George Bernard Shaw

From the book:Mrs Warren's Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the triumphant amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions of ten years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave days remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck, exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me because I "cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it". Truly my play must be more needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.

"A play by George Bernard Shaw. It was written at the request of William Butler Yeats for the Irish Literary Theatre, the group that later became the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. As might be expected, the play deals with the conflict between the Irish and the English over home rule. The preface, written after the play, is strictly political, but the drama is subtle, having neither hero nor villain. The Irishman, Larry Doyle, is sensitive, imaginative, and more mature than his English friend, Tom Broadbent. Broadbent's life is more straightforward, simpler than Doyle's; he is practical, adaptable, less bothered by thinking and feeling. "The conflict between the two men is in their characteristics, not their personalities. By the end of the play, Tom has assumed all of Larry's ties with his birthplace in ireland: his girlfriend, his Parliamentary candidacy, even control of his property. This happens, not through conniving - - Tom is too honest - - but through Larry's reticence and Tom's blunt ambition." - - Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia - Fourth Edition

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. PROLOGUE: LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. Sonnet---To Science (1829) / Edgar Allan Poe The Belfast Address (1874) / John Tyndall From Science and Culture (1880) / Thomas Henry Huxley Literature and Science (1882) / Matthew Arnold MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY. Mathematics. Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843) / Ada Lovelace From Formal Logic (1847) / Augustus De Morgan From An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) / George Boole From The Logic of Chance (1866) / John Venn From Through the Looking-Glass (1871) From The Game of Logic (1886) / Lewis Carroll From Daniel Deronda (1876) / George Eliot From The Time Machine (1895) / H.G. Wells Physical Science. From On the Power of Penetrating into Space by Telescopes (1800) / Sir William Herschel From Past and Present (1843) / Thomas Carayle From Outlines of Astronomy (1849) / Sir John Herschell From Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839-55) (1852) / Michael Faraday On the Age of the Sun's Heat (1862) / William Thomson, Lord Kelvin On Chemical Rays, and the Light of the Sky (1869) On the Scientific Use of the Imagination (1870) / John Tyndall From Theory of Heat (1871) To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode (1874) Professor Tait, Loquitur (1877) Answer to Tait To Hermann Stoffkraft (1878) / James Clerk Maxwell The Sorting Demon of Maxwell (1879) / William Thomson, Lord Kelvin From Two on a Tower (1882) / Thomas Hardy The Photographic Eyes of Science (1883) / Richard A. Proctor On a New Kind of Rays (1895) / Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen Telcommunications. Letter to Hon. Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the US Treasury, 27 September 1837 / Samuel F.B. Morse The Telephone from Westminster Review (1878) / Anonymous Mental Telegraphy (1891) / Mark Twain The Deep-Sea Cables (1896) / Rudyard Kipling In the Cage (1898) / Henry James Bodies and Machines. From On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) / Charles Babbage From Dombey and Son (1847-8) / Charles Dickens On the Conservation of Force (1847) / Hermann Von Helmholtz From Erewhon (1872) / Samuel Butler To a Locomotive in Winter (1876) / Walt Whitman SCIENCES OF THE BODY. Animal Electricity. From De Viribus Electricitatis (1791) / Luigi Galvani From Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1802) / Sir Humphrey Davy From Frankenstein (1818) / Mary Shelley I Sing the Body Electric (1867) / Walt Whitman Cells and Tissues and Their Relation to the Body. From General Anatomy (1801) / Xavier Bichat From Cellular Pathology (1858) / Rudolf Virchow From Middlemarch (1871-2) / George Eliot From the Physical Basis of Mind (1877) / George Henry Lewes Hygiene, Germ Theory, and Infectious Diseases. From The Last Man (1826) / Mary Shelley An Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) / Sir Edwin Chadwick [The Mask of the Red Death]( (1842) / Edgar Allan Poe The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever (1843) / Oliver Wendall Holmes On the Organized Bodies Which Exist in the Atmosphere (1861) / Louis Pasteur Illustrations of the Antiseptic System (1867) / Sir Joseph Lister Dr Koch on the Cholera (1884) / Anonymous The Stolen Bacillus (1895) / H.G. Wells Experimental Medicine and Vivisection. From