‘I might almost as well have been a man … I should not have bothered you all so much then’

With Saint Joan, Shaw reached the height of his fame as a dramatist, and it was this play that led to his Nobel Prize for Literature for 1925. This powerful historical drama distils many of the ideas Shaw had been exploring in earlier works on the subjects of politics, religion, feminism and creative evolution. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc, but unhappy with the way she had traditionally been depicted, Shaw wanted to remove ‘the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition’. He presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, naive, foolhardy and brave – a rebel and a woman for his time – and ours.

This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. This volume includes Shaw’s Preface of 1924 and the cast list of the first production of Saint Joan.

THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY MAJOR BARBARA INTRODUCED BY MARGERY MORGAN

'The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty...our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor'

Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire armaments dealer, loves money and despises poverty. His energetic daughter Barbara, on the other hand, shows her love for the poor by working as a Major in the Salvation Army. She sees her father as just another soul to be saved. But when the Salvation Army needs funds to keep going, it is Undershaft who saves the day. Is the Army right to accept money that has been obtained by 'Death and Destruction'? Barbara is forced to question her philanthropic motives, and what she discovers tells her something new about the world and its ways.

Fully of lively comedy and sparkling debate, Major Barbara is also one of Shaw's most powerful and forward-looking plays. As Margery Morgan says, while Shaw was responding to 'a material and cultural situation that is now part of history', his work still has relevance 'in a period when new technologies drive the globalisation of trade and the migration of populations...and ancient forms of brutality and carnage have re-appeared.'

INTRODUCED BY DAVID EDGAR 'I had no taste for what is called popular art, no respect for popular morality, no belief in popular religion, no admiration for popular heroics' With Plays Unpleasant, therefore, Shaw broke all the rules governing how a playwright should entertain his audience. In Widower's Houses, Harry Trench is engaged to brisk Blanche Sartorius. When he realizes that her father is a slum landlord, Harry questions whether he and Blanche have a future together. Charismatic Leonard Charteris is the philanderer who proposes marriage to Grace, while still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven. But Julia is not inclined to surrender him so easily. In Mrs Warren's Profession, Vivie discovers that her mother's immoral earnings have paid for her genteel upbringing. Will she be able to accept her mother for herself?

These plays, as David Edgar says, deal with 'the conflict between youthful ideals and economics realities, the drawbacks of promiscuity and the perils of matrimony, the duties of women to others and themselves, the necessity for and the costs of revolt. What could be more eternal than that?'

The definitive text under the editorial supervision by Dan H. Laurence

'You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued ... Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey.'

John Tanner is horrified to discover that he is the object of Ann Whitefield's ambitions in her search for a satisfactory husband. For Tanner, political pamphleteer and independent mind, escape is the only option. But Ann is grimly resigned to society's expectations and ready for the chase.

In this caustic satire on romantic conventions, Shaw casts his net wide across European culture to draw on works by Mozart, Nietzsche and Conan Doyle for his re-telling of the Don Juan myth. As Stanley Weintraub comments, it was Shaw's ability to combine popular comedy with intellectual seriousness that made Man and Superman 'the first great twentieth-century English play', and one that remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes.

The definitive text under the editorial supervision of

While some of Shaw's earlier plays are still performed, his later plays, such as the ones in this volume, are barely known. As the collective title indicates, the themes here are political; yet, frankly, it is doubtful how seriously we can now take Shaw as a political thinker. Despite writing in the 1930s, he has little to say of the nature of totalitarianism: although he satirises Fascist dictators in "Geneva", the satire is disappointingly mild. Neither did Shaw appear to foresee (on the evidence of these plays, at least) the imminent collapse of the British Empire.But it is Shaw the dramatist rather than Shaw the political philosopher who still holds our attention - even in plays as explicitly political as these. He had a sharp intellect and a quirky sense of humour, and his dialogue still glints and sparkles: he couldn't write a dull line if he tried. No matter how serious the themes he addresses, the crispness of his writing and his lightness of touch still scintillate.Shaw seems, perhaps unfairly, out of fashion nowadays. But even in these lesser-known works, he demonstrates his matchless ability, still undimmed, to provoke and to entertain.

‘Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak … Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms’

One of Bernard Shaw’s most glittering comedies, Arms and the Man is also 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. Bernard Shaw mocks self-deluding idealism in Candida when the foolish young poet Marchbanks 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’, and You Never Can Tell is an exuberant farce, which turns on the chance reunion of a divided family.

While Plays Pleasant were intended by Shaw to be gentler comedies than those in their companion volume Plays Unpleasant, their prophetic satire is still sharp and provocative today. As W. J. McCormack writes, ‘There is amusement but also unease. His wit unsettles us’.

The definitive text, under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence

'Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it believed in cruelty.' Into the eccentric household of Captain Shotover and his daughter Hesione comes Ellie Dunn, a young woman ready to marry for money rather than love. Hesione protests vigorously, but her rakish husband, Hector, snobbish sister, Ariadne, and the wealthy industrialist Boss Mangan have also joined the house-party and opinion becomes divided on the matter. Should financial concerns take priority over romantic ones, or should we hold on to our ideals, regardless of the consequences?

Written between 1916 and 1917, this play is Shaw's indictment of the generation responsible for the First World War. As David Hare writes, 'Heartbreak House remains not just, alongside Pygmalion, Shaw's most likeable and profound play, but also a work which has extraordinary historic importance ... it is the [twentieth] century's original state-of-England play.'

The definitive text, under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence