The Man of Destiny: And How He Lied to Her Husband Large Print Edition By George Bernard Shaw University of Michigan Library (2009), 102 pages Genre: Literature

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - January 3, 2011

In this is a one act comedy, a lover is a very handsome youth who just turned age 18. He is fatuous and passionately and deeply in love with a married woman aged 37, who is not at all pretty. He wrote her adoring poems that she only glanced at. She lost the poems. Her sister-in-law who dislikes her found them and gave them to her brother, the woman's husband. The play explores what happens next. Among other things, the boy and the wife tell each other that they were drawn to each other when they saw George Bernard Shaw's play Candida. Readers who are familiar with Candida will recognize that the plot in this play is similar in some respects to the earlier play. Both plays explore the reactions of a husband to such a situation. This is not the only time that Shaw introduces himself into a play; he wrote elsewhere that he liked to quote himself.

• Candida, by George Bernard Shaw.
  A comedy in three acts about an eighteen-year-old boy who falls in love with the wife of an approximately forty-year-old pastor. Throughout the play, the pastor and the boy argue about who Candida should live with. Candidia, however, has her own ideas...
  
  
• Getting Married, by George Bernard Shaw.
  Shaw expounds his view of marriage as a white slave trade for thousands of women in supposedly civilized societies.