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Book Reviews STANLEY WEINTRAUB. Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Pp. 255, illustrated. $29·5°· In Shaw's People, the distinguished and prolific Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub has taken twelve of his essays that were originally written between 1960 and 1993 and gathered them (with revisions) into a volume that describes Shaw's connections with those whose encounters with the playwright have "intrigued me most" (I). These comprise a diverse and sometimes unexpected list: Queen Victoria, Wilde, General Booth of the Salvation Army, H.L. Mencken, Edith Adams and her husband Francis (possible originals of the Dubedats in The Doctor's Dilemma), Yeats, Joyce, Frank Harris, T.E. Lawrence, O'Casey, Siegfried Trebitsch (Shaw's German translator), and Churchill. Of these essays, the only piece not to have appeared in print in some form before is a conference paper on Churchill, whom Professor Weintraub describes as a "master at extracting mileage from his material" (228). Some of the twelve really are Shaw's People, to whom he related in often fascinating and revealing ways, while others have rather less of a claim to the title. The chapter on "Bernard Shaw in Darkest England: G.B.S. and the Salvation Army's 'General ' William Booth," for example, is in fact about Shaw's view of the Salvation Army, and his use of the Army and parts of Booth's In Darkest England in writing Major Barbara. And Mencken is only one of Shaw's People in the sense that he wrote the first book about Shaw in 1905, and kept on adulating and excoriating him for many years thereafter - and what the chapter does is to survey Mencken's shifting attitudes towards Shaw, whom he never met. Queen Victoria, on the other hand, does qualify as one of Shaw's People in that Shaw, as Weintraub illuminatingly demonstrates in "Exasperated Admiration: Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria," took a considerable interest in her and wrote about her over a period of morc than half a century . Unlike Victoria, Churchill was personally acquainted with Shaw, and Weintraub chronicles their dialectical- but friendly and mutually respectful relationship , drawing on what they wrote to and about each other. In all of the essays, his range of SOUTce material is impressive. He casts his net widely, and as the author or editor of sixteen books on Shaw, and as the former longtime editor of SHAW: The Annual ofBernard Shaw Studies and its predecessor, he knows where to cast it. Throughout the book he makes good use of Shaw's diaries, which he edited, and the essays on Frank Harris, T.E. Lawrence,-and Queen Victoria benefit from the fact that he has written or edited books concerned with each of them. One of Weitraub's principal interests is possible originals of characters in Shaw's plays, and this volume offers some ingenious suggestions that go strikingly beyond the usual attempts at identification. He suggests ways in which Queen Victoria may have served as an original for the queen in Caesar 166 Book Reviews and Cleopatra, with Melbourne, Prince Albert, and Disraeli as partial Caesarprototypes and Baroness Lehzen as an original for Ftatateeta. And he presents evidence to make one think about both Broadbent in John Bull's Other (sland and Balbus in The Apple Cart as deriving in certain ways from Churchill. The four essays that reveal Professor Weintraub at his best, it seems to me, are' the ones devoted to Shaw's fellow Irish writers: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and O'Casey. In each of these pieces - and particularly in the one on Yeats, which is the most substantial piece of scholarship in the volume - Weintraub has gathered together materials from a great variety of sources, and has arranged them in a way that clearly tells the story of the relationship between Shaw and the other writer. (I also very much enjoyed reading the Trebitsch piece, but here I must declare an interest in that portions of it seem unaccountably to have migrated from my own review of Bernard Shaw's Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch.) Another virtue of Shaw's People is the inclusion of some fine quotations...

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