Welcome to Shaw Bookshelf! Here you will find publications on Shaw by members of the International Shaw Society, made up of top Shaw scholars in the world.
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries Series
NEW WORKS
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ELECTRONIC BOOKS
Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw Before His First Play: The Embryo Playwright. ELT Press, 2015.
Link to Project Muse Site Link to Description
Conolly, Leonard, ed. Bernard Shaw: The Philanderer. Broadview, 2015.
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Conolly, Leonard. The Shaw Festival: The First Fifty Years. Oxford University Press, 2011. Link to Book Link to Description
Dukore, Bernard. Bernard Shaw: Slaves of Duty and Tricks of the Governing Class. ELT Press, 2012. Link to Book Link to Description
Innes, Christopher and Brigitte Bogar. Shaw’s Musical Universe Link to CD
Ritschel, Nelson O`Ceallaigh. Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2012. Link to Book Link to Description
Tunney, Jay R.. The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw. Firefly Books, Ltd., 2010 (first printing). 2013 (Second printing). Available Electronically on tables/phones. Link to book: www.tunney-shaw.com
Weintraub, Stanley. Who’s Afraid of Bernard Shaw?: Some Personalities in Shaw’s Plays. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2011. Link to Book Link to Description
CLICK HERE for Professor Stanley Weintraub’s other new books.
Wood, Robert and Anthony Wynn. Valiant for Truth: Barry Morse and His Lifelong Association with Bernard Shaw. Planet Publications, 2012. Link to book
Chesterton, Gilbert K. George Bernard Shaw. The Plimpton Press, 1909.
Link to book.
Dietrich, Richard. Modern British and Irish Drama, 1890 to 1950: A Critical History. Link to book. NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE
Dukore, Bernard. Bernard Shaw: Slaves of Duty and Tricks of the Governing Class. ELT Press, 2012. Link to book
Dukore, Bernard. 1992: Shaw and the Last Hundred Years (SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Vol. 14). University Park: Penn State Press, 1994. Link to book.
Dukore, Bernard Frank. Money & Politics in Ibsen, Shaw, and Brecht. University of Missouri Press, 1980. Link to book
Dukore, Bernard Frank. Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects of Shavian Drama. University of Missouri Press, 1973. Link to book
Dukore, Bernard. Bernard Shaw, Director. Seattle: University of Washington Press and London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971. Link to book. Updated in Shaw’s Theater Link to book.
Gibbs, A.M. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
Link to Book
Tunney, Jay R.. The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw. Firefly Books, Ltd., 2010 (first printing). 2013 (Second printing). Available Electronically on tables/phones. Link to book: www.tunney-shaw.com
Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw Before His First Play: The Embryo Playwright. ELT Press, 2015.
Link to Project Muse Site Link to Description
CANONICAL BOOKS
Weintraub,Rodelle. Fabian feminist : Bernard Shaw and woman. University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Link to Book Link to Description
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STANLEY WEINTRAUB
Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw Before His First Play: The Embryo Playwright. ELT Press, 2015.
Link to Project Muse Site Link to Description
“Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been to arrive where I am.” So Bernard Shaw quoted Valiant-for-Truth, “with his foot on the brink of the river,” from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in a letter to the actress Elizabeth Robins. It was the 1890s. G.B.S. was on the brink of fame.
He had overcome limited schooling, Irish origins, unemployment and near-poverty, and a series of false starts as a writer, but he resolved to succeed on his own terms. He abandoned a striking “Passion Play” in Shakespearean blank verse. He conceded that the first of his failed novels was titled Immaturity “with merciless fitness.”
The British Museum Reading Room became his university. He taught himself everything from Pitman shorthand to books, music, and the arts—becoming in succession the leading music critic in England, then the leading drama critic. His goal was the stage itself. All that he wrote would be fodder for his theatrical future. His first completed play, Widowers’ Houses, ran only two performances, but he knew he was on his way.
Stanley Weintraub’s latest book evokes Bernard Shaw’s formative decades as novelist, diarist, polemicist, memoirist, critic of music and the arts, and aspiring playwright. The fourteen segments about Shaw’s pre-playwright beginnings (from “Passion Without ‘Passion’: Shaw’s Abortive Jesus Play” to “Shaw Becomes a Playwright: July–December 1892”) have been written and edited over more than half a century. When not completely new they are much augmented. Readers of Shaw will appreciate having them updated and available together in this new volume, as well as in UPCC’s eBook Collections, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts & Humanities at Pennsylvania State University and Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the world’s foremost Bernard Shaw scholar as well as one of the most respected scholars in Victorian and early modern studies.
