Editing George Bernard Shaw (section)

====1910–1919====
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'''1910–1919'''

'''Full-length plays'''
*''[[Fanny's First Play]]''
*''[[Androcles and the Lion (play)|Androcles and the Lion]]''
*''[[Pygmalion (play)|Pygmalion]]''
*''[[Heartbreak House]]''

'''Short plays'''
*''[[The Dark Lady of the Sonnets]]''
*''[[Overruled (play)|Overruled]]''
*''[[The Music Cure]]''
*''[[Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores|Great Catherine]]''
*''[[The Inca of Perusalem]]''
*''[[O'Flaherty V.C.]]''
*''[[Augustus Does His Bit]]''
*''[[Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress]]''
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In the decade from 1910 to the aftermath of the First World War Shaw wrote four full-length plays, the third and fourth of which are among his most frequently staged works.{{sfn|Gaye|1967|pp=1366 and 1466}} ''Fanny's First Play'' (1911) continues his earlier examinations of middle-class British society from a Fabian viewpoint, with additional touches of melodrama and an epilogue in which theatre critics discuss the play.{{sfn|Evans|2003|pp=75–78}} ''Androcles and the Lion'' (1912), which Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice.{{sfn|Evans|2003|pp=99–101}} ''Pygmalion'' (1912) is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, minor character.{{sfn|Evans|2003|pp=101 and 104}}{{refn|In a 2003 encyclopaedia article on Shaw, Nicholas Grene writes, "The Cinderella story of the flower-girl turned into a lady by a professor of phonetics resulted in a lifelong struggle by Shaw, first with&nbsp;... Tree and then with film producers, to prevent it being returned to stock with a 'happy' ending. This was a battle Shaw was to lose posthumously when the sugar-coated musical comedy adaptation, Lerner and Loewe's ''My Fair Lady'' (1956), went on to make more money for the Shaw estate than all his plays put together."{{sfn|Grene 2003 ''Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre''}}|group=n}} Shaw's only full-length play from the war years is ''Heartbreak House'' (1917), which in his words depicts "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" drifting towards disaster.{{sfn|Dervin|1975|p=286}} Shaw named Shakespeare (''[[King Lear]]'') and [[Anton Chekhov|Chekhov]] (''[[The Cherry Orchard]]'') as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on [[William Congreve|Congreve]] (''[[The Way of the World]]'') and Ibsen (''[[The Master Builder]]'').{{sfn|Dervin|1975|p=286}}{{sfn|Holroyd|1993|p=10}}

The short plays range from genial historical drama in ''The Dark Lady of the Sonnets'' and ''Great Catherine'' (1910 and 1913) to a study of polygamy in ''Overruled''; three satirical works about the war (''The Inca of Perusalem'', ''O'Flaherty V.C.'' and ''Augustus Does His Bit'', 1915–16); a piece that Shaw called "utter nonsense" (''The Music Cure'', 1914) and a brief sketch about a "Bolshevik empress" (''Annajanska'', 1917).{{sfn|Evans|2003|pp=106–114}}