In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Christopher Wixson

In the fall of 1937, the Sunday Referee, edited at the time by Bernard Shaw's occasional chronicler R. J. Minney, printed an unusual short piece titled "How Do You Answer the Telephone?" It declared that "famous people take no notice" of the post office's directive to immediately "announce your identity" after picking up the phone. Disappointingly, celebrities, it reported, tend to "answer the telephone bell with a plain 'Hullo!'" However, as with most other things, Shaw proved to be a "notable exception," and the article recounted that, upon receiving a call, the playwright apparently "assumed that there was no need to announce himself [and] merely opened with: 'And what can I do for you?'"1

Shaw's provocative salutation certainly reverberates into the twenty-first century, as the contents of this issue of SHAW attest. His writings continue to provide us with insight and enlightenment, wicked humor and rhetorical style, and challenges to our assumptions, beliefs, and practices, speaking as urgently nowadays as they did during his lifetime. As part of this ongoing conversation, this volume meaningfully deepens our understandings of Shaw as a person, as a writer, and as an international figure.

Bernard Dukore anchors the issue with an assessment of Shaw as a parent, gauging the degree to which he was animated by a paternal spirit. Deftly marshaling together personal experiences from Shaw's childhood and adult life, his prolific public meditations on parent-child relations, education, discipline, and labor practices in his critical writing, and the thematic treatment [End Page 197] of fatherhood in his creative writing, Dukore persuasively demonstrates that Shaw did indeed possess "a father's heart." Continuing in the biographical vein, Jesse M. Hellman explores Shaw's three-year relationship with Grace Gilchrist that ended abruptly and mysteriously in 1888. Noting familial affinities between the Gilchrists and the Shaws as well as contemporary perceptions of Shaw's treatment of Grace as thoughtless and philandering, Hellman proposes these "strained relations" as part of the creative genesis of Man and Superman, taking a view of Shaw's 1903 play as "a reworking, an answer as it were, to inner conflicts with which he was struggling."

The volume's middle is filled out by three essays that nourish our appreciation of the literary Shaw. Stanley Weintraub serves up a delightful sampling of Shaw's ubiquitous playlets embedded within a variety of genres across the playwright's career. These rediscoveries remind us that Shaw's "innate impulse," even in nondramatic writings, has always been toward the dialogic, that "the playwright in him was ever present, even when he was not writing a play." He shrewdly understood that language is at its most vital when it is in play; consequently, as Weintraub maintains, "for Shaw, the page was also the stage."

Building upon Shaw's professed admiration of Charles Dickens's work and the numerous allusions and references to it across his public and private writing, Pablo Ruano employs a corpus-based methodology to identify linguistic patterns of "arresting likeness" of literary style in Dickens's fourteen complete novels and Shaw's five apprentice novels. In the three case studies Ruano presents, "the remarkable systematicity of the patterns" indicates that "Shaw's acknowledged Dickensian influence goes beyond the themes, scenes, and characters he borrowed from Dickens."

James Armstrong then shifts the focus to the world-premiere production of Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci in 1886, under the auspices of the Shelley Society. In his essay, Armstrong argues that, although the production was a critical failure, for Shaw, already a Shelley disciple and having been recruited by the Society to head up press relations, The Cenci profoundly influenced his dramaturgy. Even if the "outward form of Romantic drama" no longer resonated, its "excitement and energy" could be refashioned for modern audiences into serious and meaningful plays, "unpleasant" or otherwise. Armstrong demonstrates Shaw's grapple with Shelley "over aesthetic issues as well as moral ones" in the composition of Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren's Profession.

Next come two essays from our "Shaw and Foreign Relations" desk. Kay Li provides a fuller context for Shaw's 1933 encounter with Chang Hsiao Liang in...

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