meh. Not really great at all, and the prefaces dragged on forever, unnecessarily.

I'd already read Saint Joan and Androcles and the Lion when I picked this up, cheap, to replace the softcover editions on the shelves. For the sake of completeness and because I generally like Shaw, I read Major Barbara between these covers.

While "Major Barbara" and "Androcles" are forgettable takes on religious hypocrisy and "salvationism," "Saint Joan" is a wonderful and straight account of the famous French warrior (I rank it with Candida and Man and Superman as my favorite Shaw plays). The special quality of the play is that Shaw writes it in a sincere effort to be objective and factual, thus providing human elements to the traditional "villains" of the story and also recognizing Joan's own faults.

But the real value in this book comes from the prefaces he wrote to each play, which in some cases are longer than the plays themselves and in all cases revolve around GBS's specific brand of atheo-communism. As always, I recommend reading the preface after its respective work (I'll never understand why authors feel the need to discuss major characters, plot elements and themes before you're supposed to have read the book. . . shouldn't that be in the afterword/postscript/appendix?).

Even though I didn't much care for the short and mostly trivial "Major Barbara" or "Androcles," I greatly enjoyed their prefaces. In the former, Shaw defends his position that poverty is the greatest sin of all since all others stem from it, and thus it should be the first problem addressed in any civilized society. In the preface to "Androcles," which is at least twice as long as the actual play, Shaw reviews all of the information we know about Jesus (going very thoroughly through each gospel and all of their discrepancies) and then explains in detail why he was not a divine prophet but rather a radical communist reformer. He then goes on to explain why we should take him up on his suggestions in the modern day. "Saint Joan's" preface was the least impressive of them all, which is appropriate considering the play can stand on its own. Shaw essentially talked about how he arrived to believe that Joan was as he had depicted in the play.

I don't agree with everything Shaw says even though I'm quite attracted by his intellect, wit, and clarity of thought. He's certainly not the most humble of fellows, and I understand that he was pretty well loathed in his day mainly for this reason. But it's hard to deny that the man was a first-rate freethinker and came up with not only some pretty original ideas, but also original ways in which to express them artistically. If nothing else, he had a very unique way of expressing his unique viewpoints, and it's evident even in lesser plays like "Major Barbara" and "Androcles."

Not Bad Reviews

@pointblaek

The prefaces are far better than the plays themselves.

St. Joan:-

An inspired young woman, a young country girl without education, saved France - from foreign invasion as much as from destruction and chaos - and the then powers had her not only imprisoned and tortured, but burnt alive in public, for fear they will lose their power, their straglehold over people.

Few intellectuals have either bothered - or really have had the courage - to set matters straight, down even on paper, much less pay the homage due to the young woman who seems to have had more courage than the generations of men since then.

Shaw is amongst those very few men who did not lack the courage to write about Joan of Arc.

Saint she was, and a true heroine, whether any human authorities - with any institutional power and claims to any other source of authority - say so or otherwise.

Jeanne D'Arc was as much the mother of the nation of France as was Elizabeth I of England (even Britain for that matter), and that is not a small achievement for a human. Indeed seeing the amount of obstacle one has to question if these figures were human or a higher being cloaked in human.

One wonders if anyone would have the courage to compare the two (spiritually) tall figures, who were executed by the same empire, for very similar reasons - being heroic about liberating their own people, and with claims of direct connection of their souls to higher realms - one was crucified two millennia ago in west Asia, the other burnt alive a few centuries ago in France.

Divine after all is beyond time and space and geography, empires and institutions, and most certainly beyond gender.

Sunday, September 13, 2009.
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Major Barbara: -

A delightful look at various prevalent notions and hypocrisies of the times - and realities as they are. Salvation Army, church, politics as a career, ethics of business; niceties of law that might make one illegitimate in UK or at least in England but not in Australia, much less anywhere else in the world; and inheritance vs competance, when it is about running a business.

US, particularly NRA of US (as in gun lobby) seem to have adopted the creed of one of the characters in this to an extent that poor Mr. Shaw could never have imagined - "seem to" being the key here. But on the other hand, who knows, he would perhaps have said that neither NRA of US nor he were wrong, and that any society that allows such happenings without curbing them with laws that made sense and protected children perhaps deserved the grief they allowed the arms manufacturers and dealers to let loose on them. And really US has much that is legal in US but illegal in Europe in many countries, or at least those that matter. Germany for example has outlawed any organisations or pictures to do with their past horror - but not US where those proliferate; so guns too, and the consequent stupidity of innocent persons and your own children massacred in their own homes and schools.

Gun lobby of US - and much else of the world - might claim they follow this very intelligent writer for ethics, but if you look at it with a scrutiny, actually, no they don't; they are doing precisely what the writer cautions against, that is, mixing politics and business - for example in deciding who they will or will not sell to (or allow to carry arms), whether on personal level in the country (men get license easily, women don't, even though they are far more in need of self defense, whether from personal attackers or home robbers and so on), or on global level about nations and gangs (here there is no need of examples - they are far too obvious, well known), therefore making it a mess - or at least helping politics do so.

That said, this is of course an extremely intelligent play as almost everything written by this writer is; this one deals with an arms dealer and the possible social embarrassment his family with aristocratic connections must go through - his son requires that the father help him without allowing it to be known, since he needs to have a social status - and various issues around the question, morality vs. arms manufacturer.

Monday, September 14, 2009.
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Androcles And The Lion:-

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Sunday, February 23, 2014.
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Saint Joan. Major Barbara. Androcles and the lion by Bernard Shaw (1956)