“Not a Play”: Redefining Theater and Reforming Marriage in Candida

In his early plays, Shaw repurposed conventional theatrical tropes and privileged discussion over dramatic closure, redefining drama in ways that some of his contemporaries considered antidramatic. These strategies are especially important in Candida (1895), written explicitly in response to Ibsen’s Doll’s House, which Shaw considered the prototypical New Drama. I argue that in questioning popular assumptions about marriage and gender relations, Candida also reworks theatrical genres and devices commonly associated with these assumptions, in particular the dramatic stock characters of the preacher and the poet, and the related performance genres of religious homiletics and poetry reading. The play suggests that marriage itself is a theatrical performance modeled on these and other theatrical forms; thus, traditional theater is to some degree held responsible for faulty popular assumptions regarding love and marriage, and newer kinds of theater are called on to correct those assumptions.