Candida (Shavian: 𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑛𐑦𐑛𐑳), a comedy by playwright George Bernard Shaw, was written in 1894 and first published in 1898, as part of his Plays Pleasant.

However, in late 1903 actor Arnold Daly had such a great success with the play that Shaw would write by 1904 that New York was seeing "an outbreak of Candidamania".

Candida returns home briefly from a trip to London with Eugene Marchbanks, a young poet who wants to rescue her from what he presumes to be her dull family life.

However, it was not until late 1903, when Arnold Daly mounted a production at the Princess Theatre in New York that the play became a success.

It is a contagious disease, frequently caught in street cars, elevated trains, department stores, restaurants, and other places where people talk about what they did the night before.

In Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes, Elsie Bonita Adams has given this assessment of Marchbanks, comparing him to two real-life artists: Though Marchbanks has many of the external characteristics and some of the attitudes of the aesthete-artist such as Sholto Douglas or Adrian Herbert, he does not pay mere lip-service to art, his sensitivity is no pose, and he tries to rid himself of illusions.

[5]Shaw himself describes Eugene's story-arc as a realization that Candida is not at all what he wants from life, that the kind of domestic love she could provide "is essentially the creature of limitations which are far transcended in his own nature".

[6] Eugene, according to Shaw, "is really a god going back to his heaven, proud, unspeakably contemptuous of the 'happiness' he envied in the days of his blindness, clearly seeing that he has higher business on hand than Candida".

[7] Andy Propst of Time Out listed Candida as the 25th greatest play of all time, arguing that it "bristles with Shavian wit and pointed political and social debate, ultimately shimmering as a shrewd consideration of love and marriage in Victorian England – or really any period.

Previously, Candida herself was not conceived by directors or actresses as important as the issues and themes that Shaw was trying to convey.

In March/April 2015 at the Gatehouse Theatre in London, Judi Bowker played Candida with Harry Meacher as Morell, Sebastian Cornelius Marchbanks and Roger Sansom as Burgess.

The production featured Kate Fry as Candida; Bobby Steggert as Marchbanks; Marc Kudisch as Morell; Liz Baltes as Prossy; and Drew Gehling as Lexy.

Charles Isherwood, writing in The New York Times, called it a "lovingly composed chamber musical" which "moves with a gentle step, keeping an intimate focus on its central characters.

The West Coast Premiere of the musical adaptation opened in June 2013 at The San Jose Repertory Theater directed by Michael Halberstam.