Dan H. Laurence was an English Professor and a literary and dramatic advisor to the Estate of George Bernard Shaw. As a scholar of Shaw, Laurence dedicated his career to compiling Shaw's works and authoring books about him. His commitment to studying Shaw was so profound that he left a professorship at New York University to be near a significant Shaw archive. His scholarly endeavors illuminate the enduring legacy of this pivotal playwright.
“You see this creature with her kerbstone English… Well sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess…” So begins Henry Higgins’ linguistic project to transform Eliza Dolittle’s speech. But he hadn’t bargained on Eliza’s feisty character or falling in love with her…
In each of these fifteen short plays, Bernard Shaw displays an immense skill in achieving an immediate dramatic impact - a skill that he recognized as being greatly dependent on the talent of the actors and actresses with whom he worked. Though some of the sketches are slight, others offer short but intense scrutinies of the morality and sensibility of the age. Together they demonstrate a range of moods - comedy, satire, farce and social protest - through which the more familiar Shavian themes emerge, among them the inadequacies of the contemporary government and the "inflated" reputation enjoyed by Shakespeare.
'A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth' After the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the joint ward of two men: the respectable Roebuck Ramsden and John Tanner, author of 'The Revolutionist's Handbook'. Believing marriage would prevent him from achieving his higher intellectual and political ambitions, Tanner is horrified to discover that Ann intends to marry him, and flees to Spain with the determined young woman in hot pursuit. The chase even leads them to the underworld, where the characters' alter egos discuss questions of human nature and philosophy in a lively debate in a scene often performed separately as 'Don Juan in Hell'. In Man and Superman, Shaw combined seriousness with comedy to create a satirical and buoyant exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes. This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. This volume includes Shaw's Preface of 1903 and his appendix, 'The Revolutionist's Handbook', the cast list from the first production of Man and Superman and a list of his principal works.