Shaw and Saint Joan

Shaw's drama was clearly influenced by Ibsen's middle period plays and it continues and takes further Ibsen's anti-tragic perspective. As a Fabian socialist Shaw was one of the major social critics of his time and it is easy to see why he particularly admired the radical social critique presented in plays such as A Doll's House and Ghosts. If one believed that social action could change the world for the better then tragedy could be interpreted as a conservative form that reinforced the status quo by naturalising pain and suffering and thus dissociating them from social structures and their supporting ideologies. As well as being an ardent social reformer, Shaw also sympathised with the Romantic and utopian idealism of writers such as Blake and Shelley, as he believed in a continuing developing humanity, thus his support for Lamarckian evolutionary theory in which the human will played a role in humanity's purposeful development, and his attack on Darwinism which had no place for purpose or the individual will in its concept of the evolutionary process. For Shaw, not only could the world external to humanity be changed in order to undermine the tragic, but so could humanity itself.

Shaw's anti-tragic perspective in his drama often led to his being accused of not being a true dramatist, despite the fact that most of his plays were popular successes: ‘When I venture to say that Mr Shaw is no dramatist I do not mean that he fails to interest and stimulate and amuse us in the theatre … All that we mean is that when he happens to choose the play as the form in which he shall entertain us there is a certain artistic waste.’