Mrs. Warren’s Profession | Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession
In the following essay, Nassaar argues that Shaw recast Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan in Mrs. Warren’s Profession to focus on issues Wilde avoided in his play.
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...
[The entire page is 852 words long]
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