Introduction

An advertisement for Edgeworth tobacco appearing in the 5 March 1921 issue of Collier’s begins by quoting columnist Franklin Pierce Adams saying that “the only great writer . . . actually opposed to tobacco is G. Bernard Shaw.” When asked to consider what Shaw “might have been had he ever learned to smoke,” Adams replied, “We are thinking . . . . and now that we have thought four minutes—one minute to a dot—our conclusion is that he would have been less crotchety, less irritable, and less the way he is. And the way he is is the way he ought to be. If Shaw were a smoker, we conceive of him as a sort of ninth-rate Barrie.” The voice of the copy barely concedes Adams’s point (“Possibly.”), proffering for contrast Thomas Carlyle, a “rather crotchety and somewhat of a master of invective [who] was a smoker.” “However,” it awkwardly continues, “judging by people in general, instead of by these brilliant exceptions, smoking unquestionably does smooth down one’s feelings.”ⁱ The conclusion enumerates in great detail the relaxing effects of smoking and especially the superior quality of Edgeworth’s, never returning to the subject of its opening conceit.

Why would a tobacco company choose to anchor its campaign with such a prominent nonsmoker? By the 1920s, advertising agencies were well aware of the public’s fascination with and recognition of the GBS brand, and the marketing value of fashioning their pitch to resemble a news article boldly headlined “If Bernard Shaw Had Learned to Smoke” must have seemed too lucrative to resist. The irony is that the piece trades upon GBS’s puckish style of peevish skepticism while at the same time pushing a product that neuters that very quality in the modern consumer: “Put a good pipeful of the right tobacco in the mouth of a man irritated with the way things are going and things immediately begin to look better to him. A few puffs, and he ceases to be quite so critical.” In other words, after a drag or two, you see things; and you say “Why worry?”

Besides Shaw’s antipathy toward tobacco (the only feeling, according to biographer St. John Ervine, he and Charlotte had in common), this promotional profiteering must have particularly irked the playwright since he worked tirelessly throughout his career to awaken a public gulled by various forms of analgesic propaganda that sought to lull it into a dangerous complaisance. The thought of Shaw “smoothing down” is anathema to his indispensably Teiresian relationship to just about every aspect of his culture across more than six decades. A quiescent GBS (or even an acquiescent GBS) is simply unthinkable.

Rather than demanding urgent remedy, Shaw’s querulousness is, for our own very challenging times, a desirable model of resolute interrogation, calling out and pushing back meaningfully, articulately, and always cleverly. And because the incorrigible preacher still will not be denied his peroration, his writing continues to challenge the orthodoxies of our current thinking in a world stubbornly demonstrating its obtuseness amid ongoing social injustice, increasing international insecurity, and profuse violence.

This robust issue of SHAW begins with two essays that deepen our understandings of two of Shaw’s most famous plays. Desmond Harding productively complicates the dialogic relationship between Major Barbara (1905) and modernism by analyzing how the playwright deploys the premodern utopia as a lens through which his critique of industrial capitalism can be starkly realized. Then, Gerald R. Mueller, through a reading of Man and Superman (1903), works to clarify the relationship between Shaw and Nietzsche’s connections to eugenicist thinking and totalitarianism.

The issue’s next two offerings turn to the creative legacy of two of Shaw’s less well-known works. Derek McGovern guides us through two late twentieth-century musical adaptations of The Admirable Bashville (1901), one that retained the bulk of Shaw’s play and one that considerably revised it, and argues that, unexpectedly, the latter proves the more Shavian in form and spirit. Then, Kay Li figures the influence of Androcles and the Lion (1912) on Xu Bei Hong’s 1924 painting Slave and the Lion as indicative of how young Chinese...