Lady Windermere's Fan | Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession
In the following essay, the author argues that George Bernard Shaw modelled his Mrs. Warren on Wilde’s Lady Windermere.
After Lady Windermere’s Fan was first performed on 20 February 1892, Oscar Wilde found himself a famous playwright. At the time, George Bernard Shaw was struggling to establish himself on the British stage after having failed as a novelist. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, his third play, was written in late 1893 and early 1894. Shaw’s play is a Shavian reworking of Wilde’s, an attempt to squarely face the issues that Wilde sidestepped. In a nutshell, it is Lady Windermere’s Fan intellectualized.
The situations of the two plays are remarkably similar, both built around...
[The entire page is 828 words long]
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