His first 13 works, five novels and eight plays, had been failures. He also skewers British rigidity and pomposity, sometimes with a witty line and sometimes with witless but wealthy characters. Why didn’t work benefit the worker? And what did nobles contribute? Why should a country have an empire? These views, sometimes masked, appear repeatedly in Shaw’s plays. Shaw became an ardent socialist and remained one. The industrial revolution had devalued skilled labor and worsened working conditions. Shaw grew up in poverty in Dublin, then found a very unequal society when he migrated to London. Shaw (1856-1950) had been the most popular living playwright for about 30 years, but for his comedies, which some valued less highly. This play apparently convinced the Nobel committee to confer the Nobel Prize for Literature on him. On February 5, 2021, the RVA (Richmond) Classics Book Club met via Zoom to discuss Shaw’s, Saint Joan.
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