Intro: 5* A typical Shaw Essay
Widower's houses: 4* An Excellent play
The Philanderer: 3* This one requires some context and I needed to do some reading it about before I fully grasped it, it feels less contemporary than the other two.
Mrs. Warren's Profession: 5* Masterpiece

3 good plays from one of the most distinguished writers. I liked The Philanderer, Widowers' Houses and Mrs Warren's Profession- in that order.

Plays Unpleasant (1898) by Bernard Shaw

Penguin Project 08: #561

Widowers' Houses (1892)

After reading Shaw's preface to these three plays I was slightly concerned that the socio-political language and contextual understanding seemingly required were going to render the plays themselves unreadable to me, however from the first scene of Widowers' Houses I felt in quite safe hands with his character writing. A good introduction to his views with the focus being on slum landlord Mr. Sartorius and his daughter Blanche, who abuses her servant, and how Trench, a poor doctor, wants to marry Blanche, but after discovering the source of her and her father's income refuses to anymore. I really love how modern-seeming the dialogue and relationship between Blanche and Trench is. It's very soapy and entertaining and doesn't read like how I would have imagined 1890s folk would talk. While I don't necessarily understand the scheme between Sartorius, Lickcheese, and Trench in the third act, I get the point of Trench succumbing to the unpleasant workings and enjoyed it for what it was.

The Philanderer (1893)

Despite no prior knowledge of Ibsen and the prefatory note not really filling in any gaps at all, this play was really rather enjoyable. The main chatacter is caught between two loce affairs, both of whom share his Ibsenist beliefs although to varying degrees, with one of then sharing his ideals on the disavowment of marriage and the other wanting to marry him despite this. The setting of a social club that only allows people in if they are neither a manly man nor a womanly woman is so dystopian and yet socialist during the 1890s. The dialogue reveals these really engaging sexual politics and a nice little animal testing subplot in there, too, with the scientist and one of the fathers, and all of the character interactions are a lot of fun to read.

Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893)

Definitely the densest of the three in terms of character development as a result of the topic at hand, specifically shown through the changing of the relationship between Mrs. Warren and Vivie. The way that their relationship seemingly grows closer once Vivie learns what her mother's titular profession was, but then completely ceases once she learns that the profession is still ongoing, is a very interesting turn of events. The male characters fill up the scenes nicely when Vivie and Mrs. Warren aren't stealing them, and give them both something to bounce off of. Shaw's dialogue is so enjoyable and fluid, and it's really a very enjoyable read. I'm especially looking forward to seeing a performed iteration of this one.

I enjoyed the first story Widowers’ Houses, and then hated The Philanderer. It was so long and boring that I ended up skipping it a few pages into Act 2 which I’m glad I did because I LOVED Mrs Warren’s Profession! So good and crazy to think of the year it was written and how it was received

I don't feel like giving this one a full review. I'm only going off of one actual play & most of my feelings can really be summed up as "meh". Vivie made her choice, the one she said she would from the beginning and that's kinda that. I get that she doesn't care to try and remedy the irreconcilable differences between her and her mother, that she can't help the fact that there's no real attachment between the two of them since Mrs. Warren has been so largely absent from her life. I don't love it, but I guess it makes sense. I don't blame Mrs. Warren for having lived the life she did either tho. But I think that's just the tragedy of it.

Okay that's it. I don't feel like saying any more. Except well I guess the men in this play are pretty useless for the most part. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I've read just Widower's Houses and it was really exciting
Firstly, I do love reading plays, secondly, the message was clear and it was interesting to observe the development of the characters.

I read the plays but Shaw's prefaces were unreadable.

Originally published on my blog here in February 2000.

The three plays in this volume, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren's Profession, are Shaw's earliest plays. Considered extremely daring at the time - it proved impossible to produce Mrs Warren's Profession for over twenty years - they can still in places shock us today. Each play is a blatant attack on Victorian society, on the hypocrisy of those who believe themselves morally blameless yet condemn the poor to live in degrading squalor and then live off the money this produces. This is clearest in Widowers' Houses (about slum landlords) and Mrs Warren's Profession (prostitution); The Philanderer is about attitudes to women, and has dated rather more.

The plot of Widowers' Houses is the simplest. Harry Trench falls in love with a girl he meets on holiday in Germany. Accepting her father's description of the source of his income as the respectable "property", they get engaged. Then Trench discovers that the property in question is one of London's most unpleasant slums and is horrified, and eventually he is astounded when it is revealed that his own wealth comes from the interest on a mortgage on the property. The idea is that even the most respectable are not far removed from the immoral and degrading, and this is also the central idea in Mrs Warren's Profession.

Though today most of the Victorian slums in Britain have long been cleared, prostitution is still a surprisingly important part of the economy. Shaw's message, though, is perhaps better applied in other areas. In the West, our relatively affluent lifestyles are to an extent dependant on the poverty of the Third World. People starve not just while our supermarkets are full, but to keep them full. Without the arms trade vital to the economy of many Western nations, much suffering would be eased. Pornography continues to degrade both those involved in making it and those addicted to it, while making fortunes.

Shaw manages to avoid the pitfall of preachiness which traps so many who write fiction to support a campaign, except perhaps in The Philanderer. The central location of this play is the fictional Ibsen Club, which stands for everything progressive in society. Today Ibsenism is an obsolete word, and it is clearer that Ibsen wrote about far more than Shaw thought, blinded as he was by his own social agenda. But at the turn of the century, plays like An Enemy of the People, Ghosts and (above all) A Doll's House seemed iconoclastic attacks on injustice in society. Ibsen was the subject of violent denunciation for the immorality seen in his plays (to the extent that he had to write an alternative happy ending to The Dollshouse before it could be performed in Germany), and this is what attracted Shaw the social campaigner. These plays are far simpler than Ibsen's, and much more obviously making a non-dramatic point. Their effect was much the same, and Shaw (unlike Ibsen) revelled in it.

I just read Mrs Warren’s Profession for class, it was so amazing! The writing was interesting, the characters are deeply complicated, and it holds a mirror to the hypocrisy of society. I really enjoyed it!

Shavian at its best! GBS's iconoclastic views resonates even today and is particularly felt so in the 2nd play- The Philanderer. Excellently elicited is the complex nature of humans and how easily it is dwindled. The best part of the book is ofcourse the sterling preface by the author himself.

read mrs warren's profession, kind of love frank

Read at the end of high school. The Plays Pleasant are so much more fun!