A.C.T.'s Major Barbara: Still timely 100 years later

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.
– George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and co-founder of the London School of Economics, from Major Barbara

The first time I read George Bernard Shaw’s play, Major Barbara, which was written and premiered in 1905, I was a sophomore in college in the spring of 1982, deeply committed to devouring all literature and wanting to become a writer. The play was included in Literature in Critical Perspectives (1968), an anthology of plays, short stories, poems, and essays, designed to teach “principles and techniques of literary interpretation to freshman and sophomore college students in introduction-to-literature courses.” Instead of being grouped by genre, they were organized by the major critical perspectives of the day: Social, Formalist, Psychological, and Archetypal.

The anthology and my English professor opened my eyes to reading literature more critically and with an open eye and heart to the human condition. The introduction to the critical perspective Social, entitled “Criticism and Sociology” by David Daiches, investigated how a writer’s social origins and social factors affect their work. Shaw wrote, in his 1891 essay The Quintessence of Ibsenism, that society is made up of three discrete types of people: “philistines, who have no capacity for creative thought; idealists, who believe in the tangibility of the impossible; and realists, who can see the world for what it is.” The morality play Major Barbara brilliantly brings all three types to one stage, with an interesting twist as to who the “hero” is.

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