Bernard Shaw calls “Arms and the Man” an anti-romantic comedy. The main objective of the playwright is to satirize the romantic conception of life. Shaw has no faith in emotion and feeling. Throughout the drama he denounces idealism and insists on realism. He does it through character humor and situation humor at the same time.
The play “Arms and the Man” is not a farce, a real comedy. The purpose of a comedy is to ridicule and expose some humor or weakness or social flaw. He laughs at human weakness or flaw, but the purpose of laughter is to further the flaw. Although there is a lot of mocking and loud laughter in the play, but it has a serious purpose and thus makes the difference from a farce. Shaw, well a comedian but with a serious purpose. He arouses joy but also arouses thought.
In “Arms and the Man” the intentions of the playwright are comic and the use of the anticlimax is the tool through which he achieves his comic intention. Sergio and Raina become comic figures when the insincerity of their romantic love and romantic attitude is exposed. Raina and Sergius go down to the level of Louka and Bluntschli. The playwright has succeeded in his comic intention. He shows that it is not heroic but horrible and brutal because soldiers are not heroes but fools and cowards who fight only because they are made to fight. Sergio’s heroic victory is cast in a comic light when it is discovered that he was able to win only because the Serb gunmen had the wrong ammunition. Sergius makes love to Louka as soon as Raina’s back is turned, shortly after “the upper love scene”. In this way, Shaw has shown the failure of the romantic ideals of love and war, the purpose of his writing the play. He has delivered a number of fun and humor for his readers and audience, but at the same time he has also achieved his serious purpose.
Shaw wanted a technical novelty for the modern drama which consists in making the spectators themselves the persons of the drama and the incidents of their lives their incidents, the obsolescence of the old stage tricks by which the audience had to be induced to be interested in unreal persons. . and unlikely circumstances. He thinks that Shakespeare has staged us but not our problems. Shaw believes that the most important peculiarity of modern art is the discussion of social problems. Shaw points out that Shakespeare’s drama is a specimen of inferior art because it is romantic in its situation, conventional in its ideas, and pessimistic in its temper. Shakespeare generally borrows plots from other people’s dramas. These stories are mostly romantic and wonderful, featuring all kinds of wacky incidents and situations. Shaw opposes not only the romantic sentiments of Shakespeare’s drama, but also the romantic situations found there. But he confused the genuine romances and their sensational counterpart. In fact, Shakespeare chooses extraordinary incidents in order to portray the deepest passions. In Shakespeare’s great dramas there is no extraordinary situation that is not related to human emotions. The situations can be extraordinary but they are made real by the authenticity of the passions that have been struck.
In Shakespeare’s dramas there are no heroes by Shaw’s standards. His lovers do not act on their own. He is forced to borrow motifs from the more forceful actions of his characters that come from the common pool of melodramatic plot.
Shakespeare’s dramas are based on a fundamentally different view of life and art from Shaw’s. Shaw’s philosophy of life has no connection with the existence of art in human nature. He thinks that the really bad man is as rare as the really good man and for him life is, despite poverty, disease and misfortune, a great game or show, while Shakespeare regards evil as an essential element of ordinary human nature.
Shaw insists that “a playwright’s business is to make the reader forget the setting and the actor forget the audience, not to remind them both all the time.” the exhibition of the character through the starting situation than from the fabric of a complex story.
Shakespeare’s genius is so different in almost every way from Shaw’s that, despite Shaw’s conventional claim to dismiss Shakespeare’s intelligence, any comparison between them is idle nonsense. Most of Shakespeare’s great characters are creatures of passion: the love, hate, jealousy, lust for power, and the reality of the characters, combined with the wondrous power and beauty of the language in which they are revealed, captivates. the reader and the viewer by conquering their imagination. Shakespeare is supreme in the realm of poetic drama; Shaw’s greatest gifts are not in the sphere of poetry but in the field of wit, of ideas, of brilliant intelligence. He cannot and does not want to imitate Shakespeare as a character creator, because he is too preoccupied with his own problem.