperament but not a love‑broken wreck.

Play: a comic Whitehall nocturne in which Shakespeare, the Dark Lady and Queen Elizabeth clash over jealousy, rank and art, ending with Shakespeare’s plea for a publicly endowed National Theatre and the parties parting under ambiguous consent.

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In 1777 Websterbridge the stern Mrs Dudgeon and her fractious family quarrel over Timothy Dudgeon’s death and a surprising new will. The rebellious, witty Richard—the self‑styled “Devil’s Disciple”—returns, protects his uncle’s illegitimate child Essie and is arrested after assuming the minister’s identity. At the gallows Anderson arrives with a militia safe‑conduct, stopping the execution and exposing sacrifices, loyalty and role‑reversals.

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Sir Colenso Ridgeon, famed for an opsonin test, is forced by limited resources into choosing which consumptive patients to treat, amid rival doctors, professional vanity and domestic entreaties.
His decision lets the artist Louis Dubedat be treated by others and die—an outcome tinged by Ridgeon’s jealous motives—exposing conflicts of medical ethics, art’s value, and personal conscience while Jennifer preserves her husband’s fame.

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Set in a fashionable English seaside hotel, the play follows the Clandons—reformist Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon and her children Gloria, Philip and Dolly—whose quiet expatriate life is disrupted when the local landlord Fergus Crampton is revealed as their estranged husband/father and the household confronts questions of parentage, respectability and custody.
Conflicts over gender, social pretence and romantic responsibility intensify as the penniless dentist Valentine courts Gloria and as solicitor McComas and the interventionist Bohun advise on legal and practical settlements.
Resolution is pragmatic and comic: counsel, concessions and a negotiated reunion lead to engagements and a final festival of dancing that restores a tentative family equilibrium.