Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell

Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell are plays which give a clear sense of the range of Shaw's first forays into playwriting. Together they showcase his early negotiations between his political and social concerns and the constraints and possibilities of the British stage at the fin de siècle. These plays are bound together by shared concerns with gender roles, sexuality, concepts of familial and social duty, and how all these are shaped by wider financial, political, literary, philosophical and theatrical influences. Mrs Warren's Profession is the best known of Shaw's 'Plays Unpleasant', his first exercises in using the theatre as a means to awaken the consciences of morally complacent audiences. Written in 1893 in angry response to the success of A. W. Pinero's sensational hit The Second Mrs Tanqueray and a revival of Dumas's La dame aux camélias, Mrs Warren's Profession did not receive a public performance in Britain until 1925. Shaw's provocative response...