The Short Plays of George Bernard Shaw

This collection gathers the one-act and short pieces Shaw wrote alongside his longer, better-known dramas, and it shows him working at close range. Some are broad farce, like the melodrama-spoofing “Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction”; others are pointed wartime satire, such as “O’Flaherty V.C.” and “Augustus Does His Bit”; and a few, including “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” play literary games with history. Across the set his usual concerns keep surfacing: the gap between what people profess and what they do, the follies of class and empire, and the comedy of self-important men caught off guard. The compact form suits his talk-driven style unusually well. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.