Contents and Contributors:
L. W. Conolly gives a comprehensive and detailed account
of the twenty-five years of resistance by the Lord Chamberlain to
the public presentation of Mrs Warren’s Profession on the
English stage. Conolly’s examination of public and private
commentary and correspondence of the Lord Chamberlain, his officials,
Shaw, and various theater managers provides illuminating insights
into the bizarre world of the British censorship system.
Bernard F. Dukore examines Major Barbara not from
the perspective of discussion play or high comedy—outlooks
that frequently inform analyses of this comedy—but from that
of sexuality, which is central to a play that concerns two couples
engaged to be married, a young man for whom his mother wants to
arrange a marriage, and parents who were estranged after his birth.
A prominent concern of Dukore’s analysis is the implication
of this perspective for actors and directors of the play.
Peter Gahan examines Shaw’s engagement with
Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis in the context of Shaw’s
1922 translation into English of the German play Frau Gittas Sühne,
written by his Viennese translator, Siegfried Trebitsch. Gahan further
proposes a parallel between the transgressive adulterous relationship
that propels the action of Jitta’s Atonement and the transgression
perpetrated by a translator on an author’s original text.
Pat Carter interviews Peter Tompkins, who makes public
a previously confidential portion of Shaw’s 4 December 1944
letter to Molly Tompkins (held in her son’s private collection),
thus revealing the true nature of their relationship.
Dan H. Laurence, approaching Mrs Warren’s
Profession as it passes its century mark, examines the Victorian
underworld that forms its backdrop. He contends that the play’s
ethics have grown with the years and that it has found its niche
among Shaw’s most successful dramas.
Margery M. Morgan takes a cultural-historical view
of Shaw’s part in the movement away from “medieval ideas”
toward enlightened understanding of sexuality and gender. In particular,
she relates his thinking on these matters to the network of scientific
Humanitarians and Arts-and-Crafts aesthetes that accepted the Dubliner
into their society. Testimony to his courage and clarity, his reservations
and defensive strategies, is drawn from his plays and letters across
the years.
To demonstrate the claim that Shaw’s imagination as it is
revealed in the plays is intensely and complexly heterosexual, Harold
E. Pagliaro passes over plays like Man and Superman, Major Barbara,
and Misalliance, where the Life Force works overtly to unite lovers
of its own choosing, and concentrates instead on Candida and Heartbreak
House, plays in which complex perversions of the heterosexual ideal
of the Life Force abound.
Karma Waltonen demonstrates how Shaw’s Saint
Joan illustrates his belief that the individual, through spirit
and genius, can transcend the biological determinism of gender.
In Shaw’s vision, Joan is someone who has at least partially
fulfilled that transcendence, and who, like Shaw himself, has been
made abject because of her superiority.
Rodelle Weintraub offers another in a series of
articles that examines the subtext of a manifest play to explicate
the problem-solving dream in its latent play. Man and Superman,
as a pre-absurdist play, seems deliberately to make little sense
unless one views it as a problem-solving dream-play in which the
latent play complements the manifest play and solves the deep-seated
emotional problem of the dreamer.
Stanley Weintraub evokes the relationship over
four decades between G.B.S. and Kathleen Scott, the attractive and
talented woman who became wife, then widow, of Antarctic explorer
Robert Scott. However avuncular Shaw considered his friendship to
be, it always had a sensual, if safe, edge to it. Charlotte, whose
marriage to Shaw was asexual, even let Kathleen teach G.B.S. to
dance. Kathleen also sculpted him memorably—and he put her
subtly into his plays. |
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