Heartbreak House (Penguin Classics) Paperback – 29 June 2000

The best thing about the edition is that we are allowed an introduction into the Shavian scheme of things, but the flip side of it is the introduction is by no means comprehensive. We would have welcomed a more detailed discussion of the play's historical importance. Some end notes were also called for.

Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. Published by MobileReference (mobi).This is a fascinating, fast-paced comedy with dark undertones about a bankrupt society. It is set in the late nineteenth - early twentieth century, but the issues turn out to be very contemporary: the question of capitalism, security vs. adventure, gender roles. I recommend it!

Ironically, I detest Shaw, and having read a good bloc of his plays and mini-book prefaces to his plays, I detest his plays in general. Shaw's dramatic characters are invariably one dimensional megaphones, put on stage to popularize either his own idiosyncratic ideas, or-this in his prefaces-to trumpet his own peerless genius in coming up with these ideas. His opinion of mankind in general is barely, if at all, charitable, his being thoroughly convinced that the ignorant masses are and have been manipulated and treated as a potter would wet clay by their opportunistic, soulless elite, be they kings, democratic politicos, professors, clergymen, or big businessmen, since the beginning of time. His opinions and purported sparks of polemical genius can usually be narrated in one quarter the number of words it takes to write them out, and are obviously intended to point to his own writing-creative genius. He reviled Shakespeare (who he always managed to misspell) out of sheer envy; he desired to occupy the top spot of English/Western world drama that was unfortunately already occupied by the Bard of Avon. He admired Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler as needed correctives to the sad, feckless world of post-World War I Western democracy and capitalism. And, by 1940, he had written himself out, in plays at least, and with a decade more of life in him, he had few more ideas to peddle an increasingly alien world, no longer-if ever-hanging on his every too-well enunciated syllable. All this being said, however, the Penguin Classics edition of "Heartbreak House" is a splendid, and a very affordable buy for anyone curious about the drama and polemical prose of this man. The well-written introduction by David Hare makes splendid reading, and argues almost convincingly for Shaw's still-active relevance in the world of ideas and of the stage. If you want to defeat an enemy, or someone whose ideas you revile, you must get to know him through and through, and this necessity is well satisfied by this Penguin Classics edition of this play, along with their full line of Shaw's not at all timeless dramatic productions.

Merely a warning about the Dover Thrift Edition of "Heartbreak House": Practically every page has omitted apostrophes and/or added spaces wit hin wor ds. For me, it quickly became tiresome.(Of course it's possible - though unlikely - that I just got a bad copy from a one-time printing glitch. Your call.)