Getting Married
On what should be their wedding morning, a bride and groom each read a pamphlet spelling out exactly what English marriage law commits them to, and both balk at signing their lives away. As relatives, clergy, and assorted opinionated guests fill the house, the ceremony stalls into a long, lively argument about divorce, property, fidelity, and whether marriage as an institution can be reformed at all. Shaw wrote the piece as a single continuous conversation with no act breaks, trusting the talk itself to carry the drama. It is a comedy of ideas more than of plot, sharp on the gap between romantic feeling and legal contract. First performed in 1908, it still provokes. This free PDF and EPUB edition includes Shaw’s substantial preface on marriage.
About the Author
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, and socialist polemicist who became the leading English-language dramatist of his era. A co-founder of the Fabian Society, he used comedy to attack social hypocrisy and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
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