Introduction

Bernard Shaw spent a lifetime—and a very long one—carrying out E. M. Forster’s famous dictum, “only connect.” It seems Shaw managed to know everyone, travel everywhere, and write about everything. This volume surveys some of Shaw’s many connections, a few of them heretofore unknown.

The first essay, by Bernard Dukore, explores how Shaw, even at the outset of his playwriting career, viewed directing as crucial to theater production. Indeed, his work as director influenced his dramatic works: from blocking, stage business, and creating crowd scenes to changing dialogue and devising striking visual effects. The example Dukore provides is an account of the rehearsals for an aborted 1897 production of You Never Can Tell, which Shaw directed. Dukore’s emphasis is on “the interrelationship between director Shaw and dramatist Shaw, combining to create auteur Shaw, whose works harmoniously and seamlessly blend production with his themes, characterizations, and dialogue. The dramatist becomes the director, who influences the dramatist.”

Next, Nelson Ritschel looks at Shaw’s relationship with Dublin amateur theater during the years leading up to the Great War. Beginning with a request for a Shaw week by Dublin’s Players’ Club, under Anthony Evelyn Ashley, Shaw moved to protect his plays from amateur companies attempting to stage them under amateur terms. Yet when Ashley and his wife staged John Bull’s Other Island in 1912, “the production dovetailed nicely with Shaw’s inexpensive publication of the play aimed toward the new Home Rule Bill for Ireland then being debated.” And the following year, when they joined Casmir Markievicz to establish the Dublin Repertory Theatre, Markievicz staged The Devil’s Disciple “in a production that reflected Dublin’s growing labor unrest on the eve of the infamous Dublin Lockout.” In November 1914, Ashley and his wife staged Mrs Warren’s Profession, which Shaw soon followed “with a call in the Dublin press for Irish enlistment in the Great War.”

In his analysis of the lavish 1941 Berlin-based Prussian State Theater production of Pygmalion, Peter Conolly-Smith sheds light “on the popularity of Shaw in Third Reich Germany, Shaw’s conflicted politics, and the complex forces at work in National Socialist cultural policy.” Providing background on Pygmalion’s long-standing popularity among German audiences, Conolly-Smith draws on contemporary press coverage and on the director’s annotated script in order to reveal Shaw’s complicated relationship with the Third Reich.

“Could Lady Hamilton, the play Nelson’s Enchantress, and Stella Campbell,” asks Jesse Hellman, “all connected by Vandeleur Lee and Shaw’s mother, have influenced the creation of Pygmalion?” Emma Lyon, born in poverty in 1765, as a girl was tutored in the social graces by Charles Greville, “a man who regarded her as little more than a project.” She went on to marry an ambassador (Sir William Hamilton) and, as mistress of Horatio Nelson, became one of the most famous women in Europe. In 1897 Shaw reviewed Risden Home’s Nelson’s Enchantress (1897), starring Campbell and Forbes Robertson, and soon told Robertson that he was planning a play for that “‘rapscallionly flower girl’”—Mrs. Pat. Hellman illustrates how in Pygmalion we see similarities to the personalities and relationship of Emma Hart (as she became known) and Greville. “Shaw was both fascinated and repelled by women like Lady Hamilton. Did his ambivalent attitudes find a resolution in Eliza Doolittle?”

Mary Christian then shows how Shaw, in his early plays, “repurposed conventional theatrical tropes and privileged discussion over dramatic closure, redefining drama in ways that some of his contemporaries considered antidramatic.” These strategies are apparent in Candida (1895), written in response to Ibsen’s Doll’s House (1879), which Shaw considered the prototypical New Drama. Christian argues that in questioning popular assumptions about marriage and gender relations, Candida “reworks theatrical genres and devices commonly associated with these assumptions, in particular the dramatic stock characters of the preacher and the poet, and the related performance genres of religious homiletics and poetry reading.” Candida, then, “suggests that marriage itself is a theatrical performance modeled on these and other theatrical forms; thus, traditional theater is to some degree held responsible for...