The plays vary from exposure of social wrongs, as for example slum ownership in Widowers' Houses and prostitution in Mrs. Warren's Profession, to philosophical and religious disquisitions, as in Misalliance and Androcles and the Lion, Heartbreak House, metabiological prophecies, as in Back to Methuselah, and drama tised historical chronicle, as in Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan. Shaw has ranged through a great variety of scenes in his plays—America, Bulgaria, Egypt, England, France, Germany and Ireland, and he is always careful to make the settings as pic turesque and romantic as possible. He goes to extraordinary lengths to introduce oddity into his work, as when he makes Captain Shotover, in Heartbreak House, live in a house shaped like a ship, and causes one of the characters in the play to wear the clothes of an Arab chief in the evening. At first, his work seemed to express an absolute determinism—not man, but his environment, was at fault—but in his later plays he insists, in Macbeth's phrase, that man "still has judgment here," and expresses what may be called a neo-Protestant belief. Mankind, in Back to Methuselah, reaches through creative evolution a state of longevity which resembles eternal life. Joan Arc pro tests that no one shall stand between God and her.
The general religious belief expressed in the plays may be briefly summarised as follows : God, or the Life Force, is an imperfect power striving to become perfect. If He were omniscient and omnipotent, He would not allow certain horrors to exist in the lives of His creatures, any more than an ordinary father would tolerate disease in his children if he could prevent it. The
whole of time has been occupied by God in experiments with in struments invented to help Him in His attempt to perfect Him self. When He found that these instruments were either useless or no longer serviceable He scrapped them. In this way the disap pearance from the world of mammoth beasts, among other crea tures, is explained. God eventually found that all His instruments suffered from a common defect, that they were incapable of appre hending His purpose and unable to help overcome their circum stances and bodily limitation. He thereupon created a new instrument, Man, who is still on probation. Shaw warns the world that if we, too, fail to achieve God's purpose He will become impatient and scrap mankind as He scrapped the mammoth beasts. "You should live so that when you die God is in your debt." He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, but immediately handed over the money, amounting to more than £7,000, to the Anglo-Swedish Foundation for spreading a knowl edge of Swedish literature in English-speaking countries.