Theme of Love and War

Satire is the "biting exposure of human folly which criticizes human conduct, and aims to correct it" (Di Yanni 839). Moliere was the French master of satiric comedy, and Shaw has been hailed likewise--as the "Irish Moliere." In Arms and the Man, Shaw demonstrates his genius for satire by exposing the incongruities of life and criticizing the contradictions in human character.

Arms and the Man is quite possibly Shaw's most popular play. The success of Arms and the Man has been consistent right from its first production in 1894. The original staging of the play was so well received that Shaw's reputation as one of the greatest wits in the London drama scene was almost instantly established. Shaw himself, present at the opening performance, was actually dissappointed in the response of the audience. It is true that Arms and the Man is a comedy, but it is also about war. The setting of the play is in war-torn Bulgaria, and focusses not only on the romance between the young people of the play, but the atrocities that go on during war times and the ability of people not so very far removed from these atrocities to ignore them completely.

Coming just a few years before the start of the Great War, Shaw's play turned out to be sadly prophetic. When war was declared, young men literally flooded the offices in order to sign up. These men carried with them the same romantic - and wholly innacurate - ideas of the "glories" of war that Raina and her mother Catherine carry with them at the start of the play.

Over the course of the play, Raina loses this romantic ideal in favour of a far more productive and accurate version that allows her to find true love. Sergius, her betrothed at the start of the play, goes through a similar transformation, realising that there must be more to himself than the two dimensional ideal of the soldier that young ladies seem to worship.

Unfortunately, Shaw's message was disregarded, and the Great War carried on exactly as he could have predicted. His nation suffered an immense period of disillusionment, as the true nature of war was shown to them - at their very doorstep.

Although the play is now more than a hundred years old, its themes of love and war are possibly more valid than ever before. Its comedy is still fresh and entertaining and its story of love and romance can appeal to us all. This is why it is still so widely produced.
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Shaw has selected two main themes war and love for his play Arms and the Man. Shaw has shown how the romance of war leads to the romance of love. Arms and the Man portrays this having ruthlessly thrown among the idealisms. The material and the background for the war has been provided by the historic war between Bulgaria and Serbia. And the theme for Love has been provided by his own personal life. Shaw's mother married his father against the advice of her friends, and she suffered for her absolute surrender to the romance of love. Her ...

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