He is author or editor of more than fifty books illuminating the years covered by ELT Press’s 1880–1920 British Authors series, including biographies of Victoria, Disraeli, Shaw, Rossetti, Whistler, Beardsley and T. E. Lawrence.
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Dukore, Bernard. Bernard Shaw: Slaves of Duty and Tricks of the Governing Class. ELT Press, 2012. Link to book
“An original contribution to Shaw scholarship,” says Michel Pharand, editor of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, who aptly summarizes Bernard Dukore’s book: This “systematic survey of how Shaw dramatizes slavery to and revolt against duty, and tricks of the governing class, has not previously been attempted. Proceeding chronologically and providing full historical context when needed (instructive also are the many parallels to contemporary history), Dukore pays scrupulous attention to detail and accuracy, and his language is fluid and jargon-free.”
The first part of the book’s subtitle derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, which describes its protagonist, and from Ibsen’s A Doll House, whose protagonist renounces slavery to duty and conventional morality. The subtitle’s second part is from Major Barbara, in which a powerful capitalist, a member of the governing class, refers to tricks
designed to make people act in ways that pro fit it. The powerful instill slavery to duty and ensure that organizations aiming to alleviate the suffering of the poor act in ways that benefit the controlling class’s interests.
With astonishing variety, Shaw dramatizes slavery to and revolt against duty and the tricks of the governing class in thirty-seven of his more than fifty plays from 1892 to 1948.
Whereas some characters are bound by duty, others free themselves from the many different forms of trickery. Perhaps surprising is the twenty-first century pertinence of these themes, including the hypocrisy of capitalists who use phrases charged with the words “duty” and “morality” to justify their greed as well as their devious uses of education, religion, and the press.
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BERNARD F. DUKORE
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts and Humanities at Virginia Tech and one of our most eminent writers in the eld of modern drama. He is author or editor of over thirty books and countless articles on the subject, many dealing with Shaw, others with Pinter, Ibsen, Brecht, and similar major authors.
Books by Bernard Dukore:
Bernard Shaw: Slaves of Duty and Tricks of the Governing Class. Greensboro: ELT Press, 2012.
Shaw’s Theater. Gainesville: University Pres of Florida, 2000.
Bernard Shaw on Cinema. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.
Not Bloody Likely! And Other Quotations from Bernard Shaw. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
The Drama Observed [by Bernard Shaw], 4 vols. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man: A Composite Production Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, for the American Society for Theatre Research, 1982.
The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw. London: George Prior and Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.
Money and Politics in Ibsen, Shaw, and Brecht. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980.
Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects of Shavian Drama. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973. (NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE AT QUESTIA.COM)
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LEONARD CONOLLY
Conolly, Leonard, ed. Bernard Shaw: The Philanderer. Broadview, 2015.
Link to Book Link to Description.
The second of Shaw’s “unpleasant” plays, written in 1893, published in 1898, but not performed until 1905, The Philanderer is subtitled “A Topical Comedy.” The eclectic range of topical subjects addressed in the play includes the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen on British middle-class social mores (the second act of The Philanderer is set in the fictional Ibsen Club), medical follies, the rise of the “New Woman,” and, in particular, the destructive impact of Victorian marriage and divorce laws. Just as Shaw’s other “unpleasant” plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, call, respectively, for reform of laws that allow corrupt property owners to exploit the poor and for radical change to economic structures that drive women into prostitution, so The Philanderer makes the case for more liberal legislation to allow easier divorce—particularly for women—when marriages become irretrievably broken.
Shaw’s attack on divorce laws becomes even clearer and stronger in the final act that he wrote for the play but discarded in favour of the version he published. The discarded version is published for the first time in this Broadview edition of the play.
Conolly, Leonard. The Shaw Festival: The First Fifty Years. Oxford University Press, 2011. Link to Book
On a warm, humid night in June of 1962, four amateur actors sat on stools in the Court House of Niagara-on-the-Lake for their first performance of Don Juan in Hell from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. It was a “modest” first performance, without the pomp and circumstance of other theatre openings, and many were unsure of the lifespan of such a theatre experience. So began founder Brian Doherty’s Shaw Festival, or as it was humbly called in the beginning, A Salute to Shaw.
Entering its silver anniversary, the Shaw Festival has seen the curtains open and close on numerous performances. L.W. Conolly, Shaw Festival scholar and Professor of English at Trent University, takes us on an anecdotal journey in The Shaw Festival: The First Fifty Years. In it, he celebrates one of the biggest theatre festivals in Canada, all the while honouring George Bernard Shaw and the men and women who helped make the Court House and Festival Theatres what they are today.
With stunning photographs and illustrations generously donated from the Shaw Festival Archives and the L.W. Conolly Theatre Archives, The Shaw Festival is a fitting tribute to the fifty-year development of Niagara-on-the-Lake and of Brian Doherty’s Shaw Festival.
