In Search of Shaw’s DNA

No one has made a more significant contribution to the assembly of Bernard Shaw’s biography than Stanley Weintraub. This book picks up many of the threads that constitute the immense log of his research on Shaw. It ends with a description of Shaw’s curtain speech after the first performance of his first play, Widowers’ Houses, Weintraub noting that Shaw declared that “‘what he had dramatized was an unsavory reality in contemporary life, but he ‘heartily hoped that the time would come when the play … would be utterly impossible and wholly unintelligible.’ The passage of years would prove it to be neither. Although the first production achieved only two little-regarded performances, the stage had finally claimed Shaw. Now there would be no stopping him” (197).

In fall 1987 began my friendship with Fred Crawford (1947–99), the amazing SHAW Annual editor (1989–99) to whom Weintraub has dedicated Bernard Shaw Before His First Play: The Embryo Playwright. Fred had just joined our English department. He soon gave me, as a gift, B. C. Rosset’s Shaw of Dublin: The Formative Years (1964), with its dust cover proclaiming “A revealing inquiry into the little-known youth of GBS,” and informed me it was something of a game-changer in the writing of Shaw’s life story. The dust cover also announced in font just a bit smaller than that for Rosset’s name, “with a foreword by Stanley Weintraub.” At the end of Rosset’s “Acknowledgments” are his thanks “to Dr. Stanley Weintraub of the Pennsylvania State University and editor of The Shaw Review for his Archerlike encouragement and guidance” (xii). Six pages into his introduction Rosset writes, “And what of the effects of the Hatch Street ménage à trois upon this artist in embryo?” (xviii), perhaps borrowing “embryo” from the 1959 Weintraub essay revisited in part 6 of the summary below. Weintraub, with “embryo playwright” in the title of this new book, repeats his own earlier use of the phrase. The metaphor is viral.

The book’s subject is Shaw’s biography, and the intention of this review is mostly to salute its representation of the great body of Weintraub’s scholarship on Shaw. The importance of the facts of the early life of a person cannot be overstated. But the meaning of an early life of Shaw cannot be comprehended without a record of the rest of his life. Weintraub’s work, in one way or another, manages to account for it all. Biography and history are Weintraub’s passion. In many books Shaw is his principal subject. In addition, he has written biographies of numerous other people whose lives run parallel to Shaw’s in some part of the calendar of Shaw’s long life: T. E. Lawrence, Reginald Turner, Aubrey Beardsley, James Whistler, the Rossettis, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Edward VII, Benjamin Disraeli, Lionel de Rothschild—and many, many others.

Embryo Playwright’s fourteen numbered parts “have been written and edited over more than half a century, and follow here … in much updated and augmented form. Several sections are new for this book” (4). Together, they are a progress report and an encore of the gargantuan work of Wein-traub as Shaw’s biographer, chronicler, and interpreter.

The first chapter, “1. Passion without ‘Passion,’ Shaw’s Abortive Jesus Play,” uncovers the imprint of the mythology, diction, and syntax of traditional Christian narratology on Shaw’s discourse. Weintraub also provides a contrast to the “Jesus Play,” which Shaw left unfinished in 1878, with Tim Rice’s/Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar and Shaw’s Saint Joan, each of which dramatizes an existential passion and death. The essay then explains why Shaw ultimately chose against dramatizing the passion of Jesus.

“2. Sketches for a Self-Portrait” shows how “Shaw made literary use of himself—and wrote his informal autobiography—all his life” (20). These pages...