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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: vapidness of such drama as the pseudo-operatic plays contain lies
in the fact that in them animal passion, sentimentally diluted,
is shewn in conflict, not with real circumstances, but with a set
of conventions and assumptions half of which do not exist off the
stage, whilst the other half can either be evaded by a pretence
of compliance or defied with complete impunity by any reasonably
strong-minded person. Nobody can feel that such conventions are
really compulsory; and consequently nobody can believe in the
stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or in the
genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting at
such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe. And the habit of
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