The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw by John A. Bertolini (review)

Book Reviews 685 own opinions in the light of Shaw's ideas would have been even more foolish" (254). While the unLaodicean SIIaw 1/ , because its twenty-one theses are not yet played OUI, will drive tumultuous dialectic on Shaw, it right now needs basic Shaw. First, nowhere does the volume define "political" anent Shaw. To gel on as reviewer. I have throughout applied a definition extrapolated from all of Shaw and from Shaw 1 J's implications. Radically Aristotelian, "political" in Shaw operates when two living beings (recall the vegetarian imperative) aware of one another exist. Second, one must break molds to see the "political" Shaw. He found political kinship among the uncodifiable mighty great of past and present and, by unremitting incentive, learned to tell what he saw and to expand moral/artistic reach and behavior worldwide. That is transcendent polit icking. Third, beware the too confident application of "elite" to Shaw and to his conception of governors (e.g., 27, 70, 143). For Shaw, "elite" was not demographic. Undivided attention happened anywhere: in a flower-girl from the gutter, in a farm girl become France's soul, in millionaires, in mercenaries and philosopher -conquerors. [n government mode, perception could perfonn in Vestry or Parliamentary committees, in dictatorship or parliamentary democracy. BUI no form would guarantee rational humane government. Much less and much more did: the self-discovering, inexhaustible individual, awakened, devoted, infectious. Shaw had no time for "gradual evolution of a superior race" ( 128), certainly nO( when cognition and re/cognition 1/0H' of the furthest reach of the race so far (say, in Sophocles, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Terry, Mozart, himselO could be instantaneous at an artistic stroke of the pen. What could not be predicted was ignition of genius (i.e., of the human norm). But of its unfolding, Shaw will remain an endless case study, haunting and ignored at the peri l of stupefying loss to human destiny. That destiny could he political/social grandeur equal to the creation of man/woman in the image of God, as far as mind can see. A.E. WALLACE MAURER, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY JOHN A. BERTOLINI. Tile Playwrighring Self0/Bernard Shaw. Carbondale and Edwardsville : Southern Illinois UP 1991. Pp. 206. $24.95. The gil in the title of this book reveals much about the nature of Professor Bertolini's approach to Shaw's plays. Bertol ini's Shaw is not just a writer, but very much a wright, an artificer - and one who dwells almost obsessively on the nature of his craft and on himself as a maker. "My argument here," says Bertolini in a footnote to his discussion of the writing table in the first-act set of The Doctor's Dilemma, "rests on the assumption that Shaw is an intensely self-conscious writer." And the argument rests on that assumption throughout this fine study of six of Shaw's major plays (with a chapter too on the one-act plays). The attention to a writing table on the stage is characteristic of Bertolini's melhod. He looks carefully at stage directions, and at all sorts of other detai ls - often apparently 686 Book Reviews Iiule detail s that under hi s subtle scrutiny become significant parts of the play for us. He draws attention to individual words, like "secret" in The Doctor's Dilemma, and to repeated themes. like jobs in Major Barbara. He makes a good deal of Ana's speech about the vandalizing of her father's statue in the Hell Scene of Mall and Superman, and he has much to say about fatnerhood as a theme in the Epistle Dedicatory. He offers two paragraphs on the significance of Fouquet'5 illustrated Boccacio in the Epilogue to Saint l oall. Here again he is looking closely at stage directions; Tlte Play· wriKhfing Se(f ofBernard Shaw is primarily concerned with our experience as readers of Shaw's plays rather than as playgoers. The pJaywrighting self in this book is filled with the anxiety of innuence. Hence the persistent themes of parenthood that Berlolini finds in Shaw's plays. The discussion of Pygmalion, for example. foc uses on Shakespeare as Shaw's progenitor, and on Shaw...