An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) / Claude Bernard Vivisection: Its Pains and Its Uses (1881) / Sir James Paget Vivisection and Its Two-Faced Advocates (1882) / Frances Power Cobbe From Heart and Science (1883) / Wilkie Collins From The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) / H.G. Wells EVOLUTION. The Present and the Past. From Zoological Philosophy (1809) / Jean Baptiste De Lamarck From Principles of Geology (1830-3) / Sir Charles Lyell From Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) / William Whewell From The Princess (1847) / Alfred, Lord Tennyson From The Origin of Species (1859) / Charles Darwin From The Mill on the Floss (1860) / George Eliot On the Physical Basis of Life (1869) / Thomas Henry Huxley From The Story of an African Farm (1883) / Olive Schreiner From Mental Evolution in Man (1888) / George John Romanes The Individual and the Species. From In Memoriam, LIII-LV, CXVIII (1850) / Alfred, Lord Tennyson From Principles of Biology (1864-7) / Herbert Spencer Hap (1866) From A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) / Thomas Hardy From The Evolution of Man (1874) / Ernst Haeckel From Unconscious Memory (1880) / Samuel Butler Evolution (1880) To Nature / Emily Pfeiffer From Essays on Heredity (1881-5) / August Weismann Lay of the Trilobite (1885) / May Kendall Nature is a Heraclitean Fire (1888) / Gerard Manley Hopkins Sexual Selection. From Pride and Prejudice (1813) / Jane Austen From The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) / Charles Darwin From She (1887) / Henry Rider Haggard Natural Selection (1887) / Constance Naden From Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) / Thomas Hardy SCIENCES OF THE MIND. The Relationship between Mind and Body. From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) / Thomas De Quincey On the Reflex Function (1833) / Marshall Hall From A Treatise on Insanity (1835) / James Cowles Prichard [The Birthmark]( (1846) / Nathaniel Hawthorne From [bartleby the Scrivener]( (1856) / Herman Melville From Mind and Brain (1860) / Thomas Laycock From Lady Audley's Secret (1862) / Mary Elizabeth Braddon The Case of George Dedlow (1866) / S. Weir Mitchell From Body and Mind (1870) / Henry Maudsley From Principles of Mental Physiology (1874) / William B. Carpenter From Principles of Psychology (1890) / William James Physiognomy and Phrenology. From Elements of Phrenology (1824) / George Combe From Phrenology in Connection with the Study of Physiognomy (1826) / Johann Gaspar Spurzheim From Jane Eyre (1847) / Charlotte Brontë From The Lifted Veil (1859) / Geroge Eliot Mesmerism and Magnetism. From Facts in Mesmerism (1840) / Chauncey Hare Townsend From Surgical Operations without Pain in the Mesmeric State (1843) / John Elliotson [Mesmeric Revelation]( (1844) / Edgar Allan Poe From Letters on Mesmerism (1845) / Harriet Martineau From Mesmerism in India (1847) / James Esdaile Mesmerism (1855) / Robert Browning From The Moonstone (1868) / Wilkie Collins Dreams and the Unconscious. When Thou Sleepest (1837) / Charlotte Brontë Unconscious Cerebration: A Psychological Study (1871) / Frances Power Cobbe From The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) / Robert Louis Stevenson Address to the German Chemical Society (1890) / August Kenkule Nervous Exhaustion. From Elsie Venner (1861) / Oliver Wendell Holmes From Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked (1872) / S. Weir Mitchell The Yellow Wall-Paper (1892) / Charlotte Perkins Gilman SOCIAL SCIENCES. Creating the Social Sciences. From Panopticon (1791) From Manual of Political Economy (1793) / Jeremy Bentham From An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) / Thomas Malthus From A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (1832) / J.R. M'Culloch From Bleak House (1852-3) / Charles Dickens From Positive Philosophy (1853) / Auguste Comte From Hard Times (1854) / Charles Dickens From Utilitarianism (1861) / John Stuart Mill From Jude the Obscure (1895) / Thomas Hardy Race Science. From The Races of Men (1850) / Robert Knox From Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) / Sir Francis Galton [The Yellow Face]( (1894) / Arthur Conan Doyle Urban Poverty. From The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) / Friedrich Engels From London Labour and the London Poor (1851) / Henry Mayhew From North and South (1855) / Elizabeth Gaskell East London (1867) West London / Matthew Arnold Autobiography of a Thief in Thieves' Language (1879) / J.W. Horsley From Mrs Warren's Profession (1898) / George Bernard Shaw From East London (1899) / Walter Besant Degeneration. From The Criminal Man (1876) / Cesare Lombroso From The Nether World (1889) / George Gissing From The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) / Oscar Wilde From Degeneration (1892) / Max Nordau From The Heavenly Twins (1893) / Sarah Grand From Dracula (1897) / Bram Stoker EPILOGUE: SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. Prose and Verse (1857) / Sir John Herschel

