A small inn in northern Italy, May 1796. The young General Napoleon Bonaparte — twenty-seven, unknown to history, in the first weeks of the Italian campaign that will make his name — has won the Battle of Lodi and stopped to dine. Then his dispatches go missing, stolen on the road by a beardless young man who proved astonishingly quick and strong. Napoleon, who misses nothing, swiftly deduces that the thief and a certain Strange Lady staying at the inn are one and the same.

What follows is the whole play: a long, single-scene duel of wits between the General and the Lady over the recovery of the stolen packet. For the letters are not merely military — among them is a private one, a love letter whose reading would compromise and humiliate the man of destiny. The Lady has read it; she holds it; and she is not at all the helpless adversary Napoleon expects. She lies, flatters, threatens, weeps, and reasons by turns, and again and again she is a move ahead of the most calculating man in Europe.

Written in 1895 and gathered into Shaw's Plays Pleasant in 1898, The Man of Destiny is a deliberate trifle — a bravura two-hander, Shaw called it, written to display the virtuosity of two performers. But the slightness is a disguise. Behind the candlelight and the stolen letters is a real subject: the manufacture of greatness, the machinery by which an ambitious man dresses appetite as destiny — and, near the end, Shaw's most quoted needling of English self-regard, when Napoleon turns to the audience to describe the people who never admit they want a thing until they are sure it is their moral duty to take it.

This edition presents the complete play 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.