About the Plays:

Plays Pleasant contains four comedies intended to amuse audiences but also to provoke them. Arms and the Man, set in the Balkan mountains, satirizes the romantic view of war and military heroism. Candida presents the complicated relationship between a vicar, his wife, and her young admirer. You Never Can Tell is a light, witty look at an aging suffragette and her family. The Man of Destiny features Napoleon Bonaparte at odds with English mores.

About the Playwright:

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although born in Ireland, he spent most of his adult life in England, and wrote more than 60 plays for the English stage. He won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honour available to any writer in the world, and an Academy Award for the screenplay of Pygmalion in l938.

Dan H. Laurence is series editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.

W. J. McCormack is professor of literary history at Goldsmith’s College, London.