The Shaw Review Makes a Change for the Better

249 REVIEWS 1. The Shaw Review Makes a Change for the Better Charles A. Berst, ed. Shaw and Religion (University Park and Lond: Pennsylvania State UP, I98I). $15.95. What the title, Shaw and Religion, does not make clear is that this book is the first volume of Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, which itself is a continuation of The Shaw Review. Obviously the editors of The Shaw Review feel that their subject will be better served by an annual rather than a triannual periodical. This in itself raises interesting questions which have wider application to the whole discipline of English studies. Are articles of such immediacy that journals should ensure they reach their audiences every three or four months or so.? Do scholars and other readers really need to be bombarded on all sides by the steady proliferation of journals and their articles? Are the costs of journal publication genuinely warranted? The questions are virtually endless. Shaw, as the book jacket indicates, will possess many advantages over Its forerunner. Not only will the annual volume be twice the size of the periodical, but its format will allow better presentation of individual articles and illustrations. Moreover, the annual permits an editor greater time to gather and solicit articles on a more homogenous theme than is possible with periodical publication. All too frequently the submissions to a journal are random in subject matter, and an editor cannot really delay, say, the publication of two articles on a similar topic in the hopes that a complimentary third or fourth will turn up (an thereby fill an issue). Shaw will enjoy the best of both worlds. It has plenty of time and scope to solicit special topic annuals (such as the present one), while, in the interim, "general" annuals will still appear. I rather imagine, too, that, given the high costs of printing and mailing, an annual wiil stand a better chance of economic survival. Moreover, it seems to me that even a major literary/dramatic figure can be adequately served by an annual publication. And Shaw is generally well-served in this collection of essays which focus on the later Shaw and his plays. Charles A. Berst, in "In the Beginning," argues well that aesthetics are more important than philosophy to Shaw and his conception of religion. Berst's discussion is wideranging and touches on Biblical and biographical sources, examines Shaw's early Pas.sion Play and his five novels, and delineates Shaw's growth and relationship to Ibsen. J. L. Wisenthal, in "Shaw and Ra," argues cogently that the Prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra reflects Shaw's mature religious position and is really inconsistent with the intrinsic argument of the play. Hence the Prologue should not be performed with the rest of the piece. Nevertheless the Prologue does underline nicely "some of the distinctions between the I898 Caesar and Cleopatra and the later history plays that are truly religious, Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan." Ina Rae Hark's article posits the notion that the theme of Captain Brassbound's Conversion is the conversion of individuals and hence' society , where "conversion" means liberating man's intellectual faculties 250 from ignorance. Sidney P. Albert's "The Lord's Prayer and Major Barbara " provides useful and interesting parallels between the two and demonstrates well how the Prayer is an ironic leitmotif to a variety of themes in the play. David Matual presents a well-balanced discussion of the relationship between The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and Leo Tolstoy's Power of Darkness (although one would have to agree with Matual's implicit recognition that Posnet is not really central to our understanding of Shaw). The longest piece is Valli Rao's extensive and detailed analysis of Back to Methuselah in terms of Blake's Jerusalem. Rao stresses that the concern of both works is to make Biblical stories relive. I find here some tendency in the author to be descriptive with regard to Shaw, and I suspect Rao is rather more interested in Blake. The collection is rounded out with Daniel Leary's demonstration that Too True to be Good is a "romantic synthesis" and "a religion for our...