Introduction

In its 29 July 1922 issue, Collier's magazine challenged its readers to identify the public personality who best fit the following description:

In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow,Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee,There is no living with thee or without thee.

Six weeks later, a long list of contenders had emerged that included H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Charlie Chaplin, David Lloyd George, and a generous assortment of husbands, wives, siblings, children, and in-laws. Two figures, however, reportedly "ran far ahead of the whole field"—Collier's columnist "Uncle Henry" and Bernard Shaw—with the latter "a shade to the good" from the former. A "verse verdict" written by W. E. Philips of Durham, North Carolina, deemed the contest deadlocked:

One cannot quite determine whether best the verses fitA droll and kindly irony or keenly caustic wit,So between these two celebrities the question is a draw—Whether our "Uncle Henry" or the Irish Bernard Shaw.

In lieu of declaring a single winner, Collier's chose to print nomination letters submitted by the most "admirable pickers and choosers" among readers, beginning with one for Shaw crafted by Robert E. Dundon of Louisville, Kentucky:

Of course, the quotation applies to none other than that international literary firebrand, George Bernard Shaw.

We live very much in the present, which is why we see characters looming large on the stage which will, like some of the new stars discovered by our high-powered telescopes, in time drop away to a smaller magnitude, if they do not entirely disappear.

Regardless of whether or not the verdict of the years will post the name of Shaw high in the annals of literature, he is as much a modern phenomenon as Edison, or Marconi, or the phonograph or radio.

Shaw is a human paradox. He is extract of emotion, a whizzbang of Magna Charta, Fourth of July, and the Marseillaise combined, if you will pardon the mixed figure.¹

Nearly a hundred years later, as the contents of this issue demonstrate, Shaw continues to whizz and bang his way through the second decade of the twenty-first century.

The first two articles fruitfully trace ways in which Shaw's drama was informed by his own personal experiences. The playwright's short trip to Bruges in 1902 becomes a creative crucible in Peter Gahan's fascinating look at both of Shaw's Saint Barbara plays, Major Barbara (1905) and The Glimpse of Reality (1910). Analyzing the influence of the saint's iconography in fifteenth-century Netherlandish drawing and painting upon Shaw's representations, Gahan seeks to "prize open an element of Shaw's dramaturgy that has garnered little critical attention: how the onetime art critic employs Western figurative art in his plays, something he himself pointed to as part of their very fabric." In "Shaw's Interior Authors: Censored and Modern," Lagretta Tallent Lenker provocatively gathers together Mrs. Clandon, John Tanner, Fanny O'Dowda, the Brothers Barnabas, and Saint Joan, all artists who create works (often Shavian in form and content) that run afoul of various authorities, to make the case for Shaw's ongoing engagement with the issue of censorship. These "curious, often eccentric" characters reaffirm for the playwright the "stage [as] the artistic incubator for social change and for modernism itself" and dramatize "how new ideas and creative endeavors to move society forward can be stymied by the suppression of their revolutionary spirits."

The remaining articles in this volume explore Shaw's intertextual relations and further nourish our appreciation of his choices and vision as a writer by situating his plays in conversation with the work of classical and contemporary authors. Daniel Leary, in "Anagoge/Archetype in Arms and the Man: Shaw, Virgil, and Jung," supplies the final component of his extended reflection upon Arms and the Man and Virgil's The Aeneid, the first three-fourths of which appeared in SHAW 37.1 (pages 101–34). He maintains that both "were deep writers with an unsatisfied 'Perception' of what man was, of what he might...