Shaws play "Saint Joan" is a hommage to 15th-century French military figure Joan of Arc. It was premiered in 1923, three years after her canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, and reflects Shaws belief that the people involved in Joans trial acted according to what they thought was right. It is widely considered as Shaws only tragedy.
Soldiering, my dear madam, is the cowards art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harms way when you are weak Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms One of Bernard Shaws 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
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.
With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences' complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. His first play, Widowers' Houses, depicts Harry Trench's dilemma on learning that the inheritance of his fiancee comes from her father's income as a slum landlord. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while he is still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven - who is not inclined to give him up so easily. And in Mrs Warren's Profession, Vivie Warren is forced to reconsider her own future when she discovers that her mother's immoral earnings funded her genteel upbringing.
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.
