Widowers' Houses Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Widowers' Houses (1892) was the first play by George Bernard Shaw, the famous Irish playwright and Nobel Prize winner.It is one of the three plays Shaw labelled as "Plays Unpleasant", because its purpose is not to entertain its audience - as the traditional Victorian theater was supposed to - but instead to raise awareness of social problems and serve as a criticism of capitalist behavior.
It comprises three acts, in the first a young doctor named Harry Trench and his friend William Cokane are vacationing at Remagen on the Rhine. It is revealed that Trench has fallen in love with Blanche, who is the daughter of Mr Sartorius, a self-made businessman and they become engaged. The second act opens with Sartorius talking to Mr Lickcheese, who he employs as a rent-collector. Trench and Cokane soon arive and Trench discovers that Sartorius makes his money from renting slum housing to the poor. He is disgusted by this and tells Blanche that them to live off his own income and not take money from her father. They fight about this and although Sartorius eventually convinces Trench that his own money is just as dirty as he makes it from a mortage on some of the same housing, Blanche wants nothing to do with him. In the third act, Trench, Cokane and Lickcheese return to Sartorius' house to discuss a business venture and Trench and Blanche are re-united.
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