Weintraub on Shaw

This collection of essays by one of the world's leading Shaw scholars makes original and significant contributions to understanding of Shaw on many different fronts. The book is in the mold of previous studies concerned with biographical approaches to Shaw and his work by the same author; but this collection makes attractive additions to Weintraub's imaginatively chosen cast of people—from the pages of history and from among his contemporaries—with whom Shaw engaged.

The first essay, on Shaw's amusingly irreverent "Passion Play" in blank verse about the Christian Holy Family and Judas, provides the best analysis of that strange work that I have come across. The characters in this early, unfinished work are treated with the opposite of sentimental piety. In Shaw's quarrelsome Holy Family, Mary is a shrewish scold and Joseph a "thriftless sot." As Weintraub notes, "husband and wife heartily dislike each other." Jesus is a lazy, ungrateful and rebellious son. (There are clear echoes here of Shaw's tall tales about his own parents and his upbringing.) Judas is portrayed as an intelligent and skeptical commentator on religious issues: Weintraub sees the relation between Judas and Jesus as foreshadowing the numerous pairings of realist and idealist in Shaw's later works.

Weintraub's keen eye for intriguing historical characters and incidents, and for Shaw's creative response to them, is well illustrated in the chapter "Cetewayo: Shaw's Hero from Africa." The "hero from Africa" was the Zulu king who was a leader in the courageous but unequal and unsuccessful battle of resistance by the Zulus to British invasions in 1879. In 1882, Cetewayo made a much-publicized visit to England, while Shaw was writing his fourth, and most successful, novel Cashel Byron's Profession. The Zulu king was well received, gaining a half-hour interview with Gladstone and an audience with Queen Victoria at her home on the Isle of Wight. In his novel Shaw used his fictional Cetewayo satirically as a Candide figure. The Shavian Zulu feels that the filthy air of London "engendered puniness and dishonesty in those that breathed it" and is puzzled by the obviously unfair and unequal distribution of wealth, based on property ownership, in the kingdom. But the real Cetewayo was unfailingly diplomatic and made a very favourable impression on his hosts. Weintraub skillfully dovetails his account of Cetewayo's visit with references to Shaw's use of it in his novel and in the dramatic adaptation he made of the novel in blank verse, The Admirable Bashville.

As a biographer of both figures, Weintraub is well equipped to write the "Disraeli in Shaw" essay, one especially important for the light it throws on Shaw's political opinions and his subscription to the idea of "Tory Democracy," which Shaw told Winston Churchill in a 1946 letter was "Disraeli's invention and your father's [Lord Randolph Churchill's] creed." In the same letter Shaw was fiercely critical of the postwar Labour Party which deposed Churchill, describing it as "a trade-union dictatorship." Echoes of Disraeli's influence and sayings are seen throughout Shaw's works. A prime example offered by Weintraub is the creation of the wily King Magnus in The Apple Cart, who outwits the bickering Labour politicians at every turn. There was indeed a Tory streak in Shaw and Weintraub's case for saying that Disraeli helped to shape it is convincing.

The three essays on Shaw's friendships with Edward Elgar, Lady Colin Campbell and Kathleen Scott provide excellent accounts of those associations, and the essays on Noël Coward and Eugene O'Neill are important for their contributions to understanding Shaw's influence on younger contemporaries. Shaw's satirical playlet The King, the Constitution and the Lady, about the constitutional crisis caused by Edward VIII's affair with Mrs. Wallis Simpson, published in the Evening Standard on 5 December 1936 has been republished elsewhere since. But the essay...