SOURCE: Quinn, Michael. “Form and Intention: A Negative View of Arms and the Man.” Critical Quarterly 5, no. 2 (summer 1963): 148-54.

In the following essay, Quinn explores the disconnection between Shaw's intentions in Arms and the Man and the form of the play, concluding that it is “a very good play of its kind, but it is not the kind of play one might have expected from Shaw's preface.”

One of the difficulties with Shaw is that too often, like Mistress Quickly, “a man does not know where to have” him. Largely on the basis of his own noisy claims, he still retains much of the prestige of a ‘great thinker’, standing, in somewhat heretical and clownish garb, at the end of the line of what John Holloway has called ‘Victorian sages’, a latter-day Carlyle whose aim also was “to make his readers see life and the world over again...