ABSTRACT This article examines depictions of Elizabeth I in two Irish-authored plays from the early twentieth century, Lady Gregory’s The Canavans and Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Both dramatists had, in earlier plays, used women as symbols to dramatize the plight of colonized Ireland and the struggle for independence. Their portrayals of Elizabeth, showing her as person, myth, and English icon, offered a more indirect commentary on Irish-English relations. Both plays borrowed from a variety of images of the Queen circulated in Ireland and England from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, ranging from grotesque monster to fairy queen. The dramatists use humor and irony to hold these worshipful and demonizing images at arm’s length, suggesting that Elizabeth’s symbolic personae are tools that can be used by shrewd communicators not only to buttress English authority, but also to subvert it.
ABSTRACT Shaw’s biographers have most commonly presented his wife Charlotte as a subservient helper, whose main achievement was eliminating domestic distractions so that her husband could focus on his important work. Even Charlotte’s own biographer largely presented her that way, and more recent feminist criticism still tends to conclude that Charlotte defined herself in relation to her husband. Charlotte’s own pathological aversion to publicity only contributes to this assumption that she had no independent self or ambitions. However, increasing access to a variety of archival sources reveals that Charlotte Shaw’s contemporaries did not necessarily see her as merely an “echo” of her husband, nor did she see herself that way. This article begins to uncover the ways that Charlotte demonstrated her own strong commitment to feminism and Irish independence apart from her husband’s more equivocal stand on those issues.
ABSTRACT This is a centenary tribute to Bernard Shaw’s 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature.
ABSTRACT This article investigates how Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw engages with contradictions within and surrounding the early twentieth-century women’s movement related to class. The article delineates two kinds of conflicts. The first conflict divides the labor movement concerning the role of women therein. The second conflict arises between bourgeois and labor or socialist proponents within the women’s movement. The article argues that, in contrast to Shaw’s ambivalent personal views on the women’s movement, Pygmalion shows a deep engagement with the conflicts within the movement. In particular, Shaw’s treatment of the topic of marriage within the play echoes the views of the socialist women’s movement by situating marriage within the conditions under capitalism. Furthermore, the play directly stages the conflict by representing it in the characters of Mrs. Higgins and Eliza herself.
ABSTRACT This article explores how Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island and E. B. Corbett’s A New Amazonia use speculative futures to provoke critical reflection rather than present idealized utopias. A New Amazonia prophesies a future society revolutionized by feminist domestic reforms and urban planning, yet its vision is complicated by embedded racial hierarchies and eugenic practices. The narrator’s ambivalent response invites readers to reconsider the costs and contradictions of such futures. In John Bull’s Other Island, competing visions clash: Broadbent’s romantic but colonialist Garden City proposal contrasts with Keegan’s melancholic, prophetic critiques of capitalism and imperialism. Keegan’s “dream” serves not as escapism but as a form of imaginative engagement that exposes the limits of political idealism. Both texts resist static or totalizing visions of utopia and instead foster a dynamic process of imaginative contemplation that reflects on social realities, interrogates ideological frameworks, and creates space for intellectual growth.
ABSTRACT During World War II, Shaw’s reputation unexpectedly recovered from its drubbing during the Great War. Despite criticizing Britain’s entry into another global conflagration, Shaw was neither banished from literary societies, pilloried in newspapers, nor silenced on the stage. Indeed, by 1942 his plays were everywhere, from London to far-flung villages. Several factors account for this surprising reversal. A new generation of licensers in the Lord Chamberlain’s office with personal connections to Shaw were especially well disposed toward his works. CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) directed government funding to the small arts theaters that favored Shaw. After the Blitz subsided and the war turned in favor of the Allies, West End audiences wanted more than the light revues, thrillers, and comedies that typified early wartime offerings. Revivals of Shaw not only satisfied an appetite for more serious fare but also dovetailed thematically with several of the biggest wartime hits that scrutinized the ruinous aftermath of the Great War. Above all else, audiences were willing to overlook Shaw’s vexatious politics for the privilege of seeing smart, funny plays that helped make sense of the cataclysm they had just endured.
ABSTRACT This article compares the two 1923 plays through the plot of martyrdom as a discourse of contestation. The audience is faced with a female character undergoing a process of martyrdom—Joan of Arc and Minnie Powell—while the playwrights use them and the backgrounds and themes of the plays to discuss armed nationalism, class issues, and the active nature of women’s utopian beliefs. There are, however, marked differences between the two plays as femininity defines the character of Minnie while the lack of it defines that of Joan, and as The Shadow of a Gunman is definitely rooted in an Irish context while Saint Joan distances itself from it to the point where it is rarely defined as an Irish play. Because, in part, of the similarities between O’Casey and Shaw as much as because of their “Irishness,” their staging of the plot of martyrdom as a spectacle is a way to subvert the hegemonic discourse of the nation-in-creation as regards to the place of women in it. Joan and Minnie come to represent the subalterns of their society and try, unsuccessfully, to make themselves heard by the ones who could change the established order—the audience.
