The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw ed. by Christopher Innes (review)

humanities 433 and mothers. Although Christians are supposed to do justice, it is no necessary part of sanctity to be a champion of political enlightenment and progress, which makes sanctification appear to the modern mind as an endorsement of the status quo. The Christian's true home is hereafter, and the merely this-worldly utilitarian standard of whether a life assists the cause of female emancipation is quite beside the point. But if a (male) butcher or baker is not in the same position as a mother, the virtues are gender-blind, and so the Catholic church has tried to hold them up to both men and women. The church may, in the nineteenth century, have had more success with women than with men, but that was never its aim, any more than it wanted to bring more women than men to heaven. The author often shows a commendable consciousness that her own world view is not that of her subjects, but her feminist perspective obscures the essentially religious motivation and self-understanding of lives which were lived not for this world but another. (SHERIDAN GILLEY) Christopher Innes, editor. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw Cambridge University Press 1998. xxxii, 344. $54.95, $19.95 Christopher Innes's Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw sets an admirable example in both offering a critical introduction to a writer's œuvre and in presenting innovative scholarship devoted to more specialized topics. What makes this task particularly daunting is the sheer volume of Shaw's writing, his determination, as often criticized as admired, to speak up, whether bidden or unbidden, to do so audibly and all the time. This desire to talk, preach, polemicize, and propagandize led Shaw to speak from and through a multitude of genres. It is the most consistent contribution of this collection to analyse Shaw along generic lines, including his use of dark comedy and the history play, his introductions and prefaces, his reformist writings and his work as a reviewer. That such investigations are not only useful but also suggestive is demonstrated by J.L. Wisenthal's essay, which relates Shaw's writings on music to an operatic quality of his work. Katherine E. Kelly puts a different spin on Shaw's generic crossings by placing his plays and their prefaces in the history of printed literature. Shaw was able to frame his plays with all those notorious prefaces and narrative appendices B as well as with excessive stage directions B only because printed modern drama was to be read as much as to be performed. This is a necessary contribution at a time when the dramatic text has become the laughing-stock of performance studies and when we forget that modern drama is also part of the history of the book. Kelly's contribution also complements beautifully Jan McDonald's instructive essay on Shaw's role at the Court Theatre and his lifelong engagement in staging his own plays, placing him in the company 434 letters in canada 1999 of those dramatists who touched theatre history through the staging of their own œuvre, such as Wagner, Yeats, and Beckett. One reason why Shaw is generally considered to be out of fashion has to do with the fact that he is quite unapologetically what we used to call an engaged or political writer. This term means relatively little for the present current of academic writing that takes everything to be political that has something to do B no matter how B with race, class, and gender. Since there are few things on this earth that do not, the political then enters the work through the eye of the sufficiently conditioned reader who already knows that a given text will inevitably get entangled in these and related issues and who is ready to report back to the applauding academic community. Such reading strategies are not always wrong but they do not fully capture a writer who considered the political to be even more a question of writing and speaking than of reading. Shaw did not shrink from calling his plays propaganda, because his plays are already overtly politicized, but in a late nineteenth-century sense of the word...