Bernard Shaw's The Glimpse of Reality and the Iconography of Saint Barbara

Bernard Shaw wrote not one Saint Barbara play but two, and this article shows how the iconography of the saint in fifteenth-century Netherlandish art had decisive implications for both Major Barbara (1905), one of his best known and most highly regarded, and The Glimpse of Reality (1910), perhaps his least known and most critically neglected. Focusing on this apparently slight, peripheral work, even among Shaw's shorter plays, will facilitate prizing 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. And key to Shaw's understanding of the iconography of Saint Barbara was a short trip the former art critic made to Bruges in 1902, specifically to view the largest ever exhibition up that time of the art of so-called Flemish primitives.