From “chocolate cream soldiers” to “not bloody likely”

 In spite of these political accomplishments, today, Shaw is probablybest known for his plays. He began writing plays in the 1890s as a creativeenterprise, as a way to make money and as a vehicle for his socialist ideals.From the beginning, his plays were controversial. Shaw could not find aproducer for his second play,The Philanderer(1898/1980c), and his thirdplay,Mrs. Warren’s Profession(1898/1980a), was banned by the censors.EvenPygmalion(1916/1973), which opened in 1914 caused an uproar withthe line “not bloody likely” (p. 55) Of course, as Shaw had learned early,controversycanbeanelementofsuccess,andPygmalionwasabox-officehitthat both expanded Shaw’s fame and helped ensure his financial security.The socialist Fabians focused primarily on reforming domestic, socialand economic issues in Great Britain, and Shaw’s plays were his specialversions of the comedy of manners genre, often literally set in drawingrooms. Surprisingly, then, from early in Shaw’s career, war and militarismwere important topics in his plays. Indeed, Shaw’s first successful play

 Arms and the Man(1894/1960) was about a fictional Balkan war. The playdebunks romantic concepts of war and heroism from the opening scene inwhich a professional soldier, who is more concerned about having choco-lates than ammunition, hides in a young lady’s room. Shaw went on towriteThe Man of Destiny(1898/1941, about Napoleon),Caesar and Cleopatra:A History(1898/1942), andCaptain Brassbound’s Conversion: An Adventure(1899/1941), all of which included themes of militarism or war, and werewritten before his first major Fabian pamphlet on the subjects,Fabianismand Empire(1900). In other words, Shaw began looking at war from theperspective of the theater where, as he noted in the preface toHeartbreakHouse(1919d), “the fights are sham fights, and the slain, rising the momentthe curtain has fallen, go comfortably home to supper after washing offtheir rose-pink wounds” (pp. xli–xlii).1Thus, on the eve of war, Shaw was accustomed to success againstgreat odds, and he had achieved his success through confrontation andcontroversy. He had a distinctive vision for what the world was and couldbe, and had devoted both his theatrical and political work to that vision.In particular, he had learned to use his theatrical mind to think about war.