This comprehensive and penetrating study shows how George Bernard Shaws complex, Janus-faced play connects unscrupulous behavior in Englands social, political, and economic spheres and the life of cultured, leisured Europe to the catastrophe of World War I. Revealing the play to be more intricately autobiographical than has been previously recognized, Gibbs analyzes the ways in which refracted images of Shaws own experience in the realms of love and sex appear in the plays amatory themes. 01