Bernard Shaw: A Life, and: Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw (review)

The Shaw industry is alive and well, indeed more robust than perhaps at any other time since Shaw was engaged in his own self-promotion a century or so ago. Even though his Collected Letters have long been available (with the first volume appearing in 1965), a new multivolume series has recently been launched by the University of Toronto Press, which presents not only both sides of the correspondence between Shaw and his most important colleagues but also includes still more unpublished letters. But notwithstanding this Canadian presence or the long and theatrically exciting existence of the Shaw Festival at Niagara on the Lake, the centre of the industry is down south, in Florida—as these two books indicate.

As A. M. Gibbs points out in his judicious and well-written biography, by 1909 Shaw's "fame and achievement as a playwright had grown to the point where he could be described as 'the most famous of living dramatists' in a statement issued by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory" (269). While this proclamation, part of a deliberately provocative anti-censorship campaign centered on the 1909 performance of Blanco Posnet at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, was hardly uncontroversial, it is true enough to justify the current reappraisals of Shaw, half a century after his death. Certainly Shaw's voluminous writings—on music and theatre as a newspaper critic, on politics as a socialist and social critic, on Henrick Ibsen and Richard Wagner, and on himself—as well as his prominence as a public speaker, all served to make Shaw's face (red-bearded with diabolically upturned eyebrows) one of the best known in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. In a very real sense his stature as a dramatist was inseparable from his public reputation, his omnipresence on the social and political scene, and the myths he energetically created about himself.

As early as the 1930s, however, while still producing new and topical plays as well as being the only English playwright to have an annual festival devoted mainly to his work (at Malvern), Shaw was seen as a survival from the Edwardian, or even Victorian age—as indeed in chronological terms he was, being then in his late seventies—and became increasingly ignored by British academia and theatre after his death in 1950. Now, however, the pendulum has swung back again, fuelled by the enthusiasm of Professor Richard Dietrich from the University of South Florida. Almost single-handedly Dietrich has founded the International Shaw Society, organized a series of conferences, such as a sesquicentennial celebration of Shaw at Brown University this year, established an annual symposium at the Shaw Festival, and instituted "The Florida Bernard Shaw Series" in which Peter Gahan's Shaw Shadows appears.

Shaw created his own public persona; naming himself G. B. S., was at once an assertion of depersonalized modernism and a self-fulfilling presumption of fame. Shaw's interest in manipulating his reputation and even identity leads Gahan to subtitle one of his chapters "Biography as Myth." Shaw's continual injection of himself as a character in his own plays, together with the various (and to some extent deliberately inaccurate) autobiographical sketches Shaw supplied to his early biographers and others, as well as in his Sixteen Self Sketches published in 1949, right at the end of his life, creates certain difficulties for any biographer. In Gahan's terms, Shaw created "a bewildering array of supplementary personae," which add up to "a superfluous authorial identity" concluding in the "deconstruction of the authorial subject" (60). From such a position it is a short step to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and the proposition that Shaw was a proto-postmodernist. Gahan begins by wondering whether "the incessant quest for meaning in the Shaw text [is] compatible with poststructuralism" (6). The emphasis...