Themes and Form of the plays by George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw’s plays are thematically diverse. He wove threads of humour and
romance between analyses of contemporary hypocrisies and social tensions. About the
beginning of the 20th century, Shaw began affixing lengthy prefaces to his plays that engaged
more deeply with their philosophical foundations. Shaw seems to have been always
determined to avoid tragedy. In writing style ,George Bernard Shaw always used his work to
make staunch social commentary. He was a Fabian socialist and sought to draw awareness to
important social problems. His work is often comedic and clever, which he was careful to do as
a way to sneak his message into an entertaining and enthralling expression. He continuously
engages his audience intellectually and provides stimulating dialogue and plot lines. They are
also heavy with monologues and the characters often engage with each other in intellectual
debates. He seeks, not just to entertain, but to educate while doing so.

Shaw wrote many plays in his life time. Shaw’s comedic masterpiece, and certainly his
funniest and most popular play, is Pygmalion (performed 1913). It was claimed by Shaw to be a
didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the
play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about the training
Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the
repercussions of the experiment’s success. The scene in which Eliza Doolittle appears in high
society when she has acquired a correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is one of
the funniest in English drama.

Shaw continued, through high comedy, to explore religious consciousness and to point
out society’s complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara (performed 1905), Shaw has his
heroine, a major in the Salvation Army, discover that her estranged father, a munitions
manufacturer, may be a dealer in death but that his principles and practice, however
unorthodox, are religious in the highest sense, while those of the Salvation Army require the
hypocrisies of often-false public confession and the donations of the distillers and the armoires
against which it inveighs. In The Doctor’s Dilemma (performed 1906), Shaw produced a satire
upon the medical profession (representing the self-protection of professions in general) and
upon both the artistic temperament and the public’s inability to separate it from the artist’s
achievement. In Androcles and the Lion (performed 1912), Shaw dealt with true and false
religious exaltation in a philosophical play about early Christianity.

Shaw reached against “the well-made” conventional play that held the stage at the time,
and rejected the Aristotelian dictum of the primacy of plot. Yet, “Arms and the Man
(performed 1894)” is a well-made play with much in it that is conventional. It may be a “drama
of ideas”, but it is also a masterpiece from the purely theatrical point of view. George Bernard
Shaw was himself a pacifist and Arms and the Man is one of several anti-war plays he wrote
over his long career. The main literary device Shaw uses to evoke this theme and support his
anti-war position is satire, ridiculing the ways people are misled into supporting wars. The
concept of appearance versus reality fully supports the main theme of realism versus idealism
in this play. It is particularly significant because it is as relevant today as it was when the play
was first performed in the 1890s. Its central theme, examined through a group of early
Christians condemned to the arena, is that one must have something worth dying for an end
outside oneself in order to make life worth living. Arms and the Man has a Balkan setting and
makes lighthearted, though sometimes mordant, fun of romantic falsifications of both love and
warfare. As with many of Shaw’s works, the play is, within limits, a drama of ideas, but the
vehicle by which these are presented is essentially one of high comedy.

“Arms and the Man” , is a play of idea, unlike traditional theatre. There is enough action in
it but this action is internal rather than external indicated by the clever verbal-exchanges
between characters. The chief source of interest lies in the way in which psychological change is
induced in Riana and her romantic ideals are punctured. Mentally she moves down to the level
of Bluntschli. The play is of psychological interest and theatrically effective arising form its
melodramatic opening and its numerous intriguing and farcical situations. It is a successful
stage-play and an effective “drama of ideals”. It makes the readers laugh and think. In short,
the play has a natural and happy development with numerous little surprises to keep up the
interest of the audience.

Conclusion:

George Bernard Shaw is and will forever remain an easily recognizable and undeniably
prolific writer in contemporary literature. He tailored his style in a way that would let him
present and spread his message about social problems that concerned him while keeping the
audience interested and entertained. His work was uses as an educational tool to raise
awareness about pressing concerns in society and he serves as an example for writers and
socialists.