Getting Married

N.B.--There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor's Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable when drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it, which turned out to be the classical form. Getting Married, in several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a long period, would be impossible. (GBS)

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 * Preface<!--
 * Marriage Nevertheless Inevitable
 * What Does the Word Marriage Mean
 * Survivals of Sex Slavery
 * The New Attack on Marriage
 * A Forgotten Conference of Married Men
 * Hearth and Home
 * Too Much of a Good Thing
 * Large and Small Families
 * The Gospel of Laodicea
 * For Better for Worse
 * Wanted: an Immoral Statesman
 * The Limits of Democracy
 * The Science and Art of Politics
 * Why Statesmen Shirk the Marriage Question
 * The Question of Population
 * The Right to Motherhood
 * Monogamy, Polygyny and Polyandry
 * The Male Revolt Against Polygyny
 * Difference Between Oriental and Occidental Polygyny
 * The Old Maid's Right to Motherhood
 * Ibsen's Chain Stitch
 * Remoteness of the Facts from the Ideal
 * Difficulty of Obtaining Evidence
 * Marriage as a Magic Spell
 * The Impersonality of Sex
 * The Economic Slavery of Women
 * Unpopularity of Impersonal Views
 * Impersonality is Not Promiscuity
 * Domestic Change of Air
 * Home Manners are Bad Manners
 * Spurious "Natural" Affection
 * Carrying the War into the Enemy's Country
 * Shelley and Queen Victoria
 * A Probable Effect of Giving Women the Vote
 * The Personal Sentimental Basis of Monogamy
 * Divorce
 * Importance of Sentimental Grievance
 * Divorce Without Asking Why
 * Economic Slavery Again the Root Difficulty
 * Labor Exchanges and the White Slavery
 * Divorce Favorable to Marriage
 * Male Economic Slavery and the Rights of Bachelors
 * The Pathology of Marriage
 * The Criminology of Marriage
 * Does it Matter?
 * Christian Marriage
 * Divorce a Sacramental Duty
 * Othello and Desdemona
 * What is to Become of the Children?
 * The Cost of Divorce
 * Conclusions


 * Play