Bernard Shaw’s Dionysian Trilogy: Reworkings of Gilbert Murray’s Translation of Euripides’s Bacchae in Major Barbara, Misalliance, and Heartbreak House

This article outlines how Bernard Shaw reworks elements from Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides’s Bacchae in Major Barbara (1905), Misalliance (1909/10), and Heartbreak House (1916/17), which taken together constitute a Dionysian trilogy. The article further proposes that the Greek example, and especially the Dionysian with its religious implications as propounded by Murray, was crucial to several aspects of Shaw’s writing including his politics and economics of equality and his philosophy of a life force, while he himself represented the Dionysian Zeitgeist socially, politically, and culturally for that younger generation soon to be decimated in the Great War. This Dionysian Shaw is recognized, as his contemporaries viewed him, as the leading figure in pre-World War I Britain of that first wave of literary modernism, whose impact has been obscured by the better known, perhaps more aesthetically radical, if more politically conservative postwar second wave.