Candida

The Reverend James Morell is a celebrated Christian Socialist clergyman — eloquent, popular, certain of his own goodness — and his household seems a model of modern good fortune. His wife, Candida, warm and shrewd and without illusions, makes his public life possible. Then a ragged, aristocratic young poet of eighteen, Eugene Marchbanks, whom Morell has taken charitably under his wing, declares his love for Candida and turns on his benefactor — accusing the famous preacher to his face of being a windbag wholly unworthy of the woman who keeps his life in order.

The charge lands because part of it is true, and for the first time in his complacent existence Morell is shaken. He has never doubted that Candida belongs to him, that she loves him as the strong, good man he believes himself to be. Now a boy has made him doubt it, and the play drives, with Shaw's mischievous precision, toward an auction: the parson and the poet are made to stand before Candida and bid for her, each saying what he has to offer.

Morell offers his strength; Marchbanks offers his weakness and his need. And Candida, having heard both, gives her verdict in a single sentence that overturns everything the scene seemed to promise — she gives herself "to the weaker of the two," leaving both men, and the reader, to work out which of them she means. The discovery reverses the whole moral arrangement of the play: the strong man is the one who cannot stand alone, and the woman who seemed the dependent partner is the keystone of the arch.

Written in 1894 and published in Shaw's Plays Pleasant (1898), Candida is a quietly radical comedy of ideas — an inversion of the conventional love-triangle, a meditation on where strength really lives in a marriage, and one of the plays that won Shaw the affection of audiences who had found his harsher work merely clever. This edition presents the complete play in clean, readable typesetting for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.