The title ‘Arms and the Man’ has been derived from the opening lines of Virgil’s epic The Aeneid: ‘Arma virumque cano,’ which translates to ‘of arms and the man, I sing.’ Virgil uses the phrase with positive overtones. At the same time, marriage is desirable and good both had become wrapped in romantic illusions, which resulted in disastrous wars as well as unhappy marriages. These themes are interwoven, for Shaw believed that while war is evil and stupid. The play has two primary themes: war and marriage. It was more of a passing of human characteristics from generation to generation with subtle changes in form.
What Shaw saw either to frown at or to chuckle at were not just the temporary injustices or passing follies of his generation. Arms and the Man (Review)Īrms and the Man, the earliest of Shaw’s ‘pleasant’ plays, is both amusing and thought-provoking it makes the readers giggle while making them think about serious concerns. The title of the first two volumes of Shaw’s dramatic works, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, published in 1898, served the special purpose of conveying that his plays were of a different kind from those that the readers and audience had been accustomed to until that time. Shaw started with the conviction that the emotional turmoil of men and women had got way too much attention on the stage, and he decided to compose plays about public affairs that touched the lives of the masses. Until Shaw started writing for the theatre, there had been no modern British dramatics who took current social, political, and/or religious issues as themes for their plays. George Bernard Shaw is among the greatest of the many Irishmen who have written some of the finest plays in the English language.
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