SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, vol. 27
Shaw at the Sesquicentennial
6 x 9 | 2007
ISBN 978-0-271-02767-8 | cloth: $42.00 sh
Paperback edition is not available
SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies Series
CONTRIBUTORS
John A. Bertolini teaches Shakespeare, dramatic literature, and film at Middlebury College, where he is the Ellis Professor of the Liberal Arts. He has written The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw, edited SHAW 13 (“Shaw and Other Playwrights”), and introduced and annotated two collections of Shaw’s plays for Barnes & Noble, Man and Superman and Three Other Plays and Pygmalion and Three Other Plays. He is a member of the International Shaw Society Advisory Committee.
Charles A. Carpenter is professor emeritus of English at Binghamton University. His books include Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays, Modern Drama Scholarship and Criticism [1966–1990]: An International Bibliography (2 vols.), and Dramatists and the Bomb: American and British Playwrights Confront the Nuclear Age, 1945–1964. He is a founding member of the International Shaw Society, whose website makes his comprehensive, annually updated bibliography of Shaw studies accessible for everyone’s use.
MaryAnn K. Crawford, professor of English and director of the University Writing Center and Program at Central Michigan University, is co–general editor of SHAW, was associate editor since 1999, and is one of the founding members of the International Shaw Society. In addition to SHAW, she researches, writes, and publishes on a variety of literary, linguistic, and literacy issues.
Bernard F. Dukore, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts and Humanities at Virginia Tech, has directed plays and written numerous books and articles on modern drama and theater. His most recent production is Arms and the Man (2001). His most recent books are Shaw’s Theater (2000) and Sam Peckinpah’s Feature Films (1999). He is a founding member of the International Shaw Society and serves on its Advisory Committee. He is presently writing a book titled Alan Ayckbourn’s Theatre Works: Seriousness Redeemed by Frivolity.
Peter Gahan, who lives in Los Angeles, is the author of Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). His introduction to a reprinting by Penguin Classics of Shaw’s Candida was published in 2006. He has served on the editorial board of SHAW since 2004.
A. M. Gibbs is emeritus professor of English at Macquarie University, Sydney. His most recent book, Bernard Shaw: A Life (2005), received an Honorable Mention as runner-up for the Robert Rhodes Prize for books on literature awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies and was short-listed for Premiers’ Awards in two states of Australia.
Nicholas Grene is a professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, where he has taught since 1979. He has written extensively on Irish drama and on Shakespeare; his books include Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study of the Plays (1984) and Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record, edited with Dan Laurence (1993). He is currently completing a study of Yeats’s poetry, to be published by Oxford University Press, and an edition of Major Barbara for the New Mermaids series.
Martin Meisel is Brander Matthews Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater and Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. His most recent book is titled How Plays Work: Reading and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2007). He has played vacillating characters and the occasional villain onstage and now and then directed. He is a founding member of the International Shaw Society and serves on its Advisory Committee.
Annie Papreck King (Ph.D., Saint Louis University) teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on Shaw’s frustration with late-Victorian bardolatry and the ways in which this contempt for Shakespeare’s elevated status influenced Shaw’s own work. Her previous publications include a bit of esoterica on Shaw and baseball.
Barbara Pfeifer (M.A.) studied English, German, and history at the Universities of Vienna and Zurich. In 2006 she received a grant by the Austrian Research Council to work on a doctoral thesis on the reception of Shaw’s plays on the Viennese stages in the twentieth century, as part of the Weltbühne Wien (World Stage Vienna) project. Her research interests include Shaw studies and literary and cultural theory, as well as Viennese theater history.
John R. Pfeiffer is a professor of English at Central Michigan University, the bibliographer of SHAW, and a founding member of the International Shaw Society. His recent articles have been on Aldous Huxley, Margaret Walker, Saint Joan, and George Eliot, including a contribution in the Modern Language Association’s Academic Collective Bargaining.
Michel W. Pharand, co–general editor of SHAW, teaches in the Faculty of Letters at Kobe University, Japan. He is a founding member and serves on the Advisory Council of the International Shaw Society. He is the author of Bernard Shaw and the French, editor of SHAW 24 (“Dionysian Shaw”), and currently is editing Bernard Shaw and His Publishers for the Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw series.
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel is an associate professor at Massachusetts Maritime, where he teaches Irish literature and theater. His latest book, Performative and Textual Imaging of Women on the Irish Stage, 1820–1920: M. A. Kelly to J. M. Synge and the Allgoods, was published early in 2007. His earlier books include Synge and Irish Nationalism: The Precursor to Revolution and Productions of the Irish Theatre Movement, 1899–1916. He has published numerous articles on Synge and Irish theater, and he is currently editing James Connolly’s play Under Which Flag? and working on a book on Shaw and Irish socialism.
