Arms and the Man was first performed at the Avenue Theatre, London, in April 1894 and published by Grant Richards in 1898 as part of Plays Pleasant. It was Shaw’s first genuine theatrical hit — the earlier Plays Unpleasant had been more admired than performed — and it established the Shavian method: take a conventional dramatic situation (in this case, the romantic war play), turn its assumptions upside down, and use the resulting comedy to make a serious argument.
The setting is Bulgaria during the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885. Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman, has a fiancé, Major Sergius Saranoff, who has just led a famous cavalry charge. Into her bedroom climbs Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs, who is fleeing the battle and needs shelter. Bluntschli is everything Sergius is not: unromantic, practical, and honest about the reality of war. He carries chocolate creams in his cartridge boxes instead of ammunition (he points out that in battle, hunger is a more immediate problem than running out of bullets) and he describes Sergius’s famous charge as a suicidal blunder that succeeded only because the Serbs had been issued the wrong ammunition.
The comedy arises from the collision between romantic ideals and practical reality. Raina has constructed her life around romantic fictions — she thinks of love as a noble passion and war as a glorious adventure — and Bluntschli’s matter-of-fact demolition of these fictions is simultaneously hilarious and liberating. By the end of the play, Raina has transferred her affections from the heroic Sergius to the pragmatic Bluntschli, and the romantic soldiers have been exposed as poseurs.
The play was the basis for Oscar Straus’s operetta The Chocolate Soldier (1908), which Shaw detested (he refused permission for his dialogue to be used, so Straus wrote entirely new lyrics). The title, from Virgil’s Aeneid — “Arma virumque cano” (I sing of arms and the man) — is itself ironic: Virgil celebrates heroism, Shaw mocks it.
Collecting Arms and the Man
First edition (Grant Richards, London, 1898): Published in Plays Pleasant. Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition of Plays Pleasant: $80–$250
- Later separate editions: $10–$25