Project MUSE®: SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 20 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw StudiesTWOProject MUSE®SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies1529-14800741-5842Latest articles in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971922
<p></p>
The charge of Bernard Shaw having "bees in his bonnet" goes back to at least the turn of the last century. The "Small Talk" section of the 20 July 1898 issue of The Sketch approved of The London Year-Book's recent "brevets of London character" series, including a "capital masque of fools, in which everybody who is anybody is trotted out." The example cited is:
Here's Bernard Shaw! with bonnet full of bees,
Of follies, Irish facts and theories.
A droll, yet sad to listen to for long;
Brilliant, but ever desperately wrong.
Mixed in expression; quick to understand;
Cast in the formless matrix of his land.1
In the early 1930s, an unusual Irish group raised objection to, as the Glasgow Daily Record put it, "the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallIntroduction2025-10-17text/htmlen-USIntroduction2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®203492026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17The Zombie Comstock Law and Shaw: Contraceptives and Abortions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971923
<p></p>
In September 1905, Arthur Elmore Bostwick, head of the Circulation Department of the New York Public Libraries in Manhattan, banned Man and Superman from the open shelves. But it remained on the open shelves in public libraries in Brooklyn, the proverbial city across the river. The New York Times reported that he disapproved of all Shaw's plays and opposed children reading them since they were bound to misinterpret his radical attacks on social conditions. If a little east sider were to read, in Man and Superman, that a criminal on trial is no more crooked than the magistrate trying him, he asked, would this lower juvenile crime? When the paper's London correspondent requested a comment by Shaw—who mistakenly
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallThe Zombie Comstock Law and Shaw: Contraceptives and Abortions2025-10-17text/htmlen-USThe Zombie Comstock Law and Shaw: Contraceptives and Abortions2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®879122026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Bernard Shaw, Augustin Hamon, and Common Sense about the War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971924
<p></p>
"The time has now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war." Thus opens Common Sense about the War,1 published in England as a "Special War Supplement" of The New Statesman on 14 November 1914 and in the New York Times on 15, 22, and 29 November.2 Shaw's 35,000-word article was intended as a wake-up call to all belligerent nations to come to their senses and assume responsibility for their warmongering. Its unintended consequence was to alienate many of Shaw's friends and colleagues and turn Shaw into a pariah. "It fell upon the astounded public with the detonation of a thunder clap," writes Archibald Henderson, and, as Dan Laurence notes, "generated a fury of outrage and splenetic
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallBernard Shaw, Augustin Hamon, and Common Sense about the War2025-10-17text/htmlen-USBernard Shaw, Augustin Hamon, and Common Sense about the War2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®371042026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Bernard Shaw, the Wisdom-Power Dialectic, and a Constellation of Vindicatory Thematics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971925
<p></p>
This article seeks to defend Bernard Shaw against the charge that he irredeemably besmirched his legacy by supporting the reigning dictators of the age, primarily Mussolini, Hitler, and especially Stalin. Specifically, it aims to counter the negative portrait Matthew Yde paints in his Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia.1 This book critiqued the Anglo-Irish polemicist for alleged ingrained totalitarian impulses, which Yde claims would countenance grievous crimes on a grand scale in return for a socialist paradise on earth.Yde grounded his argument against Shaw on the following cluster of related assertions: that Shaw harbored lifelong obsessive drives (1) to control circumstances, (2) to bring
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallBernard Shaw, the Wisdom-Power Dialectic, and a Constellation of Vindicatory Thematics2025-10-17text/htmlen-USBernard Shaw, the Wisdom-Power Dialectic, and a Constellation of Vindicatory Thematics2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®1087322026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Mercury's Heartbreak: From Bernard Shaw to Orson Welles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971926
<p></p>
The main professional contact between Bernard Shaw and Orson Welles occurred in relation to the Mercury Theatre's 1938 revival of Heartbreak House in New York, which the latter directed and in which he played (at twenty-two, no less) Captain Shotover. A strict and accurate account of their interaction, almost always relegated to a footnote in Shaw Studies, remains a bit of an elusive muddle for Welles biographers. As Simon Callow bemoans, that situation is far from unusual. "A question mark hovers over practically every aspect of Welles's life and work. … The source of confusion is, almost without exception, Welles himself [although] he has been eagerly abetted in the construction of his personal myth by legions of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallMercury's Heartbreak: From Bernard Shaw to Orson Welles2025-10-17text/htmlen-USMercury's Heartbreak: From Bernard Shaw to Orson Welles2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®1005362026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Shaw's "The Miraculous Revenge" and its Possible Revelation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971927
<p></p>
Bernard Shaw's short fiction "The Miraculous Revenge" was first published in the London journal, Time, in March 1885, and again in Dublin's short-lived literary journal, The Shanachie in 1906.1 While not known as some of his Irish contemporaries are for collecting folklore, in composing his story set mostly in rural County Wicklow, Ireland, Shaw adapted a specific Wicklow folktale. It is a tale, through its localized connections, that reveals a compelling surprise that possibly echoed nearly thirty years later.Michael J. Holland in "Shaw's Short Fiction: A Path to Drama," notes that the Irish ferryman character in "The Miraculous Revenge" is an example of "Shaw's early attempt to capture colloquial dialogue [which]
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallShaw's "The Miraculous Revenge" and its Possible Revelation2025-10-17text/htmlen-USShaw's "The Miraculous Revenge" and its Possible Revelation2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®470212026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: A Corpus-Based Study of Their Correspondence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971928
<p></p>
Bernard Shaw was a lifelong letter writer and because of this, one of the aspects of his work that has received a greater deal of critical scrutiny is his correspondence. As many scholars have pointed out, the importance of his correspondence for the study of his life and works cannot be overstated.1 In quantitative terms alone, his epistolary output is immense, although there is no consensus on the exact number of letters that he penned. For example, Dan H. Laurence claims that Shaw wrote around a quarter of a million letters and postcards.2 However, Charles A. Carpenter estimates that Laurence's figure "seems highly questionable" and that it was "virtually impossible for him" to have written that many letters.3
