Why does such a large proportion of the criticism devoted to Shavian drama deal with such a surprisingly small number of plays? Of Shaw's more than fifty works for the stage, few are looked at and many deserve closer attention. This volume, dealing with pieces of lesser prominence in the canon, aims to enrich our sense of the range and depth of Shaw's achievement as a playwright. Contributors to Shaw 7 have construed neglect broadly to include dramas slighted on the stage, on the page, or both. Fresh perspectives are offered on two dozen full-length and shorter plays ranging from The Philanderer (1893) to Shakes Versus Shav. The Neglected Plays presents the latest work by such well-known critics as Charles A. Berst (on The Man of Destiny), Frederick P.W. McDowell (on You Never Can Tell), and Barbara Bellow Watson (on The Apple Cart) as well as essays by promising younger scholars on plays such as Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction and Buoyant Billions. A collection of newspaper pieces revives no less an expert than Shaw himself on the subject of his own neglected plays. Finally, an exhaustive bibliographical article by Charles A. Carpenter points toward possibilities for future research. Shaw 7: The Neglected Plays challenges some established critical assumptions, in the process revealing Shaw to be a far more self-conscious modernist than is usually supposed. The book will be of interest not just to professional Shavians, but also to all who share a love for the modern theater.

Shaw, now in its twenty-second year, publishes general articles on Shaw and his milieu, reviews, notes, and the authoritative Continuing Checklist of Shaviana, the bibliography of Shaw studies.

Sir George Bernard Shaw’s contribution to the Western theatre is unparallel, and hence, is imitated, remembered and read by literature lovers even today. Over the course of his life he wrote more than 60 plays, and nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes more palatable. In these works, Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, healthcare, and class privilege as primary themes of his plays. This book is an anthology of some of Shaw’s important plays, which are much talked about, and also prescribed in the English Literature syllabuses of all premier Indian and International Universities. As the title suggests, the book focuses on three important social components of that period—Politics, War and History. The plays discussed and critically analyzed are both in terms of Shaw’s interpretation of his times, and the author’s research on the subject. This book is suited for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of English. Besides, the students doing research work in Shaw’s plays will be benefitted reading this book.

SHAW 18 offers fourteen articles that illuminate aspects of Shaw's family history, relations with contemporaries, evolving reputation, and dramatic works. Dan H. Laurence presents an authoritative genealogy of the Shaw and Gurly sides of Shaw's family. Among discoveries that have long eluded Shaw's biographers is the birthdate of Elinor Agnes "Yuppy" Shaw, Shaw's sister. Michael W. Pharand assesses Shaw's intense dislike of Sarah Bernhardt. Stanley Weintraub analyzes Shaw's presence in the plays of Eugene O'Neill. Shaw's Advice to Irishmen, a newspaper account of Shaw's 1918 Dublin lecture "Literature in Ireland," records Shaw's comments on George Moore, J. M. Synge, and James Joyce. Robert G. Everding surveys Shaw festivals from 1916 in Ireland to the present-day Shaw festivals in Ontario and Milwaukee. In a review of Frank Harris on Bernard Shaw (1931), Richard Aldington dismisses Shaw as human being, thinker, and dramatist: "You must be a Shavian to admire and love Shaw the artist." In an interview with Leon Hugo, biographer Michael Holroyd discusses his biography of G.B.S., responses to his biography, and future work involving G.B.S. Jeffrey M. Wallmann argues that alienation in Shaw's plays enhances their contemporary value. Bernard F. Dukore investigates Shaw's reasons for discarding the original final act of The Philanderer. Rodelle Weintraub argues persuasively that You Never Can Tell requires the audience to choose between "Crampton's reality" and "Crampton's dream." Mark H. Sterner, weighing the various charges against Ann Whitefield's character in Man and Superman, concludes that Shaw's treatment of her and Tanner "as significantly different, but nevertheless equal . . . in itself was a revolutionary change in the status of sexual power relationships." Julie A. Sparks identifies W. W. Henley's sonnet "'Liza" as a likely source not only for some of Eliza's traits in Pygmalion but also for images in Man and Superman and Major Barbara. Charles A. Carpenter considers Buoyant Billions and Farfetched Fables in the context of Shaw's response to the birth of the atomic age. Paul Bauschatz, evaluating the differences between My Fair Lady and Pygmalion, illustrates why the film can reflect Shaw's play "only uneasily." SHAW 18 includes five reviews of recent additions to Shavian scholarship as well as John R. Pfeiffer's "Continuing Checklist of Shaviana."

Bertolini provides close, subtle readings of six of Shaws major plays: Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctors Dilemma, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan. He also devotes a full chapter to the one-act plays.

