Dan H. Laurence Libros

????Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own. This is the definitive text produced under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence, with an illuminating introduction by Nicholas Grene, discussing the language and politics of the play. Also included in this volume is Shaw's preface, as well as his 'sequel' written for the first publication in 1916, to rebut public demand for a more conventionally romantic ending.

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.