Genesis of a Dramatic Critic

GENESIS OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC ANOTIIER COLLECTION (thefourth since 1906) of Shaw's Saturday Review drama articles has recently made its paperbacked appearance.1 To attempt to review it here would be to traverse critical pathways too heavily trafficked already; these weekly feuilletons have long since joined the theater essays of Hazlitt, Addison and Steele, and Coleridge in immortality. But at the same time they have tended to create a false impression that Bernard Shaw the dramatic critic was conceived out of a vacuum on that 4th of December 1894 when he called on Frank Harris and agreed to visit the theater professionally for a salary of £6 a week (surely no editor ever received better value for his money). The "Saturday" articles gave Shaw a wider audience than he had hitherto known (or, rather, than had hitherto known him, for many of his critical writings-in the Pall Mall Gazette, the Dramatic Review, Truth, the Penny Illustrated Paper, etc.-had previously been unsigned); but to state, as one of Harris's biographers does, that "this marked Shaw's entrance into the literary arena," a view too frequently endorsed by Shaw's own biographers, is to reveal little knowledge of Shaw's formative literary years. The statement ignores five novels (four of which had been serialized in England, and one of them, Cashel Byron's Profession, twice pirated in the United States as early as 1886); four plays (two of which had been produced, and one, Arms and the Man, critically acclaimed both in London and New York); The Quintessence of Ibsenism ; and seven years of musical criticism for the Star (as the popular Como di Bassetto) and the World (where the initials ~