The early conclusion that Shaw was mainly a magpie following the trails of many thinkers has led to the further consequence of neglecting Shaw's relationship to other playwrights. This volume of SHAW explores Shaw's plays as inheritances and inspirations of dramatic art and also locates Shaw himself as a presence in the work of his contemporaries and successors. The volume concentrates on Shaw in relation to other modern British playwrights, notably Wilde, Bennett, Rattigan, the Court Theatre playwrights, and Shaw's successors from Coward to Stoppard. Gwyn Thomas's 1975 BBC play, The Ghost of Adelphi Terrace, puts Shaw and Barrie together on stage, and Shaw's 20 June 1937 Sunday Graphic obituary tribute to Barrie demonstrates Shaw's high regard for his contemporary and near neighbor. There are also essays on how Shaw came increasingly to resemble Strindberg as a dramatist, on the requirements of acting and directing Shaw alongside his contemporaries at the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, and on Heartbreak House as a complex dialogue with Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Strindberg. John R. Pfeiffer has prepared a special bibliography of sources relating to Shaw and other playwrights in addition to the Continuing Checklist of Shaviana, and Dan H. Laurence has provided Shaw's pronunciation guide for the more troublesome names of his stage characters. There are also reviews of four recent additions to Shavian scholarship. Contributors include John A. Bertolini, Fred D. Crawford, R. F. Dietrich, T. F. Evans, A. M. Gibbs, Leon H. Hugo, Christopher Newton, Sally Peters, John R. Pfeiffer, Evert Sprinchorn, and Stanley Weintraub.

This book combines the insights of thirteen Shavian scholars as they examine the themes of marriage, relationships and partnerships throughout all of Bernard Shaw’s major works. It also connects Shaw’s own experiences of love and marriage to the themes that emerge in his works, showing how his personal relationships in and out of matrimonial bonds change the ways his characters enter and exit marriages and misalliances. While providing a wealth of new analysis, this collection of essays also leaves lingering questions for the reader to spark continuing dialogue in both individual and academic settings.

In 1892 the first production of Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses, heralded the birth of modern drama in the English language. One hundred years later a group of Shavians gathered to examine the significance and influence of Shaw's drama in the English-speaking world. The conference, sponsored by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, brought together theater scholars, critics, and artists from Canada, England, Ireland, and the United States. The conference also featured productions of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, The Man of Destiny, and Farfetched Tales, each followed by a symposium. The centennial conference not only marked the importance of the event but also stimulated new ways of regarding that historic moment, reexaminations of the significance of Shaw's plays, and explorations of their consequences. Some speakers reevaluated the genesis of the first production of Widowers' Houses and its social, cultural, and theatrical context. Some brought to bear on the subject of Shavian drama recent critical perspectives, such as feminism, deconstructionism, and the type of close textual and intertextual scrutiny seldom accorded Shaw. Others explored his impact in England, America, Ireland, and the Antipodes. Still others examined the relationship of comedy and ideas, subtext, and how this Victorian dramatist remains pertinent today. The conference concluded with a symposium that aimed to assess what might lie ahead for Shaw on page and stage in the next hundred years. This volume records the proceedings of the conference as well as reviews and the continuing checklist of Shaviana. Contributors are Peter Barnes, Charles A. Berst, Montgomery Davis, Bernard F. Dukore, Martin Esslin, Joanne E. Gates, Nicholas Grene, Christopher Innes, Katherine E. Kelly, Frederick P. W. McDowell, Rhoda Nathan, Christopher Newton, Michael O'Hara, Jean Reynolds, Irving Wardle, Stanley Weintraub, and J. L. Wisenthal.

SHAW 16 contains twenty-nine unpublished pieces by Shaw written between 1877 and 1950. The most significant is a ten-page draft synopsis of Man and Superman (the original manuscript draft of the play has been lost) in a contemplated five-act version, providing scholars with a hitherto unavailable ur-text. Equally important for the biographical and artistic insights they offer are the early literary efforts found in Shaw's first opus notebook, including an extended narrative-verse fragment of 1877 set in Dublin; a polemic (his first) on oakum picking and prison conditions; a criticism of organists and orchestral conductors; and an attempted evaluation of contemporary arts and letters in 1878. We find Shaw, through the persona of a female narrator, creating in his own image a fictional memoir of the young Hector Berlioz; offering an ironic vindication of housebreakers (in anticipation of Heartbreak House); exploring the seamy side of the prizefight ring; examining "exhausted" genres of Victorian art in 1880; defining the "true signification of the term Gentleman"; lecturing on Socialism and the family and on realism as the goal of fiction; and penetratingly considering the future of marriage in a rejected book review, one of four included in the volume. The dimensions of Shaw's political views may be examined through nearly a dozen commentaries on politics and on war and peace, ranging from the Boer War (an 1899 draft letter to the press, "Why Not Abolish the Soldier?") and 1903 municipal elections to U.S. Liberty Loans, the Italo-Abyssinian War, "how to talk intelligently" about the Second World War, and the implications of the hydrogen bomb in the nuclear age. For good measure, the volume concludes with two brief playlets, previously unrecorded. The editors have arranged these pieces individually or grouped by theme and genre as near to chronological order as possible, and the reader is brought closer to the original manuscripts by the retention of Shaw's stylistic and spelling inconsistencies, and by transliteration of the shorthand notations he frequently inserted between lines or in the margins. Each text is supplemented by an editorial note providing its provenance and a detailed physical description of the manuscript.