Heartbreak House... is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded."
Written between 1916 and 1917, Heartbreak House was Shaw's indictment of the generation responsible for the First World War. In his preface he said, "the art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether Germany or England perish', yet he did withold the play during hostilities.
While the play's mood owes much to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, the futility of Shakespeare's King Lear reverberates throughout. It is, as the critic J.I.M. Stewart writes, 'the play in which Shaw confronts, for the first time in his imaginative writing, the small extent of his faith in man. What lies just beneath the play's surface is despair. It is thus in intention, or impulsion, radically different from almost all the rest of his work."

Condition: Like New