It is a fine spring morning in 1908, and the great Norman kitchen of the Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea is dressed for a wedding. Edith, the Bishop's youngest daughter, is to marry Cecil Sykes, and the family and guests have gathered in their finery: the mild, unshockable Bishop; his lovelorn soldier brother, General "Boxer" Bridgenorth; the freshly divorced Reginald; the worldly young St John Hotchkiss; the greengrocer Collins, who caters every wedding in the parish.

Then the wedding stops before it starts. The bride and the groom, separately, have each read a pamphlet setting out in plain legal language what marriage actually commits them to — the property entanglements, the near-impossibility of divorce, the liabilities each would take on for the other. Appalled by the contract hidden inside the romance, both refuse to go through with it. With nothing to do until the matter is settled, the assembled company falls to debating the whole question of marriage from first principles.

What follows is one of Shaw's boldest experiments: a full-length comedy with almost no plot, obeying the classical unities of time and place, in which a houseful of sharply opposed people — a celibate priest, a rejected suitor, a divorced man, a bride who refuses to be an unpaid housekeeper — argue matrimony, divorce, and the absurdities of the marriage law. Late and electrifying, the beautiful, half-mystical Mrs George Collins arrives to lift the debate from law toward prophecy.

A glittering comedy of ideas and a serious case against the gap between marriage as romance and marriage as contract, Getting Married (1908) is Shaw the social critic at the top of his form. This edition presents the complete play, with Shaw's celebrated long preface, in clean, readable typesetting for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.