Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries

Foreword

Foreword In recent years the concert readings of Shaw’s plays done by the ShawChicago Theater Co. and Project Shaw in New York (by the Gingold Theatrical Group) have convincingly shown that the language of Shaw’s plays is so powerfully evocative that it can stand alone. In these productions, actors with minimal or no costuming standing before microphones on bare stages, using few or no props, speaking with appropriate facial expressions and the slightest body movement, deliver Shaw’s lines with great effect. Yet this sort of minimalist production succeeds partly because the words themselves manage to adequately convey what has been left out, most notably the visual element provided by actors moving about the stage amid the settings described in the stage directions, which in various ways are realized in full productions. That settings are crucial to Shaw’s meanings, whether physically present on the stage or suggested to the imagination in readings, has not been so systematically demonstrated as it is in Tony Stafford’s Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries. To achieve this within a single volume, Professor Stafford has focused on the most meaningful of frequently used settings, that of gardens and libraries, meaningful especially because of their frequent interrelationships in the same play. From Widowers’ Houses to Back to Methuselah, Stafford illustrates his thesis in a significant number of representative plays that as well reveal a sequence of development in Shaw’s dramaturgy over his entire career. Stafford finds in these interrelationships a semiotics of interpretation that sheds considerable light upon Shaw’s dramatic intentions and accomplishments as it relates Shaw’s particular usages of gardens and libraries to· xi · xii · Foreword the larger cultural meanings of such things. Shaw’s presentation of his time and place through the actions of human beings in the particular settings of gardens and libraries has provided and will provide readers and playgoers as meaningful and revelatory a view of the Victorian-Edwardian-Georgian world as one could wish for. R. F. Dietrich Series Editor ...