Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant.

SHAW, George Bernard.

$1,200.00

Item Number: 137391

London: Grant Richards, 1898.

First edition of the definitive text of Shaw’s volume of “unpleasant” plays: Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession  Octavo, two volumes, original cloth with gilt titles to the spine, top edge gilt, tissue-guarded frontispiece and 8 pages of publisher’s advertisements to Vol. I, 4 pages of publisher’s advertisements to Vol. II. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page of Vol. I, “From G.B.S., painter of humanity, to Warne Browne, painter of the next deepest subject – the sea! Cadgwith Sept. 1899.” The recipient, Alfred J. Warne Browne, was an English seascape painter based in Cornwall. His work was highly popular in both the United Kingdom and the United States; he exhibited at the Royal Academy, New Watercolour Society, and Walker’s Gallery in London between 1884 and 1903. Upon his death in Ruan Minor from a stroke in 1915, he was described in the Helston Advertiser as “a true Bohemian, with a highly developed artistic temperament. Mr. Warne Browne loved the sea, and painted it with a sincerity and fidelity which ought to have secured for him a higher place in the world of art” (Cornwall Artist’s Index, 2022). In very good condition. Small bookplates. Housed in a custom half morocco and folding chemise slipcase.

With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences’ complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. His first play, Widowers’ Houses, depicts Harry Trench’s dilemma on learning that the inheritance of his fiancée comes from her father’s income as a slum landlord. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while he is still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven—who is not inclined to give him up so easily. And in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Vivie Warren is forced to reconsider her own future when she discovers that her mother’s immoral earnings funded her genteel upbringing.