Vanessa L. Ryan is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and is completing a book-length project on Victorian psychology and narrative. She has published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, RES, Victorian Poetry, and Literature and Medicine.
Isidor Saslav, concertmaster of the Longview Symphony and retired director of String Studies at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, has been the concertmaster of the Buffalo Philharmonic as well as the Minnesota, Baltimore, and New Zealand symphony orchestras. He began his collection of Shaw materials in 1960 when he was a student at Wayne State University in Detroit. It has grown to approximately 8,000 items. His writings on Shaw have been published in The Shavian (London), The Independent Shavian (New York), and the Victoria University Stout Centre Review (Wellington, N.Z.).
Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a recipient of the St. George medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for services to Russian art and theater. His latest books include the Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (Scarecrow Press), The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov (Routledge), and a translation of Gogol’s Inspector General (Broadway Play Publishing). He is currently working on a book about Offenbach.
Julie A. Sparks received her doctorate in English from Pennsylvania State University and teaches in the English Department at San Jose State University. Her scholarly interests include drama, utopian and dystopian literature, and the relationship between science and religion.
Lawrence Switzky is a graduate student in the English Department at Harvard University. He has published essays on twentieth-century British playwrights and is currently researching and writing on modernist drama and authoritarianism.
Stanley Weintraub is the author of three books about World War I: A Stillness Heard Round the World. The End of the Great War (1985), Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001), and the Shavian biography of 1914–18, Journey to Heartbreak (1971).
Ivan Wise is editor of The Shavian, the journal of the Shaw Society. He organized a conference at the University of London in 2006 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Shaw’s birth. He has written reviews and articles on Shaw for the Times Higher Education Supplement and in 2006 contributed to the program for the Shaw season at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, U.K.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE EVOLUTION OF SHAVIAN CONSCIOUSNESS
MaryAnn K. Crawford and Michel W. Pharand
ON ARCHITECTURE
Bernard Shaw
KING MAGNUS AND KING MINUS: A PLAY AND A PLAYLET
Stanley Weintraub
G.B.S. AND “THE LAW OF CHANGE”
A. M. Gibbs
SHAW, STOPPARD, AND “AUDIBLE INTELLIGIBILITY”
Martin Meisel
SHAW AND CONVERSION
Nicholas Grene
GETTING PUBLISHED: GRANT RICHARDS AND THE SHAW BOOK
Michel W. Pharand
“MORE LOOKED AT THAN LISTENED TO”: SHAW ON THE PREREVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN STAGE
Laurence Senelick
A DRAMATIST FOR ALL SEASONS: BERNARD SHAW IN VIENNA, 1933–45
Barbara Pfeifer
SHAW, CONNOLLY, AND THE IRISH CITIZEN ARMY
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
THE STRATEGY AND THE BACTERIOLOGY: SCRUTINIZING THE MICROBE IN SHAW’S TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD
Charles A. Carpenter
WILDE AND SHAKESPEARE IN SHAW’S YOU NEVER CAN TELL
John A. Bertolini
SHAKESPEARE’S SHAVIAN CLEOPATRA
Annie Papreck King
“CONSIDERING THE ALTERNATIVES . . .”: SHAW AND THE DEATH OF THE INTELLECTUAL
Vanessa L. Ryan
THE LAST WORD ON LAST WORDS: SHAW AND CATASTROPHIC DRAMA
Lawrence Switzky
SHAW’S LETTERS IN OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS: THE “ORPHANS”
Isidor Saslav
REVIEWS
G.B.S. Boxed (The Bernard Shaw Collection, six-DVD set)
Bernard F. Dukore
Shaw at 150: The BBC on DVD (The Bernard Shaw Collection, six-DVD set)
Peter Gahan
More Shaw on the Great War (What Shaw Really Wrote about the War, edited by J. L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary)
Stanley Weintraub
The Voice of Shaw (The Spoken Word, two-CD set, by Bernard Shaw)
Ivan Wise
Dick Dudgeon, Caesar, and Captain Brassbound in Poland (G. B. Shaw’s Unconventional Hero in Three Plays for Puritans, by Malgorzata Bielecka)
Julie A. Sparks
A CONTINUING CHECKLIST OF SHAVIANA
John R. Pfeiffer
CONTRIBUTORS
NOTICES
INTERNATIONAL SHAW SOCIETY NEWS