In 1890, before he even began his career as a playwright, Shaw identified what he considered to be the defining quality for a new, non-traditional form of drama. From Aristotle on, action had been the core of drama; now Ibsen offered a radically different model. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism Shaw presented Ibsen as a socialist and a realist, whose naturalistic drama exposed all collective abstractions as damaging illusions, and promoted the “individual will” against “the tyranny of ideals.” But beyond this, the key factor was that instead of the standard final-Act climax, Ibsen's characters sat down and talked. The clash of opinion replaced physical conflict, so that a play's resolution was the outcome of discussion.

As with so much of Shaw's writing, all this may seem an idiosyncratic distortion of its subject, but reveals a great deal about its author. The pamphlet was published in 1892, shortly before his first play Widowers' Houses appeared, and served as a manifesto for his theatrical aims. When Shaw delivered it as one of the lectures for a Fabian Society series on "Socialism in Contemporary Literature" two years earlier "The Quintessence of Ibsenism" had a more immediate target; and its politics were deliberately provocative in attacking the collectivist beliefs of other leading Fabians, such as Annie Besant (who had chaired Shaw's lecture) and Sidney Webb. However, the switch from action to discussion, that Shaw detected in Ibsen's work, corresponds with the fundamental Fabian approach to social change.