Selected Short Plays (Shaw Library)

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.

Includes the following works: Passion, Poison, and Retrifaction; Dark Lady of the Sonnets; The Music Cure; The Inca of Perusalem; Augustus Does His Bit; Village Wooing; Cymbeline Refinished; How He Lied to Her Husband; Annajanaska; The Bolshevik Empress; The Six of Calais; The Glimpse of Reality; Overruled; and Great Catherine O'Flaherty, V.C.;