Shaw himself wrote that Candida `is a counterpoint to Ibsen's Doll's House, showing that in the real typical doll's house it is the man who is the doll'.Ibsen in A Doll's House(1879)had shown how men treated their wives as inferior creatures, or dolls,and at the end of the play his heroin rebels and leaves her her husband .In Candida Shaw powerfully and effectively reverses Ibsen's idea.

Counterpoint or reversal was Shaw's favourite technique in all of his plays.In Candida,he not only reverses the main idea of a Doll's House but also counterpoints the typical situation of an established type of Victorian domestic comedy.Play about romantic adultery,or its type possibility, were very popular in the nineteenth century.These plays usually featured a dull husband, a romantic wife, and an attractive, glamorous lover. In the interest of morality, the lover usually lost and...