Short Plays

Irish writer George Bernard Shaw began his career as a novelist. But he is most remembered as one of the greatest English-language playwrights of the modern era.

Shaw’s best-known plays are his long-form, evening-length works like Man and Superman. But over his long career, he also wrote many shorter works.

This edition collects Shaw’s short English-language plays published between 1901 and 1927. There are historical works like “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” which imagines a meeting between William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I, and “Great Catherine,” set in Imperial Russia. There are short farces like “How He Lied to Her Husband” and “The Fascinating Foundling,” and political pieces like “Press Cuttings” and “Augustus Does His Bit.” Then, too, there are serious works like the heartwrenching “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” and the existential drama “The Glimpse of Reality.”

Where Shaw wrote prefaces to these shorter plays, they are also included here.