ABSTRACT The Discarded Defence was devised by Justine Zapin and Samantha Cade in 2024. The Discarded Defence: Shaw’s Rearticulation of Roger Casement was first staged at the Museum of Literature Ireland as part of the International Shaw Society’s 2024 International Conference, “Shaw’s Ireland: An International Perspective,” with Samantha Cade directing, Justine Zapin as Bernard Shaw, and Gavan O’Connor Duffy as Sir Roger Casement. The Discarded Defence was commissioned for an encore performance at The Dot Theatre Dublin for the benefactors and VIP guests of the Shaw Festival Theatre on 4 December 2025. This publication reflects the most recent version of the script and includes a transcript of the postshow discussion between the creative team and the artistic director of the Shaw Festival Theatre, Tim Carroll.
ABSTRACT This biographical article traces young adult Bernard Shaw’s interactions with Irish—as well as some significant non-Irish—people during his first twenty-two years living in London in order to give an idea of what being Irish meant in the Imperial capital at the end of the nineteenth century. This first part covers the eighteen years from 1876 to just before his first London theatrical success. The second part (to be published in a future issue of SHAW) will begin with that 1894 Avenue Theatre Season and conclude four years later in May and June 1898, when the forty-one-year- old Irish socialist’s life took a completely new turn with the publication of his first two volumes of plays (Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant), his becoming a full-time dramatist on retiring as a full-time critic, and his marriage to Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Taken together, these Irish connections of the early London years laid the foundations for Shaw’s considerable involvement in Irish affairs, cultural and political, in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
ABSTRACT This article explores and details the many London productions Shaw’s plays received from 1920–29. These productions were from West End producers, suburban repertories, and touring repertory companies. While Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, Saint Joan, and The Apple Cart were the most noted of the West End productions, there were West End revivals of older plays, such as Pygmalion, John Bull’s Other Island, Caesar and Cleopatra, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Major Barbara. Producers included Viola Tree, James Fagan, Barry Jackson, Lewis Casson, and Charles Macdona. Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre led the way in reviving long-shelved plays among suburban repertories, while Macdona’s touring Bernard Shaw Repertory frequently played London throughout the decade. In commenting on the number of his plays’ productions mid-decade, Shaw stated: “Shaw is becoming a monomania.”
ABSTRACT Prompted by the work of Mike Savage, who differentiates between social, cultural, and economic capital—whose own analysis is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s writings—this article interrogates how and why in Widowers’ Houses (1892) Bernard Shaw mingles these different forms of capital. Sartorius, the self-made character, requires the acquiescence of Lady Roxdale, Harry Trench’s aunt, before he gives his own approval for the engagement between his daughter Blanche and Harry. Early character exchanges and the letter Sartorius drafts with Cokane in order to break the news of the potential engagement demonstrate Shaw’s complex interfaces of social, cultural, and economic capital. However, it is through transactions linked to investments in property that the article will affirm how Shaw determines that property regimes constitute, reaffirm, and self-justify sociopolitical inequalities, many of which Shaw first experienced in Ireland.
Over the course of the past few decades, several studies have examined how Bernard Shaw's oeuvre has been adopted and adapted by theater professionals and influenced playwrights beyond Britain and Ireland. Much of this has been dominated by focusing on western Europe and North America, but there has been recent research into Shaw's reach in China, Japan, Brazil, and Hispano-American countries. However, there have yet to be similarly sustained explorations of his relationship to the rest of Asia and there is even less known about how African dramatists have engaged with Shaw and drawn upon his dramaturgy to craft their own modern theater. This article focuses its attention on colonial Ghana to begin to address this lacuna.
This is a selected bibliography of writings by and about Bernard Shaw on Italian culture, politics, and theater.
Much work has been dedicated to Bernard Shaw's handling of the New Woman in his works, focusing largely on his presentation of female protagonists and whether they achieve a transformation toward independence or remain constrained by society and patriarchal structures. In this article, we will look at the New Woman in Shaw's Pygmalion and her transformation over time by comparing the play text to three film adaptations. In doing so, we will focus on the figure of Eliza and consider how often-subtle changes to the original text have a major effect on the viewer's perception of the female protagonist. Thus, we will show how a single text can be reinterpreted over time to reflect different eras and cultures. Moreover, we will demonstrate the evolution of Eliza's representation over a period of 60 years and the social movements this reflects, including two waves of feminism.
Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan premiered on the New York stage on 28 December 1923 and in London on 26 March 1924. The authors have used these centenaries to revisit the play. This article examines how working together, Shaw and actress Sybil Thorndike, along with her husband, director Lewis Casson, helped to create a new classical acting style for the twentieth century, reimagining the heroism of bygone ages in a way that could still connect to contemporary audiences. It offers a reconstruction of the events and personalities that culminated in Saint Joan's break-through London premiere.
George Bernard Shaw is one of the best-known playwrights and critics of the twentieth century. However, he also stands out as a letter-writer. His correspondence is vast, including actors, directors, publishers, etc. Therefore, Shaw's correspondence has unquestionable historical importance. However, most editions of his letters focus on historical factors and downplay matters of style. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze, from a stylistic perspective, Shaw's epistolary discourse, especially his use of the first-and second-person pronouns and possessive determiners, in his exchanges with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Methodologically, this is a corpus-based study. Thus, a corpus has been compiled with their letters between 1899 and 1939. The digital software AntConc (Anthony, 2020) is the program that has been employed and its tools have been used to analyze the letters and illuminate the use of these pronominal forms, their stylistic function, and the context in which they are employed.
