BIOGRAPHY

Ervine, St. John G. Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work, and Friends. New York: William Morrow, 1956. The most sympathetic and fair biography of Shaw.

Henderson, Archibald. George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956.

Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw, Vol. 1, 1856-1898: The Search for Love, New York: Random House, 1988. Bernard Shaw, Vol. 2, 1898-1918: The Pursuit of Power. New York: Random House, 1989. Bernard Shaw, Vol. 3, 1918-1950 : The Lure of Fantasy. New York: Random House, 1991. Bernard Shaw, Vol. 4, 1950-1991: The Last Laugh. New York: Random House, 1992. The most detailed and comprehensive biography. A condensed version is available: Bernard Shaw: The One- Volume Definitive Edition. New York: Random House, 1998.

Shaw, George Bernard. Interviews and Recollections. Edited by A. M. Gibbs. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. An indispensable record of first-hand personal views of and by Shaw.

CRITICAL WORKS

Bentley, Eric. Bernard Shaw. New York: New Directions, 1947.

Berst, Charles A. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Drama. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Bertolini, John A. The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw. Carbon-dale and Edwardsville: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1991.

Crompton, Louis. Shaw the Dramatist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.

Dukore, Bernard. Shaw’s Theatre. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

Evans, T. F., ed. Shaw: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1976.

Gibbs, A. M. The Art and Mind of Shaw. New York: Macmillan, 1983.

Gordon, David J. Bernard Shaw and the Comic Sublime. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Holroyd, Michael, ed. The Genius of Shaw. New York: Holt, Rine hart and Winston, 1979.

Meisel, Martin. Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. A brilliant and delightful account of Shaw’s relationship to the theater of his youth.

Morgan, Margery M. The Shavian Playground. London: Methuen, 1972.

Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies: Vols. 1-22 successive. General editors: Stanley Weintraub, Fred D. Crawford, Gale K. Larson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981-2003.

Turco, Alfred, Jr. Shaw’s Moral Vision. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Valency, Maurice. The Cart and the Trumpet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Watson, Barbara Bellow. A Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Woman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Still the best case for Shaw as a feminist.

Wisenthal, J. L. The Marriage of Contraries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Endnotes

1

1 (p. 5) they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy: Shaw is naming several controversial figures of his time: German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 — 1860) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900); Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828 — 1906); Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg (1849 — 19 12); and Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910).

2

2 (p. 6) though I already knew all about Alnaschar and Don Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another romantic hero mocked by reality: Shaw lists three fictional romantic heroes: In “The Barber’s Fifth Brother,” a tale from The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Alnaschar is a dreamer who invests in glassware in a scheme to become rich and marry the vizier’s daughter, but then shatters the glass in a rage against his imaginary wife; Don Quixote is the idealistic romantic hero of the satirical romance of that name by Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1 616); Simon Tappertit, in Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), is a locksmith’s apprentice given to ambitious and romantic delusions.

3

3 (p. 10) Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a single much quoted sentence containing the phrase “big blonde beast”: The phrase, from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887; First Essay, section 11), refers to the noble animal element that reemerges from time to time in heroic peoples. “Blonde,” according to Nietzsche’s translator, Walter Kaufmann, refers not to the Teutonic races but to a lion’s mane.

4

4 (p. 15) His [Undershaft‘s] conduct stands the Kantian test: The reference is to the categorical imperative — universal rule of ethical conduct — of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (17 24-1804): Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become a universal law.

5

5 (p. 20) I am met with nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am only too thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand: Shaw uses French writers (and lovers) Alfred de Musset (1810 — 1857) and George Sand (1804)-1876; pen name of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dude vant) as representatives of outmoded Romantic thought.

6

6 (p. 26) a flag with Blood and Fire on it is unfurled, not in murderous rancor, but because fire is beautiful and blood a vital and splendid red: The Salvation Army motto, which appears on its flag, is “Blood and Fire.” Shaw explains here that the Blood and Fire are not literal but rather figurative of the beauty and energy of life and joy; like the English artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827), Shaw appreciated the power and exuberance of vital energy.

7

7 (p. 28) like Frederick’s grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever: During the SevenYears War ( 1756 — 1763), in his failed attack on Kolin (June 18, 1757), King Frederick II of Prussia (known as Frederick the Great) is said to have turned to his hesitant soldiers and urged them on with the taunt, “You scoundrels! Do you want to live forever?”

8

8 (p. 38) he launches his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but ... slaying twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine.... Had he blown all Madrid to atoms, ... not one could have escaped the charge of being an accessory, ... themselves also: Unfortunately, Shaw here seems to sympathize with Morral’s terrorist act (see note on page 37); at the least, he refuses to judge it as something worse than stupidity: The deaths of twenty-three innocent people and the injuring of ninety-nine others provoke him only to note that as participants in a repressive and exploitative capitalist society, they along with everyone else were guilty of allowing that society to continue its evil. It is an abhorrent view. And if it does not sound strange to our ears, that is because we heard this explanation of terrorism often enough after the terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

9

9 (p. 38) Bonapart’s pounding of the Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our respectable classes “the whiff of grapeshot”: “The Whiff of Grapeshot” is the title of chapter 7 in Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 work The French Revolution (book 3, part 7). In the chapter Carlyle recounts how Napoleon fired with cannons upon a crowd of insurrectionists, killing 200 of them; he asserts that this action marked the end of the French Revolution.

10

10 (p. 39) who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney are now revelling in “the whiff of dynamite”: Shaw’s analogy creates a false moral equivalence between a crowd using violence to seize power and in turn being met with violence to a crowd witnessing a wedding and being blown up.