Arms and the Man (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Shaw, George Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143039768 ISBN 13: 9780143039761

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2006

Synopsis

Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of one of Shaw’s most delightful comedies—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library

A Penguin Classic
 
Raina, a young woman with romantic notions of war and an idealized view of her soldier fiancé, is surprised one night by a Swiss mercenary soldier seeking refuge in her bedchamber. The pragmatic Captain Bluntschli proceeds to puncture all of Raina’s illusions about love, heroism, and class. In a second duel of sex, Louka, Raina’s maid, uses her wiles in her attempt to gain power. Optimistic, farcical, absurd, and teeming with sexual energy, Arms and the Man has Shaw inverting the devices of melodrama to glorious effect.
 
This is the definitive text prepared under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw’s preface of 1898.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In the opening scene of Arms and the Man, which establishes the play's embattled Balkan setting, young Raina learns of her suitor's heroic exploits in combat. She rhapsodizes that it is "a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act its romance!" Soon, however, such romantic falsifications of love and warfare are brilliantly and at times hilariously unmasked in a comedy that reveals George Bernard Shaw at his best as an acute social observer and witty provocateur.
First produced on the London stage in 1894, Arms and the Man continues to be among the most performed of Shaw's plays around the world. The play is reprinted in its entirety here from an authoritative British edition, and is complete with Shaw's stimulating preface to Volume II of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant.

From the Inside Flap:

It's 1885, and Raina's bourgeois Bulgarian family is caught up in the heady patriotism of the war with Serbia. The beautiful, headstrong Raina eagerly awaits her fianc 's victorious return from battle - but instead meets a soldier who seeks asylum in her bedroom. This is one soldier who definitely prefers romance and chocolate to fear and bullets. War may be raging on the battlefield, but it's the battle of the sexes that heats up this extraordinary comedy and offers very different notions of love and war.

An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Al Espinosa, Jeremy Sisto, Teri Garr, Anne Heche, Micahel Winters, Jason Kravits and Sarah Rafferty.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0143039768
• ISBN 13: 9780143039761
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 73