Category: George Bernard Shaw

Of Man and Superman, Shaw himself said that he had written “a trumpery story of modern London life, a life in which . . . the ordinary man’s main business is to get means to keep up the position and habit of a gentleman and the ordinary woman’s business is […]

Read more Critical Essay Shaw’s Method and Technique

It is with good reason that Archibald Henderson, official biographer of his subject, entitled his work George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century. Well before his death at the age of ninety-four, this famous dramatist and critic had become an institution. Among the literate, no set of initials was more […]

Read more George Bernard Shaw Biography

The Commander of Calatrava, who has chosen to retain his sculptured form because it is more flattering to him than was his fleshly form, suggests Ramsden. But the Statue hardly views himself as an advanced thinker. Indeed, as he says, he is happy not to have to think at all: […]

Read more Character Analysis The Statue

His Satanic Majesty, who rules in his palace of pleasure, is “not at all unlike Mendoza,” although much older. His manners would seem to be perfect, but it is apparent that they are a veneer put on by one who is actually rather vulgar. When one recalls that Mendoza, the […]

Read more Character Analysis The Devil

This is Ann Whitefield some 300 years earlier and before the emergence of the pursuing woman. A faithful Catholic who had never failed to go to confession, she is appalled to find herself in Hell. She is no less shocked to learn that her father, who had been translated to […]

Read more Character Analysis Dona Ana de Ulloa

Jack Tanner’s aristocratic ancestor does indeed resemble Tanner but is not to be confused with his still earth-bound descendant. Shaw describes him as having “a more critical, fastidious, handsome face, paler and colder, without Tanner’s impetuous credulity and enthusiasm, and without a touch of his plutocratic vulgarity.” His manners are […]

Read more Character Analysis Don Juan Tenorio

The brigand-poetaster is depicted as a rather attractive man in his way. He is tall and strong, and has a fine speaking voice and a ready wit. His manners, one may reasonably assume, he learned as a waiter. “Hence my cosmopolitanism,” he explained in reference to his former occupation. Inevitably […]

Read more Character Analysis Mendoza

Malone is even more of a caricature than his son, depicted as he is as a robber-baron in the capitalistic world. It is the Fabian Shaw who comes to the fore in the dramatic characterization here. In his first reported public speech delivered in January 1885, before the Industrial Remuneration […]

Read more Character Analysis Hector Malone, Sr.

In the words of Mr. Arthur H. Nethercot (Men and Supermen, 1954), Hector is Shaw’s Manly Man. And Shaw has no more respect for him than he has for the Womanly Woman; he is an object of satire. On the credit side, Shaw tells us that he has an “engaging […]

Read more Character Analysis Hector Malone, Jr.

Since Shaw had introduced the New Woman into British drama, it is not surprising that he did the same thing for the New Man. Enry Straker is the characteristic phenomenon of the New Age; he is the efficient mechanic, the product of the new technological education which ultimately will eliminate […]

Read more Character Analysis Henry Straker