Shaw Annual VI

31:1, Book Reviews mitment to the humanist "ideology of reading" makes him a strong misreader of contemporary theory rather than its skeptical engager (1). Thaïs Morgan ____________________________________Arizona State University_____________ SHAW ANNUAL VI Stanley Weintraub, ed. Shaw: The Annual of George Bernard Shaw Studies, Volume 6. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. $22.50 This extraordinary sixth volume in the series lives up to its publicity as "carrying on the off-beat and far-ranging traditions of Shaw" by including essays in criticism, biographical notes and speculations, two newly-found pieces by Shaw, an interview-essay on his Joan and an account of the indentification and naming of Pointe Bernard Shaw, lies Radisson, Ungava Bay, Québec. This last entry opens the work and, while not setting the tone for what follows , provides the off-beat entry for the year in its description of the topoanthropomorph peninsula, its identification and the process of having the name accepted by federal and provincial committees. The aerial photograph reproduced on page 2 is enough to convince most viewers of the appropriateness of the newly named Pointe although I suspect some will see it in the profile of Ho Chi Minh. The three essays that concern Shaw's literary works principally from a critical perspective form only a small part of a volume dedicated to Shaw and his milieu. In the first, "The Mystery of Candida," Bert Cardullo elaborates on the mystery play elements first identified by Elsie B. Adams and treats the play both as a modern mystery play of the Madonna and Child and as a secular mystery play exploring the mysteries of marriage, art and capitalism and the rebirth of the poet, the pastor and the businessman into self-knowledge at the play's end. Cardullo's argument is well made, persuasive, and contains valuable suggestions for a fresher and closer look at the play. J. Scott Lee similarly brings a fresh perspective to Arms and the Man by examining its comic elements as forming a comic unity not perceived in Shaw's time and contested since. By carefully analysing the comic action, its prologue, and the illusions of Shaw's characters, Lee makes plausible his conclusion that the play's comedy depends on the folly of the characters doing something unnecessary they think they are good at so well and thoroughly that they nearly lose sight of the purpose for which it is done. Paul Sawyer rounds out the trio of critical works in a note tracing the history of the three different final lines of Arms and the Man and illustrating Shaw's tinkering over the years to get an ending that satisfied him. 120 31:1, Book Reviews Six entries deal with varied aspects of Shaw's life, acquaintances and friends in relation to his many concerns as a writer. Sean Morrow's essay on Mabel Shaw as the model for the missionary in TAe Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God draws upon Shaw's "three-cornered correspondence" with Miss Shaw, the founder and Principal of a girls' school at Mbereshi in Northern Rhodesia and J. E. Whiting, a banker in Leeds who disbursed money to the school. The correspondence, drawn from the Shaw papers at Harvard, the London Missionary Society archives, the Arthington Archive in Leeds and the National Archives of Zambia, and the biographical information about Miss Shaw and G. B. Shaw help Morrow make a convincing case of identification. Fred Crawford offers useful speculations about the illustrations of parallels between Jonathan Swift's TAe Conduct of the Allies (1711) concerning the War of the Spanish Succession and Shaw's Common Sense about the War (1914). Shaw himself encouraged such a comparison but not precisely the sort that Crawford elaborates as he describes two writers in opposition to a war presuming to write common sense to audiences generally unprepared to see things their way. In "Shaw, Einstein and Physics" Desmond McRory not only does fine work in highlighting the friendship between the writer and the scientist but also probes Shaw's diverse and complex attitudes toward science by examining Shaw's statements from the 1920s onward, particularly...