Mrs. Warren’s Profession | Mrs. Warren’s Profession: Art Over Didacticism
In the following essay, Berst examines Mrs. Warren’s Profession in terms of its art rather than its social message.
Since Mrs Warren’s Profession is one of the most openly didactic of Shaw’s plays, an examination of its achievement as art should prove helpful in assessing the extent to which Shaw’s role as a dramatic propagandist limits his accomplishment as an artist. Few critics nowadays would agree with Percival P. Howe that the preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession renders the play unnecessary, or would go so far as Alick West and analyze it in terms of a Marxist tract, but the decided tendency to generalize about Shaw’s works first in terms of their message and only second in...
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