Major Barbara —Shaw's “Divine Comedy”

Abstract

Major Barbara can be considered the epitome of Shaw's total dramatic output. It embodies most of the social ideas and stage techniques of his earlier plays, and it distinctly foreshadows the ideology of the remaining four decades of his literary life. Moreover, Major Barbara is probably Shaw's most religious work; certainly it is the play of his which deals most explicitly with the threefold theme of sin, repentance, and salvation. (Back to Methuselah is less explicit, more diluted, as a play about religion.) Hence to label Major Barbara as Shaw's “Divine Comedy” is meant to be neither facetious nor hyperbolic, but to indicate a new point of departure from which to view the play. At the same time, to use the lens of the Divine Comedy to re-examine Major Barbara is not to imply that the two works are necessarily equal in artistic merit or that they are even fully comparable. Yet the Dantean perspective can, I think, help us to see Shaw's play in a new and brighter light, and by so doing clarify its central position in the Shavian canon as well as its possible stature as one of the great works of the twentieth century.