Arms and the Man

This article is about the play by George Bernard Shaw. For other uses, see Arms and the Man (disambiguation).

Arms and the Man
Shaw at the time of the production of Arms and the Man
Written byGeorge Bernard Shaw
CharactersRaina Petkoff
Sergius Saranoff
Captain Bluntschli
Catherine Petkoff
Major Paul Petkoff
Louka
Nicola[1][2]
Date premiered21 April 1894 (1894-04-21)
Place premieredAvenue Theatre
SubjectLove and war[3][4]

Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw, whose title comes from the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid, in Latin: Arma virumque cano ("Of arms and the man I sing").[5]

The play was first produced on 21 April 1894 at the Avenue Theatre and published in 1898 as part of Shaw's Plays Pleasant volume, which also included Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of Destiny. Arms and the Man was one of Shaw's first commercial successes. He was called on to stage after the curtain, where he received enthusiastic applause. Amidst the cheers, one audience member booed. Shaw riposted, "My dear fellow, I quite agree with you, but what are we two against so many?"[6]

Arms and the Man humorously exposes the futility of war and the hypocrisies of human nature.

  1. ^ "E-NOTES". Retrieved 20 November 2013.
  2. ^ "Cliff Notes". Retrieved 20 November 2013.
  3. ^ Bernard Shaw (1990). Arms and the Man. Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0-486-26476-9.
  4. ^ "Encyclopædia Britannica". Retrieved 20 November 2013.
  5. ^ Shaw, Bernard (1898). "Arms and the Man". Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. Vol. The Second Volume, Containing the Four Pleasant Plays. London: Grant Richards. pp. 1–76 – via Internet Archive.
  6. ^ Frezza, Daniel. "About the Playwright: George Bernard Shaw" Archived 19 February 2008 at the Wayback Machine, "Utah Shakespearean Festival," 2007. Accessed 12 February 2008. Shaw's contemporary, William Butler Yeats, was present for the performance, and rendered this quotation differently in his autobiography: "I assure the gentleman in the gallery that he and I are of exactly the same opinion, but what can we do against a whole house who are of the contrary opinion?" (Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil, book 4: The Tragic Generation, from Autobiographies, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 3, ed. William H. O’Donell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 221).