“I am no longer a soldier. Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong and keeping out of harms’ way when you are weak…”
One of George Bernard Shaw’s most interesting works, Arms and the Man blends social satire with intriguing philosophy. Like his other works, Shaw questions conventional values and uses war and love as his satirical targets.
Any notions of the romance of war go out the window the minute a soldier climbs through one of your bedroom windows while fleeing a battle's bloodthirsty victors.
This is early Shaw, written before he assumed the mantel of Britain’s Supreme Deflator.
All he’s after here is Romanticism—and its stranglehold on popular entertainment.
His antidote to these potholes of illusion is a skeptical realism that clears the atmosphere like rain in a drought, demonstrating what surprises an old frame can bring to a new picture.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950) has been called the greatest British dramatist after Shakespeare, a satirist equal to Jonathan Swift, and a playwright whose most profound gift was his ability to make audiences think by provoking them to laughter. Author of hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, fifty-three plays, and numerous books, he is best known for Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1913), Heartbreak House (1919), and Saint Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
