George Bernard Shaw is remembered first for the great long plays — Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Saint Joan. But across his long career he was also a tireless writer of the short play: the curtain-raiser, the one-act sketch, the topical squib. This collection gathers sixteen of them, composed between 1901 and the years just after the First World War, and together they form a workshop in miniature — the same Shavian mind that built the cathedrals, here turning out chapels, follies, and jewel-boxes with the same craft and a great deal more mischief.

The variety is the point. There are pure farces — Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, written for a charity bazaar, and the nonsense sketch The Music Cure. There are deft comedies of marriage and flirtation — How He Lied to Her Husband, Overruled. There are historical fancies that put words into the mouths of Shakespeare and Catherine the Great — The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Great Catherine. There is The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet, the "sermon in crude melodrama" that became one of the most famous censorship battles of the age, refused a licence in London and staged in defiance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. And there are the bitter, funny wartime pieces written while the guns were still firing — Augustus Does His Bit, The Inca of Perusalem, the Irish soldier's tale O'Flaherty V.C., and the revolutionary fantasia Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress. Sixteen plays; no two alike.

For all their lightness, the short plays aim at the same targets as the masterpieces — marriage, war, censorship, class, hypocrisy — only in small, with no room across a single act to soften a blow. Several come wrapped in Shaw's own prefaces and apologies, prose as good as the plays themselves, and all of them carry his celebrated stage directions, written to be read for pleasure as much as performed.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of these plays in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.