Captain Brasshound’s Conversion is pro duced. Three Plays for Puritans collects The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.

1901Strindberg’s Dance of Death is completed. The Social Revo lutionary Party, instrumental in the Bolshevik Revolution, is formed in Russia. Shaw writes about the eternal obsta cles in male-female relations in his epic Man and Superman, which he subtitles “A Comedy and a Philosophy.” He also publishes The Devil’s Disciple and sees Caesar and Cleopatra produced for the first time.
1902A private production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession is staged at the New Lyric Theatre in London.
1903Shaw publishes Man and Superman. The Admirable Bashville is produced.
1904John Bull’s Other Island premieres in London.
1905Shaw writes the play Major Barbara, through which he at tempts to communicate many of his moral and economic theories, including the need for a more fair distribution of
wealth. It is produced this year, as is Man and Superman. In New York City, Mrs. Warren’s Profession is publicly staged for the first time. Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis is published posthumously. The Sinn Fein party, dedicated to Irish in dependence, is founded in Dublin.
1906The Labour Representation Party wins twenty-nine seats and shortens its name to the Labour Party. Henrik Ibsen dies. Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, a satire on the medical profession, is produced.
1909Shaw writes The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and the one act farce Press Cuttings, both banned by the royal censor.
1910Shaw writes Misalliance, which he compares to Shake speare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
1912He publishes Misalliance, and his satire Androcles and the Lion is staged for the first time.
1913A German language version of Pygmalion, another satire Shaw wrote in 1912, premieres in Vienna.
1914With World War I imminent, Shaw publishes a polemical antiwar tract, Common Sense About the War, which provokes a popular backlash and public denouncement. Pygmalion is produced for the first time in English.
1917Dejected over the war, Shaw writes Heartbreak House.
1919Heartbreak House is published in NewYork.
1920The canonization of Joan of Arc gives Shaw the idea for a new play. Heartbreak House is produced in New York.
1921Shaw publishes five linked plays begun during the war under the title Back to Methuselah, a dramatic work that begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the year A.D. 31,920.
1923Shaw writes Saint Joan, which is produced and hailed as a masterpiece.
1924Saint Joan is published.
1925Shaw is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Saint Joan. He donates the prize money to fund an English trans lation of the works of August Strindberg.
1928Shaw publishes his nonfiction The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and writes The Apple Cart, a dra matic comedy set in the future.
1929The Apple Cart is produced.
1931Shaw visits Russia, where he meets Josef Stalin and Maxim Gorky. He completes the play Too True to Be Good, which explores how war can undermine established morals.
1932Too True to Be Good is staged for the first time.
1933An international celebrity, Shaw makes his first trip to America. On the Rocks and Village Wooing are produced.
1934Shaw writes the plays The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, The Six of Calais, and the first draft of The Millionairess dur ing a cruise to New Zealand. Simpleton is produced this year.
1938Geneva, a play that imagines a successful League of Na tions, premieres.
1939Shaw writes Good King Charles’s Golden Days, which is pro duced this year. He wins an Academy Award for the screenplay for Pygmalion, over which he exercised tight control.
1943His wife, Charlotte, dies after a long illness.
1947Shaw completes the play The Buoyant Billions.
1948The Buoyant Billions is produced in Zurich.
1949Shaw’s puppet play, Shakes Versus Shav, is produced.
1950George Bernard Shaw dies on November 2 from compli cations related to a fall from a ladder. He bequeaths funds for a competition to create a new English alphabet based on phonetics rather than Roman letters. The competition, won in 1958 by Kingsley Read, results in the Shavian al phabet.

INTRODUCTION

In one of Katharine Hepburn’s early films, Morning Glory (from a 1933 play by Zoe Akins), Hepburn plays a self-confident, self-reliant, fearless, and outspoken young woman, ambitious to become a great actress in New York—in short, Hepburn plays herself. In the film, in an exchange with a producer (played by the ever-dapper Adolphe Menjou), Hepburn explains that she has done several major roles back home in her local Vermont theater company, including a role “in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell.” Menjou then asks, “Bernard Shaw?” and she replies, “The one and only.” They continue:

“You think Shaw’s clever?”

“He’s the greatest living dramatist.”

“You really think so?”

“I know it.”

She goes on to explain that she once wrote to Shaw and received a reply (which she carries with her), and that she will always have a Shaw play in her repertoire “as long as I remain in the theater.” The version of herself Hepburn plays here amounts to a version of the headstrong Shavian heroine. In the real theater world, Hepburn played the title role in one of Shaw’s late but not-quite-great plays, The Millionairess, in a New York and London production (1952). Some twelve years earlier, when she was starring in the film The Philadelphia Story, Shaw himself had suggested that she was just the sort of actress to play his millionairess. But even apart from her actual stage experience with Shaw, Hepburn, like her parents before her, was a Shavian—that is, influenced by Shaw’s ideas; full of unorthodox views, especially about religion; independent-minded; strong-willed. That was the appeal of Shaw in the 1930s, when the number of his plays that were part of the active repertory of the world’s theater—say twenty plays—was greater than that of almost any other playwright, Shakespeare, as always, excepted.

The modernists—Eliot, Joyce, Beckett—and modernism had not yet completely triumphed, so that Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf could argue about Shaw’s place in modernism, Virginia maintaining that Shaw was out of date, and Leonard asserting that if it had not been for Shaw’s work of educating the first generation of the twentieth century about everything, the modernists would have found no audience. So Shaw still could seem ahead of his time—enough ahead of his time for a most modern woman like Katharine Hepburn (and the character she played in Morning Glory) to admire him as a culture hero, an advanced thinker, and a modern playwright.

The four plays in the present volume are test cases both for Shaw’s achievement in drama and for the destinies of his headstrong heroines. The plays also give more trouble than those in Barnes & Noble Classics’s other edition of Shaw—Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, and Man and Superman— more trouble in that they have more unresolved chords than his earlier plays, and so are more difficult to understand; they reflect a Shaw troubled by the role of the artist in the world and by the world’s role in the universe. Heartbreak House, the last play in this edition, was written during World War I; it expresses Shaw’s struggle not to be defeated by all the evidence that the Devil in Man and Superman, who argued that Man is primarily a destroyer with his heart in his weapons, was right after all.