Book Description

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Candida contains 249 letters and entries written between 1889 and 1950, and edited by a leading contemporary Shavian Vitaly Baziyan. The book represents a significant addition to modern-day understanding of Shaw's play Candida and reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of issues, love affairs und relationships with contemporaries. This text of the play from a revised edition Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. By Bernard Shaw. The Second Volume, containing the four Pleasant Plays published by Constable and Company Ltd., London: 1920 is a hand-made reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading. Here are some inspirational book quotes from Bernard Shaw: "The play, which is called Candida, is the most fascinating work in the world." "I have written THE Mother Play-"Candida"-and I cannot repeat a masterpiece." "I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall in love with somebody else." "I assure you in all unhumility I am the greatest dramatist of the XX century." "There is a Shaw boom on in Germany, because four of my plays have been produced in Vienna, Leipzig, Dresden and Frankfurt." "But I want the Germans to know me as a philosopher, as an English (or Irish) Nietzsche only ten times cleverer." "And remember that though we may be no bigger men than Goethe and Schiller, we are standing on their shoulders, and should therefore be able to see farther & do better. And after all, Schiller is only Shaw at the age of 8, and Goethe Shaw at the age of 32." "I am never wrong. Other people are sometimes-often-nearly always wrong, especially when they disagree with me; but I am omniscient and infallible." "Until within the last few months, when the success of Fraulein Agnes Sorma as Candida in Berlin was followed by an outbreak of Candidamania in New York, I had nothing to shew in the way of a successful play." "But everybody likes Candida. Wyndham drops a tear over Candida; Alexander wants the poet made blind so that he can play him with a guarantee of 'sympathy'; Mrs Pat wants to play Candida; Ellen Terry knows she is Candida; Candida is everybody's play except the utter groundlings." "But I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. I am a magnificently successful man myself, and so are my knot of friends but nobody knows it except we ourselves..." "Now I want to make a suggestion to the press. I dont ask them to give up abusing me, or declaring that my plays are not plays and my characters not human beings. Not for worlds would I deprive them of the inexhaustible pleasure these paradoxes seem to give them. But I do ask them, for the sake of the actors and of Vedrenne and Barker's enterprise, to reverse the order of their attacks and their caresses. In the future, instead of abusing the new play and praising the one before, let them abuse the one before and praise the new one.... If the press wishes to befriend us, let it befriend us in need, instead of throwing stones at us whilst we are struggling in the waves and pressing life belts on us when we have swum to shore." "Now on the stage, where the word is spoken, and so much depends on the way it is spoken, grammatical completeness does not matter at all. If a string of interjections or broken phrases will give the meaning, so much the better. So far from its being a crime to repeat words and phrases, it is the worst of crimes to vary them, since the effect is often lost by doing so."