The plays of Bernard Shaw span many years and cover many topics. While many of Shaw's works are entertaining as well as enlightening, the plays in this volume (written very early in his career) tackle complex issues that concern society. These plays force us to critically view how success in the world is judged. They demonstrate how any of us may unknowingly be an accomplice to or a participant in activities to which we stringently object on a moral basis. This is pertinent in society today! The works in this volume open our eyes. . .and we may not like what we see. In summary, the plays in this volume are important, although they will hopefully make the reader feel somewhat uncomfortable. A well planned anthology of Shaw's work should be part of any college education

Shaw's last, and in my opinion, best satire, An Unsocial Socialist is a wonderful book that is sadly not well known. The plot is pulls you in and the book spawned an equally great play, "Smash". I couldn't put it down until I finished it.

Community Playhouse in Long Beach did the show this August. As it played, the plot didn't come through, but the wit of Shaw did. The playhouse didn't have the costumes of the military men, nor the actors to carry-off the pomp and bravado of these would-be heroes. In a time when G.W. Bush is fighting his own phantasmic enemies this play should have lapooned the whole spectre of military madness. George Bernard Shaw gave us the theme it will take some imagination and talent to make it contemporary and equal to the madness of our times. Anon

George Bernard Shaw takes the title for this play from the opening life of Virgil's epic poem the "Aeneid," which begins "Of arms and the man I sing." Virgil glorified war and the heroic feats of Aeneas on the battlefield. However, Shaw's purpose in this play is to attack the romantic notion of war by presenting a more realistic depiction of war, devoid of the idea that such death and destruction speaks to nobility. Still, "Arms and the Man" is not an anti-war drama, but rather a satirical assault on those who would glorify the horrors or war.

Shaw develops an ironic contrast between two central characters. The play begins with accounts of the glorious exploits of Major Sergius Saranoff, a handsome young Bulgarian officer, in a daring cavalry raid, which turned the war in favor of the Bulgarians over the Serbs. In contrast, Captain Bluntschil, a professional soldier from Switzerland, acts like a coward. He climbs up to a balcony to escape capture, he threatens a woman with a gun, and he carries chocolates rather than cartridges because he claims the sweets are more useful on the battlefield.

In the eyes of Raina Petkoff, the young romantic idealist who has bought into the stories of battlefield heroism, Saranoff is her ideal hero. However, as the play proceeds, we learn more about this raid and that despite its success, it was a suicidal gesture that should have failed. Eventually Saranoff is going to end up dead if he continues to engage in such ridiculous heroics. Meanwhile, we realize that Bluntshcil has no misconceptions about the stupidity of war and that his actions have kept him alive.

"Arms and the Man" is an early play by Shaw, first performed in 1894, the same year he wrote "Mrs. Warren's Profession." The ending is rather tradition for comedies of the time, with all the confusion between the lovers finally getting cleared up and everybody paired up to live happily ever after. The choice of a young woman as the main character, who ultimately rejects her romantic ideals to live in the real world, is perhaps significant because serving in the army and going to war is not going to happen. Consequently, her views are not going to be colored by questions of courage in terms of going to war herself. I also find it interesting that this play understands the horrors of war given that it was the horrors of World War I that generally killed the romantic notion of war in Britain.

A starving, exhausted soldier running for his life bursts into a young woman's room, finds outrage, criticism, solace, chocolate creams, and unexpected love -and that's just the opening scene. This clever, witty, subtle, and surprising treat from the author of Pygmalion still holds up well more than 100 years after its writing. Shaw fashions the subjects of false ideals, heroism, romanticism, and the fake glories of war into a well-constructed farce which sustains through the very last line. Can't wait to see a new production of the play, and a great read meanwhile....

