Arms and the Man Theme

George Bernard Shaw wrote Arms and the Man in 1893 during the Victorian era when most plays were lighter dramas or comedies in the vein of The Importance of Being Earnest, which was a play about manners and other Victorian conventions. Still, in many ways, Arms and the Man, despite some of its themes, is a perfect example of Victorian literature. The play opened to the British public in 1894 to mixed reviews and was one of the plays included in the Plays Pleasant Volume which included a few of Shaw’s other, less popular works including “You Never Can Tell.” What is most interesting about Arms and the Man is that, although it is a comedy, it deals with several political and social themes covertly. Ideas such as the idealism behind war and the romanticism of love are attacked through satire and even more importantly, issues of class are brought to the forefront. Shaw was an avid socialist and had a number of beliefs about class that are appropriate to the historical situation in Europe. At the time the play was performed, Britain was experiencing a number of significant social and political changes as issues of class were coming to the forefront of national debates.
The idea of class struggle is at the heart of “Arms and the Man” by George Bernard Shaw but instead of making the reader or viewer keenly aware of them, he slips in a number of thought-provoking lines and makes one think about these issues after the laughter has faded. Unlike other plays of the time,Arms and the Man did not seek to merely entertain an audience with polite humor. Instead, it sought to expose some of the most pressing issues of the day in a palatable format—the comedy. This is a trademark feature of Shaw’s plays and he once wrote, “What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods” (Peters 109). In other words, George Bernard Shaw thought that there was no sense in writing something for mere