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L. W. Conolly
L. W. Conolly (right) and Richard Dietrich (left)
Leonard Conolly is Emeritus Professor of English and former President and Vice-Chancellor of Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. He is a former President of the International Shaw Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an Honorary Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto, a Corresponding Scholar of the Shaw Festival, and Literary Adviser to the Estate of Bernard Shaw.
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Ritschel, Nelson O`Ceallaigh. Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2012. Link to Book
“With great skill, Nelson O`Ceallaigh Ritschel has constructed a gripping intellectual narrative out of the Irish national debate over socialism that led to the Easter Uprising of 1916.”–John A. Bertolini, author of The Playwriting Self of Bernard Shaw
“Ritschel’s reputation as one of the most insightful writers on the interplay of early Irish theatre and the broader culture within which it operated is confirmed again by Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation.”–Gary A. Richardson, author of American Drama
George Bernard Shaw has always been regarded as a political provocateur and socialist with ideas that reflected a complicated public philosophy. Scholarship abounds on Shaw’s politics, but Nelson Ritschel’s compelling study is the first to explore how Shaw’s presence in Irish radical debate manifested itself not only through his direct contributions but also through the way he and his efforts were engaged by others–most notably by the socially liberal dramatist J. M. Synge and the socialist agitator James Connolly.
Looking closely at such works as In the Shadow of the Glen, John Bull’s Other Island, Playboy of the Western World, and O’Flaherty, V.C., Ritschel opens an important door on the hidden dialogue between these men. The result is a gripping, even suspenseful, narrative of the intellectual march to the Easter Uprising of 1916.
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Nelson O`Ceallaigh Ritschel
Nelson O`Ceallaigh Ritschel, professor of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, is the author of Synge and Irish Nationalism.
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JAY TUNNEY
The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw
by Jay R. Tunney, Introduction by Christopher Newton
288 pages / 6″ x 9″ / 69 black-and-white photographs and illustrations, index
$35.00 Hardcover with jacket / 978-155407-641-3
Available at bookstores; online booksellers or from Firefly Books
www.fireflybooks.com
E-book available from online booksellers
In addition to the Introduction by Christopher Newton, the
book was favorably reviewed by Stanley Weintraub, has Leonard Conolly’s testimonial on the inside front cover flap, as well as many other favorable reviews from important publications that can be found on the website: www.tunney-shaw.com
Jay Tunney is presently working on a play and a documentary
of his book with experienced professionals that hopefully will help expand the market of Shaw aficionados internationally.
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Weintraub, Stanley. Who’s Afraid of Bernard Shaw?: Some Personalities in Shaw’s Plays. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2011. Link to Book.
People known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognizable characters in his plays. He turned Beatrice Webb into a witchlike virago in The Millionairess, Winston Churchill into an aspiring, blowhard politician in John Bull’s Other Island, and Lawrence of Arabia into the eccentric army private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek in Too True to Be Good. However, as eminent Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub reveals in this exquisite collection, Shaw’s relationships to real or imagined personalities could be both curiously unexpected and deliciously complex.
Featuring figures as varied as Julius Caesar, Zulu king Cetewayo, Noel Coward, Edward Elgar, and Benjamin Disraeli, this volume brilliantly demonstrates how Shaw put something of himself into all of his “people.” The result is a book that is consistently revealing, intriguing, and entertaining.
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Weintraub, Stanley. Shaw’s people: Victoria to Churchill. Penn State University Press, 1996. Link to book
Weintraub is a well-known literary critic Shaw scholar who has previously edited Shaw’s diaries, autobiography, and critical works. This book consists of essays dealing with Shaw’s relationship to twelve of his Victorian contemporaries, including Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Frank Harris, Sean O’Casey, and Winston Churchill. Each relationship sheds new light on the personality of Shaw, the man “who in his lifetime possessed the most famous initials in the world.”
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Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1, 1986 Link to book
Diaries of George Bernard Shaw, 1885-1897, containing entries relating to his daily life in London during this period, mostly written in Pitman shorthand, with details of names, places, finances and petty expenses. The diaries provide and interesting insight into his personal life, various radical intellectual organisations in London, his professional journalistic work, and his attempts to create a successful writing career. Also included in the collection are five volumes of transcripts made by Shaw’s secretary, Blanche Patch, [1946-1950].
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Stanley Weintraub
Professor Stanley Weintraub and Mrs. Stanley Weintraub
Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of over fifty books, including Private Shaw and Public Shaw, Journey to Heartbreak, Victoria: An Intimate Biography, and Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.