In one surviving account, Joan of Arc was quoted as saying that her judges were merely putting her on trial because they were members of the pro-English faction and therefore her "capital enemies"; unfortunately, this play tries to claim otherwise. One of Shaw's primary themes is the notion that Pierre Cauchon and Joan's other judges were acting as "sincere" defenders of the Church in their prosecution of her, a view which is contradicted by document after document as well as the above quote from Joan herself. Cauchon and his cronies are well known to historians as having been long-term supporters of the English and Burgundian factions, and the eyewitnesses said repeatedly that they prosecuted Joan out of revenge for the defeats that their side had suffered at the hands of her army, rather than out of any genuine belief that she was guilty of heresy. Cauchon even allowed her to take final communion (which was never done in the case of heretics), indicating that even he didn't truly believe the charges against her. As Shaw was aware, these charges were soundly debunked when the case was appealed after the English were finally driven from Rouen in 1449; and the arguments put forward in this ruling have been confirmed as accurate by experts in medieval theology and canon law, whereas Cauchon's arguments can easily be refuted by consulting medieval theological works - his arguments are, at best, merely distortions of what the medieval Church actually taught. Here are some specific examples which factored prominently in Shaw's play:
- Shaw, like Cauchon, claimed that Joan was guilty of heresy for wearing male clothing allegedly as a personal preference, despite the fact that both of these men were aware of her own statements to the contrary. She was quoted as saying that she wore soldiers' clothing (of a type which had "laces and points" by which the pants and tunic could be securely tied together) primarily to protect herself, as her guards had tried to rape her on several occasions; this reason is also given in some of the 15th century chronicles, along with similar quotes from Joan herself on the need to protect her chastity while surrounded by the men in her army. The medieval Church allowed an exemption in such cases of necessity (read St. Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica", or St. Hildegard's "Scivias", for example): the practice of so-called "cross-dressing" was only condemned if it was done as a preference. Shaw rejects all of the above based on the specious argument that the "other women" who accompanied armies in that era didn't wear such clothing, ignoring the fact that these "other women" were: 1) prostitutes, who wore provocative dresses because they were trying to encourage sexual encounters rather than the opposite; and 2) aristocratic women sometimes were given command of their family's armies in the absence of their husband or son, but these women did not bed down at night among the troops in the field, as Joan often did. Shaw chooses to ignore these circumstances.
- On a somewhat related subject, Shaw tries to portray her as a rebel against "gender norms", again ignoring her own statements and the circumstances of the era. She was quoted by one eyewitness as saying that, quote, "I would rather stay home with my poor mother and spin wool [rather than lead an army]", which hardly sounds like someone who is trying to reject traditional gender roles. When another woman, Catherine de la Rochelle, wanted to get involved, Joan told her to "go home to your husband and tend your household". At no point do we find her making any 'feminist' statements. She was given titular command of an army for the same reason other religious visionaries sometimes were given such a role in that era, not as part of a "feminist crusade".
- Shaw admits that Joan was a devout Catholic and yet claims her as "the first Protestant martyr" - in the same sentence. This seems to be a rather willful contradiction, and the claim of "Protestant tendencies" is merely based, once again, on the old business of accepting Cauchon's claims about her at face value while ignoring the circumstances. If you read the documents you will find that Joan never opposed the Church as a whole: she merely stated her objection to being tried by a panel of pro-English clergy, and repeatedly asked to be given a non-partisan group instead or to be brought before the Pope. It was a violation of Inquisitorial procedure to stack the panel of assessors with people who were pursuing a secular vendetta against the accused: what Cauchon and his cohorts were doing, as Inquisitor Brehal later pointed out during the appeal, was itself an act of heresy. The notion that the medieval Church viewed all Inquisitorial panels as "infallible" and therefore not open to question is just a stereotype, bluntly contradicted by actual medieval theological writings: St. Hildegard, in her 12th century book "Scivias", warns the clergy against judging someone in error or out of anger, as it would be the offending clergy who would be punished for it by God. Joan was perfectly within her rights, even under the rules of the medieval Church, to question her biased judges, and was declared a martyr for Catholicism by Inquisitor Brehal when her execution was declared invalid in 1456. Shaw ignores this. The claim that his play is somehow vindicated by the fact that it was "vetted" by one Catholic (out of the hundreds of millions of Catholics worldwide) is a pointless argument: there are "Catholics" who claim that Joan was having adulterous sex, and all sorts of defamatory allegations. The bottom line is: this play does little more than repeat the slander leveled at Joan by the men who cruelly put her to death, despite the work of generations of scholars to bring a more accurate picture of the issue to light.

when i read this play for my junior AP english class, i truly enjoyed it and thought that while joan is rather naive and intolerant, she is a feminist icon--rebellious and unconventional. she is portrayed as being brave, unlike the romantic fluff-chick that various publications make her out to be. while i did enjoy the informative preface, there were sections in which shaw sounded like a typical elitist male and that disappointed me very much.
all in all, i'd like to think that it was a decent play, and definitely worth reading.

