Arms and the Man is set in 1885, in a small Bulgarian town near Dragoman Pass. Shaw establishes this setting in the stage directions at the very beginning of Act 1, which takes place in November of the aforementioned year. Acts 2 and 3 take place after a four-month time skip, in early March of 1886. The play is entirely set in the house and grounds of the upper-class Petkoff family. Despite the fact that the play is set during wartime, no scenes take place on the battlefield—all of the action is limited to this upper-class house, denying the audience any visual spectacles of violence.
The physical setting of the play is likely based on the real western Bulgarian town of Dragoman, near Slivnitsa, where a decisive battle took place between the Bulgarian Army and Serbian Army. The result of this battle was the unification of the Kingdom of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia. This wartime setting provides the perfect backdrop for Shaw's commentary on gender and technology—specifically military technology—both of which underwent a dramatic series of shifts in broad social and literary perception towards the end of the 19th century. As these shifts occurred on a cultural level, writers began to move away from the conventions of Romanticism and towards Modernism, a transition that Arms and the Man documents.
