Sign-In
Cart
Getting Married: A Comedy of Marriage, Divorce, and Social Convention
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Curated Collection Publishing
Pages: 222
Weight: 0.58
Height: 0.51 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A wedding is about to take place-but before anyone gets married, George Bernard Shaw wants to know whether marriage itself makes any sense.
On the morning of Edith Bridgenorth's wedding to Cecil Sykes, family and friends gather at the home of the Bishop of Chelsea. What should be a conventional celebration quickly becomes something far more complicated. Around the prospective bride and groom are men and women whose experiences of love, marriage, separation, desire, and independence expose just how difficult it is to fit human relationships within a single set of social and legal rules.
First performed in 1908, Getting Married is less a conventional romantic comedy than a provocative examination of marriage as an institution. Shaw turns a wedding gathering into a wide-ranging debate about divorce, monogamy, sexual morality, economic dependence, religious authority, jealousy, parenthood, and the legal obligations created when two people marry.
At the center of Shaw's argument is a deceptively simple problem: society treats marriage as a universal institution while human beings-and their relationships-are anything but uniform. Some characters seek independence within marriage; others question whether marriage can survive desire, incompatibility, or changing circumstances. The law promises order, but Shaw repeatedly asks whether rigid rules can accommodate the unpredictable realities of affection and human behavior.
The women in the play are particularly important to Shaw's examination of marriage. Questions of economic freedom and personal autonomy complicate traditional assumptions about husbands, wives, and dependence. Marriage is therefore not merely a matter of romance. It is also a legal, financial, religious, and social arrangement capable of determining how individuals are permitted to live.
Shaw approaches these questions with characteristic wit, allowing competing arguments to collide rather than supplying an easy formula for successful relationships. Characters who appear unconventional can prove unexpectedly perceptive, while respectable assumptions become increasingly difficult to defend. The result is a comedy driven not by mistaken identities or romantic misunderstandings, but by the unsettling realization that society's most familiar institution may rest upon contradictions few people stop to examine.
More than a century after its first performance, Getting Married remains fascinating because Shaw refuses to ask merely who should marry whom. He asks the more disruptive question of what marriage should require of anyone at all. Funny, argumentative, and deliberately provocative, the play transforms a wedding day into an examination of love, freedom, responsibility, and the rules society creates to govern intimate life.
Also from
Shaw, George Bernard
An Unsocial Socialist (a Humorous Take on the Socialism of Victorian England)
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Love Among the Artists (an Autobiographical Novel of G. B. Shaw): A Story with a Purpose
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Captain Brassbound's Conversion: The transition of Captain Brassbound: A Study of Justice and Authority
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Androcles and the Lion: A Dramatic Exploration of transition and Conflict in the American Civil War
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Caesar and Cleopatra: A Dramatic Encounter of Power and Politics in Ancient Egypt
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Caesar and Cleopatra: A Dramatic Exploration of Power and Politics in Ancient Egypt
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
An Unsocial Socialist: A Humorous Political Satire on Socialism in Contemporary Victorian England
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Plays Unpleasant: The Widower's House, the Philanderer, Mrs Warren's Profession
Shaw, George Bernard
Hardcover
Plays Unpleasant: The Widower's House, the Philanderer, Mrs Warren's Profession
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Shaw/Caesar and Cleopatra Shakespeare/ Antony and Cleopatra
Stone, Herbert S.
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Shaw/Caesar and Cleopatra Shakespeare/ Antony and Cleopatra
Shaw, George Bernard
Stone, Herbert S.
Hardcover
Fanny's First Play: A Theatrical Exploration of Morality and Respectability
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
The Admirable Bashville; Or, Constancy Unrewarded: A Theatrical Adaptation of "Cashel Byron's Profession" in Blank Verse
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
John Bull's Other Island: A Study of Cultural and Personal Identity in Early 20th Century Ireland
Shaw, George Bernard
Paperback
Also in
Plays
Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night
Shakespeare, William
Paperback
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
Miller, Arthur
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Paperback
The Laramie Project and the Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
Fondakowski, Leigh
Pierotti, Greg
Kaufman, Moises
Paperback
FRANKENSTEIN or The Modern Prometheus (The Revised 1831 Edition - Wisehouse Classics)
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paperback
Four Major Plays: A Doll's House/Ghosts/Hedda Gabler/The Master Builder
Arup, Jens
Ibsen, Henrik
McFarlane, James
Paperback
A Doll's House and Other Plays: With Pillars of the Community, Ghosts and an Enemy of the People
Ibsen, Henrik
Paperback
KJV, Pew Bible, Large Print, Hardcover, Burgundy, Red Letter Edition (Large Print Edition)
Thomas Nelson
Hardcover
Five Plays: Ivanov, the Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and the Cherry Orchard
Hingley, Ronald
Chekhov, Anton
Paperback
Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts: The Long Christmas Dinner, the Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, and Pullman Car Hiawatha
Wilder, Thornton
Paperback