Shaw was a close friend of a Benedictine Abbess, Dame Laurentia, who "vetted" his plays for fairness to the faith. This play is fun, takes lots of bites out of politicians and clergy, and says something beautiful about the imagination. This Joan is no dolt and had to be burnt at the stake. That is a complement to her faith.

Having read the criticism by another online reviewer that "Saint Joan" is misleading, I wondered if we had read the same play. So I had a look at this book and the problem is obvious: no prefaces! Shaw's plays are meant to be read with his prefaces and they shouldn't be separated. Shaw himself intentionally wrote in that mode, noting at one point, "I would give six of the plays that Shakespeare did write for one of the prefaces he ought to have written." That's a little extreme, but the point is taken, and I believe that the general reasoning is valid. Shaw's complete plays with prefaces run to six volumes or so. Take that kind of route if you can; you'll be well rewarded with edification and entertainment.

While Shaw may have been a gifted playwright, his "Saint Joan" did an enormous disservice to the subject: the view it presents of Joan of Arc conflicts with the historical evidence on nearly every point, echoing instead the propaganda of her enemies. In truth, her trial was orchestrated by the English and their clerical allies (and even Shaw admits that the Inquisition overturned the verdict in 1456, shortly after the English were finally driven out of Rouen); nor was Joan a "rebel" except in the minds of her political opponents. By dredging up this fraudulent view of La Pucelle, Shaw's play was among the first popular works to undermine the efforts of countless scholars whose research had brought a more truthful view of the issue to light.

shaw liked nietzsche, ok. as long as you are fine with that read away at MAJOR. it is the retelling and literary covering of the Ubermensch. Hilarious, I can just see the protagonist standing cross-armed throughout the majority of the text while the daught beats away . . .

This is the third volume of a three-volume collection of musical criticism by one of the most renowned English-language authors of the last 120 years. Unfortunately, he was losing his powers in the period which this volume covers, and it's not nearly as good as the first two. Might be worth having for the reprint of his short book on Wagner's Ring

I guess my only issue with the book is about the title. Can't shrinks use plain English? There's gotta be a better word than intersubjective, no?

This book is detailed and i recommend this book to the people who loves reading. I read this book 1 and a half years ago, but I liked it a little.

The book has some interesting threads from an historical point of view however after having read through the "super sleuth" story in the lead half of the book, I was somewhat disappointed by the text of the letter itself. It was too academic in my mind and less papal. But back to the detective work - ultimately I found the book to be overly ambitious (the subject doesn't warrent it) and somewhat arrogant as if the encyclical itself is above the Church and must be taken to be heavenly. In the end the work did not receive papal blessing nor was it even published at the appropriate time to evoke the appropriate ecclesial mood amidst a public rally

This is an interesting tale of an encyclical that never saw the light of day, especially because it was an encyclical against racism clearly aimed at Hitler. But the authors misintepret the document's import.

They act as if this draft encyclical would have been the first time the Church denounced the Third Reich's anti-Semitism. In fact, Pius XI had solemnly condemned it in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), written in German and read from the pulpit of every German church. He also denounced it in several addresses to the College of Cardinals.

They also miss the fact that Pius XII incorporated large chunks of this encyclical into the first encyclical he published after being elected pope in 1939. As Pierre Blet shows in his fine work on the Vatican archives, Pius XII continued to hammer home the Church's opposition to anti-Semitism in many cables to papal ambassadors, authorizing them to save Jewish lives through Vatican passports, false baptismal certificates, and the granting of sanctuary in church buidlings.

The "hidden encyclical" only confirms the public words and actions of Popes Pius XI and XII against racism, especially in its Nazi guise. Oddly, however, the authors twist this evidence into something suggesting just the opposite.

The concept of this book was admirable and the text of the encyclical is intriguing but a lot of the narrative is dull and repetitive. Its a good piece of information that could have been presented in a more readable manner.