Blood and Fire for the Millennium

On a chilly afternoon in early February 2005, Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, spoke before a crowd of twenty thousand at the Make Poverty History Rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on the eve of addressing finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations. The scene was particularly poignant for Mandela, in that the spot where he delivered his speech had been the scene of countless anti-apartheid demonstrations outside South Africa House in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mandela's address aimed at encouraging the public to put pressure on world leaders to make good on the promises outlined five years earlier in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals; in effect, that by 2015 the developed world would increase and improve aid for the poor by way of debt relief, deliver trade justice, and take real action against the AIDS pandemic. Urging the crowd to "Make Poverty History in 2005," Mandela declared, "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural…. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."¹ The fate of the Third World is one of the great moral issues of our time. Unfortunately, rich countries are far from achieving the Millennium Summit's goals; on the contrary, the developed world still gives too little, both in terms of aid and relief from debt, but also in terms of fair and open terms of trade. To make matters worse, as the current global financial crisis deepens, creating a severe shock to worldwide economic growth, governments appear powerless to halt a global recession that is already ushering in a season of hunger for both the rich and poor of the world.

Even at this historic distance, Shaw's Major Barbara (1905) remains a stark reminder that the scourge of poverty is a predictor of every kind of social instability, violence, and state failure. Given the global balance of power in the wake of 9/11, the "war on terror," and the war in Iraq, this new edition of Shaw's play demonstrates yet again Shaw's enduring aptness to the times. Indeed so prescient is Shaw's drama of ideas, which pits spiritual and worldly power embodied in Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, against her Machiavellian father, millionaire arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, that it requires the full range of Shavian shock literary tactics, recorded and insightfully commented upon by editor Nicholas Grene, to account for our own creative-destructive moment of capitalist predation.

The first aim of this annotated edition of Major Barbara, which includes Shaw's 1906 Preface (following the playtext), is to provide an authoritative text based on a careful collation of all available sources. The result is an erudite edition that illuminates the development of Shaw's protracted work on the play from 1905 through Gabriel Pascal's famous 1941 wartime film version. Taking as his copy-text the Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces (1971), which he collates with the first British edition, John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to Her Husband (1907), Grene's comprehensive survey records all significant documents and their variants: the original draft of the play (comprising both the Derry version of III.ii as well as the revised Edstaston text), the licensing copy of the play submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, and the prompt book used for the play's first production.

In keeping with the high standards of the New Mermaids Series, Grene's well-researched and thoroughly documented edition will serve students directly while also addressing the teachers, scholars, and common readers who comprise Major Barbara's widely ranging readership. On the one hand, the play's narrative structure and thematic intricacy make them ideal subjects for introductory literature courses—including high school English classes and "Introduction to Fiction" courses for college freshmen and sophomores. The structure of the play can be taught in a way that encourages students to see drama as...