From the moment the fourteen-year-old Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst agreed to marry the heir to the Russian throne, she was mired in a quicksand of intrigue. Precociously intelligent, self-confident, and attractive but with a stubborn, wayward streak, Sophia withstood a degree of emotional battering that would have broken a weaker spirit until at last she emerged, triumphant over her many enemies, as Empress Catherine II of Russia. Her achievements as empress were prodigious. She brought vast new lands under Russian rule. She raised the prestige of Russia in Europe. She began the process of imposing legal and political order on the chaos she inherited from her predecessors. Yet few historical figures have been so enthusiastically vilified as Catherine the Great. Whispers that she had ordered her husband's murder grew to murmurs that she was an immoral woman and finally to shouts that she was a depraved, lust-crazed nymphomaniac. With deft mastery of historical narrative and an unsurpassed ability to make the past live again, Carolly Erickson uncovers the real woman behind the tarnished image—an indomitable, feisty, often visionary ruler who, in an age of caveats and constraints, blithely went her own way. Great Catherine reveals the complexities of this great ruler's nature, her craving for love, her insecurities, the inevitable sorrows and disappointments of a strong empress who dared not share her power with any man yet longed to be led and guided by a loving consort. Great Catherine is a fresh portrait of an infamous historical figure, one that reveals how Catherine's flawed triumph guaranteed her posthumous fame and enhanced the might and renown of Russia for generations to come. From Publishers Weekly Erickson's account details Catherine the Great's early years surrounded by court intrigue and rumor and her rise to become one of the most important rulers in the history of Russia. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review "One of the most accomplished and successful historical biographers writing in English."--Times Literary Supplement

Lady Cholmondeley certainly got more than she bargained for when she asked Bernard Shaw for "a few of [his] ideas of socialism." Bernard Shaw's sister-in-law expected a brief summary, a simple user's manual on his political and ethical beliefs. Instead in 1928 she was presented with a great tome that encompasses the meaning of life and just about everything, from marriage and children's upbringing to how to run industry. What she got was one of the great, passionate and indignant expositions of how social injustice destroys human lives. - foreword by Polly Toynbee

Cort Theatre, The Theatre Guild presents Uta Hagen in Margaret Webster's production of Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan," with John Buckmaster, Andrew Cruickshank, Alexander Scourby, Robert Pastene, Frederic Worlock, directed by Miss Webster, scenery designed by Richard Harrison Senie, costumes designed by Elinor Robbins, original score by Lehman Engel, production under the supervision of Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner.

A collection of essays on Shaw's artistry in using the drama to project his intense social and political convictions.

Published in 1919, Heartbreak House is an examination of the failings of the European leisure classes before World War I—failings that author George Bernard Shaw blamed for the war, and that he predicted would quickly lead to another, longer war. The play is set in an English country house, where representatives of every type of English society have gathered at the home of the seemingly-mad Captain Shotover. Hidebound aristocrats and cultured bohemians, wealthy capitalists and radical idealists, prim moralists and idle libertines, are all laid bare in one of Shaw’s bleakest and yet most absurd plays.

A retelling of the consequences following the meeting of Androcles, the slave, with a wounded lion in the forest.