A Shaw Concordance

A SHAW CONCORDANCE* THE ADVENT OF COMPUTERS on the literary scene has drastically altered the making of concordances, as it has altered so many other tasks. Important authors whose works formerly seemed too extensive for the long and painstaking scribal labor that went into a "hand-made" concordance were suddenly placed well on this side of possibility. And foremost among these, in point of both length (his plays and prefaces alone run to more than two million words, and at that are only about a third of his total works) and importance (more books and articles are published about the man and his works than any other figure in English or American literature except Shakespeare) is George Bernard Shaw. A concordance is, of course, a tool for scholarly research in the humanities -one of the few tools, in fact, available to the student of literature , who, unlike his scientific counterpart, most often must rely on the direct application· of his intellect to his subject. And, although concordances of shorter works have traditionally been more numerous simply because they were easier to prepare, in truth it is the more prolific writers who stand in greater need of concordances. For instance , a person interested in Dylan Thomas's use of the word "gentle" might without trepidation scan the few plays and the short poems that make up his works: but anyone who wanted to know how Chaucer used "gentle" would scarcely read the whole canon to find out. Chaucer, fortunately, has long had his concordance; but Bernard Shaw, until the present study was completed, did not. Yet it was clear that if we were ever to examine methodically the language of this great playwright (essayist, critic, novelist, orator) who conceived his occupation to be "that of a master of language," a concordance would certainly be necessary. And Shaw's works were in many respects well-suited to the production of this valuable tool: neither the problems typical of earlier authors (variant, undecipherable, or missing texts) nor those found in more recent writers (full extent of canon unknown) are encountered in G.B.S. The playwright himself edited his works in his lifetime, and with the possible exception of some occasion-piece-a skit, or the like-no further additions are expected to turn up at this point. The least sophisticated but perhaps most frequent use of con- *To be published in 1971 by the Gale Research Co., Detroit, Michigan. 155 156 MODERN DRAMA September cordances is as a simple aid to the memory. One of Shaw's special gifts, moreover, was the wittiness of his discourse; and the thousand and one unusually memorable phrases that this gift produced have created an especially strong need for a Shaw concordance. A greater depth of scholarship that is achieved through the use of concordances is the discovery of an author's characteristic patterns of expression. Such studies not only deepen our understanding of the individual author: they also enrich our knowledge of the potential that our language holds for the expression of ideas. Again, concordances may be used to trace (and, for that matter, to discover) changes in an author's style and content. In the case of Shaw, whose writing spanned three-quarters of a century, the charting of these trends has been particularly difficult without a concordance, and will be particularly rewarding with one. We know that his opinions were never stagnant, and that the range of his interests, expressed in his plays as elsewhere, is unequalled in modern English literature. And by identifying key words associated with given ideas and then locating these words in the text, we can discover the first appearance of ideas, their subsequent growth, and any transformation they may undergo. Such investigation, coupled with the extensive biographical material available on Shaw, should prove to be a very fertile field for scholarship . The making of a Shaw computer concordance, the largest concordance now in existence, has been a long job, a difficult job, and at times a tedious job. It involved three consecutive readings of all Shaw's plays and prefaces-once to grasp the dimensions of the task, and twice more to proofread the text at intermediate stages...