Works by Stanley Weintraub:
Weintraub, Stanley. ““Humors” Names in Shaws Prentice Novels.” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 5.4 (1957): 222-225.
Weintraub, Stanley. “An Unfinished Novel by Bernard Shaw.” (1958): 3.
Weintraub, Stanley. “‘Shaw’s Divine Comedy’: Addendum.” The Shaw Bulletin, II (May 1958) 22.
Weintraub, Stanley. “The Embryo Playwright in Bernard Shaw’s Early Novels.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1959): 327-355.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Shaw’s Mommsenite Caesar.” Anglo-German and American-German Crosscurrents 2 (1962): 257-72.
Weintraub, Stanley. Private Shaw and public Shaw: a dual portrait of Lawrence of Arabia and GBS. Braziller, 1963.
Shaw, Bernard, and Stanley Weintraub. Shaw. University of Iowa Press, 1970.
Weintraub, Stanley. Shaw: An Autobiography. Max Reinhardt, 1970.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Shaw’s’ Lear’.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 1.3 (1970).
Weintraub, Stanley. Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw, 1914-1918. Weybright and Talley, 1971.
Weintraub, Stanley, ed. Bernard Shaw’s Nondramatic Literary Criticism. University of Nebraska Press, 1972.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Heartbreak House: Shaw’s Lear.” Modern Drama 15 (1972): 255-65.
Weintraub, Stanley. Saint Joan: fifty years after: 1923/24-1973/74. Louisiana State University Press, 1973.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Shaw’s Other Keegan: O’Casey and GBS.” Sean O’Casey: Centenary Essays (1980): 212-226.
Shaw, Bernard, Frank Harris, and Stanley Weintraub. The Playwright and the Pirate: Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris, a Correspondence. Pennsylvania State Univ Pr, 1982.
Weintraub, Stanley. The unexpected Shaw: biographical approaches to GBS and his work. F. Ungar, 1982.
Weintraub, Stanley. “A Respectful Distance: James Joyce and his Dublin Townsman Bernard Shaw.” Journal of modern literature (1986): 61-75.
Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1, 1986
Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw: Guide to Research. Penn State University Press, 1988.
Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw on the London art scene, 1885-1950. Pennsylvania State Univ Pr, 1989.
Weintraub, Stanley, and Fred D. Crawford. Shaw: The Annual of Bernared Shaw Studies. Vol. 10. Pennsylvania State Univ Pr, 1990.
Weintraub, Stanley. “The Avant-Garde Shaw: Too True to Be Good and Its Predecessors.” Critical Essays on George Bernard Shaw, ed. Elsie B. Adams (New York: GK Hall, 1991): 119-32.
Weintraub, Stanley. Shaw’s people: Victoria to Churchill. Penn State University Press, 1996.
Weintraub, Stanley. Shaw and Other Matters: A Festschrift for Stanley Weintraub on the Occasion of His Forty-Second Anniversary at the Pennsylvania State University. Susquehanna University Press, 1998.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf and GBS.” SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 21.1 (2001): 41-62.
Weintraub, Stanley. Who’s Afraid of Bernard Shaw?: Some Personalities in Shaw’s Plays. University Press of Florida, 2011.
Weintraub, Stanley. “Bernard Shaw’s Other Saint Joan.” The Shavian: 7-13.
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CANONICAL BOOKS
Weintraub,Rodelle. Fabian feminist : Bernard Shaw and woman. University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Link to Book
Throughout his career Bernard Shaw served as a “vigorous exponent of women’s freedom to be themselves, to liberate themselves from their traditional roles and traditional subservience. This book reflects upon Shaw as an early champion of goals still fresh on the banners of today’s feminist movement: equal opportunity to secure employment; equal pay for equal work; contracts for marriage; marriage free from degrading economic and possessive-sexual factors; dignified divorce; financial independence within or without marriage; ownership of property exclusive of one’s husband; bearing of children outside of marriage and refusal to bear children; equal opportunity to participate in athletics; and legal equality of every variety.
Following a general introduction by the editor, the book offers sections on Literary and Mythic Influences and Political and Economic Influences. Part III reveals Shaw grappling with the question of Sex Roles or True Vocation, and Part IV describes Shaw’s Liberated Women. Next comes a consideration of the Influence of Shaw’s Feminism: Three Generations—including interviews with the playwrights Clare Boothe Luce and Megan Terry. A concluding section presents five broadsides, not previously reprinted, under the rubric of Shaw on Feminist Issues. There is an extensive bibliography of works by and about Shaw, The Fabian Feminist.
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Rodelle Weintraub
Rodelle Weintraub is assistant editor of The Shaw Review and co-author of Lawrence of Arabia: The Literary Impulse (1975). She teaches English at Penn State.