Social Criticism in George Bernard Shaw’s Plays

G eorge Bernard Shaw occupies a distinctive position in modern drama because he transformed the stage into a forum for intellectual confrontation, social diagnosis, and ideological debate. His plays frequently move beyond conventional dramatic entertainment by placing social institutions, economic structures, moral conventions, and inherited assumptions under sustained scrutiny. Marriage, class hierarchy, capitalism, religion, war, prostitution, gender relations, poverty, and political authority become subjects of dramatic inquiry, while wit, paradox, satire, characterization, and extended dialogue become instruments through which Shaw challenges the intellectual complacency of his audience. His dramatic method emerges from the conviction that theatre possesses a pedagogical and reformative function. As Shaw explains in his preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession , drama can expose social conditions that respectable society prefers to keep concealed (Shaw, 1898/2009). Archer (1911) and Holro…