Bernard Shaw

Dan H. Laurence

Peter Gahan

'If you are not ready to lay the truth at her feet as I am-then you will know to the end of your days that she really belongs to me and not to you.' The Reverend Morell, a socialist preacher, brings a penniless young poet, Eugene Marchbanks, into his home, which is dominated by his fascinating wife, Candida. With its single stage setting and small cast of six characters, Shaw's play is deceptively simple. Centered on a romantic triangle and parodying courtly love and the domestic drama of Ibsen, Candida also abounds with classical allusions, the fervor of a religious revival, and poetic inspiration and aspirations. This is the definitive text prepared under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. This volume includes Shaw's preface of 1898. WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Introduction by PETER LITERATURE

A Pleasant Play

Candida

Peter Gahan argues that George Bernard Shaw anticipated much of what came to be known as poststructuralism. Gahan's path-breaking book rereads Shaw's writing, dramatic and non-dramatic, against the background of recent critical theory in order to reassess its radical influence in both its own time and ours. Though sometimes dismissed today as merely witty, Shaw should be considered one of the progenitors of contemporary literary studies, Gahan says, in that his work actually allows for ideas of theorists such as Derrida and Lacan. Gahan first considers Shaw's poststructuralist pioneering in a general, philosophical way. Taking a fresh and thoughtful look at a wealth of readings, he then examines Shaw's criticism and autobiographical writing, in which questions of authorship and subjectivity were crucial. Gahan looks at essays on music, science, and politics and at Shaw's critique of Darwinian theory, in which he calls for a new metaphysics to be included in the discourse of science. In concentrating on his less familiar plays, Gahan shows how Shaw incorporated themes like writing, language, meaning, and authorship into his playwriting, while acknowledging an awareness of the subjectivity of human experience in general and of the writer's experience in particular. For the first time, the play cycle Back to Methuselah--the work Shaw considered his magnum opus--is examined as central to the oeuvre. This book restores Shaw to his rightful place as a major intellectual figure and as one of the most important authors and dramatists of the early 20th century. It considers the Shaw text as pivotal in the historical break in Western culture between the Victorian and modern world. Its bracing discussion heralds what could be a major shift in the future of Shaw studies.

Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw

Shaw Shadows

This book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb’s ground-breaking pre-World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality, redistribution and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era’s leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb’s famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 – a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State – this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.

Peter Gahan

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