This study aims to read one of Shaw’s most significant plays Heartbreak House (1919) from a Vichian-Hegelian perspective. Just like Vico and Hegel who believe that heroes play a major role in the formation of human history, Shaw introduces Hector with all the potential and capabilities of a hero who would be expected to play a formative role in one of the most dramatic phases of human history. Shaw’s Great War play dramatizes his generation’s heartbreak, the moral and political paralysis of the educated and cultured classes of Europe. The ship-house in the play is the allegorical representation of all Europe drifting to the rocks while the passengers and the captain are consumed in their domestic, petty, egotistical whims and passions wasting their good energies on trivialities but no one intervening. It has an unmistakable Homeric tune to it as many scholars have drawn our attention. Hector is one of the most central characters of the play and that he stands for one of the most fundamental themes in the play: the potential hero, leader decapacitated by his weakness for women, particularly by his wife Hesione Hushabye. Shaw constructs the educated liberal classes, heartbreakers in opposition to “barbarian” horseback dwellers.

Keywords:.Heartbreak House, Bernard Shaw, Vico, Hegel, hero, morals