Bernard Shaw As A Romantic Drama

The important achievement of Shaw as a dramatist was to disinfect the stage of the evils of sentimental and romantic drama. Playwriting in England never flourished since the great seventeenth century. Weak and sentimental plays modelled on the romantic drama of Shakespeare were presented. They contained stock characters and stock situations. Shaw with his new drama swept these conventional sentimental pieces clean from the stage. With his new morals he breathed new life and introduced the new dramatic movement in England. Here, of course, he was indebted to the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). From Ibsen Shaw learnt the idea of writing problem plays that discussed the contemporary problems of life and society, and sought

He then set out to impose himself upon the theatre–less out of special liking for the theatre than out of a moral passion for the establishment of righteousness in social relationships. Therefore when he dragged Life into the theatre, it began at once to talk about housing conditions, religion, finance, prostitution about everything that Shaw thought to be muddled and mismanaged and pernicious.... The interval between Widowers’ Houses (1892) on the one hand and Candida (1894) and You Never Can Tell (1896) on the other, was a matter of only two or three years, but in the interval Shaw developed from a propagandist to a playwright dealing with real problems and nearly-real people. In Man and Superman (1903) he presented his philosophic idea of the Life Force–an animating spirit instilled into man with the purpose of energizing him to produce a higher type of creature, the Superman, as God’s coadjutor on earth. Faced by man’s inertia and unreadiness to co-operate in the divine plan, the Life Force is made in Man and Superman to select woman as the more willing instrument in the devisal of means for evolving the Superman. Shaw’s conception of a Life Force ran through most of the later plays, coming to fuller development in Back to Methuselah (1921), where it merged into his larger theory of Creative Evolution, signifying the idea of manmade-perfect through the conscious development of the will to be made Perfect.