Major Barbara Analysis

The play takes place during a cold January in London, likely around the same time that it was written in the early 20th century, since the characters talk about 1886 like it was only a few years ag...

Major Barbara is a play, so there isn't some overarching narrative voice that frames or makes sense of the dialogue for us. That said, Shaw's stage directions do give some character background and...

We're not going to lie—we definitely LOL'd while reading this play. A lot. Sure, it's a pretty cynical take on human nature in many ways, and pretty much everyone ends up compromising their princ...

While a lot of the play's comedic flair comes from Lady Brit's lines, her husband, Andrew Undershaft, is actually at the heart of the moments that signal the play's overall tone. Like the play itse...

Shaw's dialogue is incredibly witty and smart. For some good examples, you need look no further than some of the exchanges between Undershaft and Dolly, in which they spar about morality and their...

Yeah, what is up with the title? As we have already said elsewhere, Andrew is the play's true protagonist, since it's his story that really drives the plot…so why is it named after his daughter?...

Having abandoned (or at least heavily revised) her principles to align more with her father's, Barbara has apparently regressed to being about five years old, clinging to her mother's skirts and be...

Overall, the prose in Major Barbara is pretty readable and easy to parse—it's not like you'll need to keep a dictionary in hand the entire time or anything like that—and aside from some histori...

Inherited Finances—the Ties that BindLady Britomart comes from a noble family, but she doesn't have much of her own money to dispense to her children—which is unfortunate, since it means she ha...

TwilightWhen the play opens, we quickly learn that the children of Andrew Undershaft and Lady Britomart have been kept in the dark about some key matters. For example, Stephen, the only son, was...

George Bernard Shaw is a Nobel Prize-winning author. They don't give those out to just anyone, you know. (Source.)Aerosmith wrote a song called "Major Barbara." You know you've made it big when you...

There's basically no steaminess here, except for a kiss between Dolly and Barbara negotiated over Dolly's giant drum—which, while amusing, sounds pretty unsexy to us. However, there is some talk...

Dionysus (2.240, 2.255-256, 2.432, 3.29, 3.242-243) Euripides (Undershaft's nickname for Dolly)Niccolò Machiavelli (Dolly's nickname for Undershaft)William Morris (3.228, 3.230)Plato (3.366-368)Pl...