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallBernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: A Corpus-Based Study of Their Correspondence2025-10-17text/htmlen-USBernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: A Corpus-Based Study of Their Correspondence2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®1057202026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Shavians in Colonial Ghana: Kobina Sekyi and Mabel Dove
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971929
<p></p>
Over the course of the past few decades, several studies have examined how Bernard Shaw's oeuvre has been adopted and adapted by theater professionals and influenced playwrights beyond Britain and Ireland. Much of this has been dominated by focusing on western Europe and North America, but there has been recent research into Shaw's impact in China, Japan, Brazil, and Hispano-American countries.1 However, there have yet to be similarly sustained explorations of his relationship to the rest of Asia and there is even less known about how African dramatists have engaged with Shaw and drawn upon his dramaturgy. By turning our attention to colonial Ghana, where Shaw affected the development and reception of a modern
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallShavians in Colonial Ghana: Kobina Sekyi and Mabel Dove2025-10-17text/htmlen-USShavians in Colonial Ghana: Kobina Sekyi and Mabel Dove2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®720132026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17The Transformation of the Shavian New Woman: A Comparison of Pygmalion and Three Film Adaptations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971930
<p></p>
Much work has been dedicated to Bernard Shaw's handling of the New Woman—"a small but growing class of females in [Shaw's] era, both on- and off-stage, who were economically independent and sexually liberated"1—in his works. These analyses have focused largely on his presentation of female protagonists and whether they achieve a transformation toward independence, or whether they ultimately remain constrained by society and patriarchal structures. These portrayals are of course influenced by the social circumstances during which he was writing: first-wave feminism and the fight for political rights, particularly suffrage. Yet, literary works are not static objects that merely memorialize a specific moment in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallThe Transformation of the Shavian New Woman: A Comparison of Pygmalion and Three Film Adaptations2025-10-17text/htmlen-USThe Transformation of the Shavian New Woman: A Comparison of Pygmalion and Three Film Adaptations2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®418862026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Embodying Heroism in Saint Joan: Thorndike, Casson, Shaw, and the London Premiere that Reshaped the Modern Theater
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971931
<p></p>
The Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898, helped to formalize techniques of "modern" acting, providing a specific "method" for representing modern plays. Classical acting at the time, though, continued to rely on the conventions of the Victorian era. Dramatic declamations in cavernous theaters remained the norm for Shakespeare, but contemporary plays more and more relied on subtle and nuanced performances pioneered by Stanislavski and his followers. The modern style did not always work well, however, when applied to blank-verse dramas in medieval or Renaissance settings. Was there any way to bridge these two styles of acting? Could modern acting techniques
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallEmbodying Heroism in Saint Joan: Thorndike, Casson, Shaw, and the London Premiere that Reshaped the Modern Theater2025-10-17text/htmlen-USEmbodying Heroism in Saint Joan: Thorndike, Casson, Shaw, and the London Premiere that Reshaped the Modern Theater2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®1046882026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17A Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Bernard Shaw on Italian Culture, Politics, and Theater
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971932
<p></p>
The entries below were collected from the following sources: works about Shaw in Italian in the Archibald Henderson Collection of George Bernard Shaw at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; W. Eugene Davis, gen. ed., George Bernard Shaw: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, 3 vols. (Northern Illinois University Press, 1986–87); Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1983; references in brackets provided below); and various online sources.Recent Italian interest in Shaw is evinced by a volume of thirteen plays (with their prefaces) newly translated by eight Italian scholars. George Bernard Shaw. Teatro (Bompiani, 2022), a massive tome of some 3,315 pages
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallA Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Bernard Shaw on Italian Culture, Politics, and Theater2025-10-17text/htmlen-USA Selected Bibliography of Writings By and About Bernard Shaw on Italian Culture, Politics, and Theater2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®1009942026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17Shaw and India
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971933
<p></p>
Bernard Shaw—an iconoclast even in his youth—turned away from his Christian upbringing when he was still a boy. If he had been a more conventional thinker, he might have professed atheism and forgotten about religion. In typical Shavian fashion, however, Shaw decided to invent his own religion, built around the concepts of Creative Evolution and the Life Force. He undertook a lifelong study of religion, including the religions of India—the subject of Gautam Sengupta's new book Revisiting Shaw: George Bernard Shaw Looks at India. Sengupta has written an intriguing examination of the religions of India—with a bonus. His entire book is written in a Shavian context.Sengupta's book draws from two important sources. One
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallShaw and India2025-10-17text/htmlen-USShaw and India2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®59402026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17A Continuing Checklist of Shaviana
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934
<p></p>
When I was preparing my doctoral thesis on the reception of Shaw in Spain—focusing on his translations, the theatrical productions of his plays, and the influence of Spanish culture on his work—I never imagined that one day I would be responsible for continuing the checklists initially compiled by John Pfeiffer and later by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín for SHAW (and the previous Shaw Review's checklists). These invaluable resources greatly assisted me in my thesis and subsequent research, and I owe them a great deal. I hope I have lived up to the legacy of these giants who came before me and that I can perhaps contribute to ensuring that a future young scholar interested in Shaw does not feel lost amid the vastness
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971934">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/180/image/coversmallA Continuing Checklist of Shaviana2025-10-17text/htmlen-USA Continuing Checklist of Shaviana2025-10-172025TWOProject MUSE®3554102026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-10-17