Bernard Shaw On The American Stage

Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations—production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors’ studio portraits— inform the study throughout.

A collection of critical writings on theater from the Nobel Prize–winning playwright behind Man and Superman and Pygmalion. The Critical Shaw: On Theater is a comprehensive selection of essays and addresses about drama and theater by renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw. An outspoken critic of the melodramas and formulaic farces that comprised most of the popular theater in the late nineteenth century, Shaw relentlessly campaigned for audiences, actors, theater managers, and even government officials to take theater more seriously, to use the stage as a forum for representing complex real issues such as poverty, marriage and divorce laws, sexual attraction, gender equality, and political power, so that through seeing them acted out, audiences could better understand and address them when they left the theater. Shaw’s commitment to social reform through theater was matched by his expertise in the artistic and practical aspects of drama: whether he was reviewing productions, lecturing about acting, or schooling agents on royalties and copyright law, Shaw set a standard for intelligent professionalism that our own theaters might still aspire to and be measured against. The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw’s voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw’s life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.

This is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of works by and about Bernard Shaw. No book has appeared before that has surveyed all of the research and writing that the life and work of Bernard Shaw have evoked. The greatest dramaturgist in English after Shakespeare, Shaw was one of the dominant public figures of his time, a long lifetime (1856-1950) that began in the mid-Victorian period and extended into the Atomic Age. Inevitably, someone who straddled his age so visibly and so memorably, and whose works retain a continuing fascination, has been the subject of thousands of articles and hundreds of books, from criticism of individual works to multivolume biographies, editions, and studies. Stanley Weintraub has distilled his forty years of experience of Shaw studies to bring them into useful focus and sort out the significant writings from the burgeoning mass of publications. This book is an essential tool for both scholars and general readers interested in the multifarious world of Shaw. Readers will not only find out what has been done, but what still remains to be accomplished in Shaw studies; what Shaw's influence has been on other writers; even where Shaw has appeared as a character in other writers' poetry, fiction, and drama.

When an interviewer asked Bernard Shaw whether, "speaking personally", he would prefer to see the English and Americans "become drama and variety fans as of old, rather than movie fans", Shaw replied, "Speaking personally, I should prefer to see them become Shaw fans". With his customary wit and quite often with remarkable prescience, Shaw began a dialogue on cinema that ran almost from the infancy of the industry in 1908 until his death in 1950. Bernard F. Dukore presents the first collection of Bernard Shaw's writings and oral statements about cinema. Of the more than one hundred comments Dukore has selected, fifty-nine -- more than half -- are new to today's readers. Twelve are previously unpublished, one is published in full for the first time, and forty-six appear in a collected edition of Shaw's writings for the first time since their publication in newspapers and magazines. Very early in the life of cinema, Shaw perceived that as an invention, movies would be more momentous than the printing press because they appealed to the illiterate as well as the literate, to the manual laborer at the end of an exhausting day as well as to the person with more leisure. He predicted that cinema would form people's minds and shape their conduct. He recognized that cinema's "colossal proportions make mediocrity compulsory" by leveling art and life down to the blandest morality and to the lowest common denominator of potential audiences throughout the world. By 1908, Shaw was familiar with experiments synchronizing movies and sound. When talkies arrived, he discerned that they would precipitate major changes in acting, writing, and economics. He also saw how they would affect live theatre:"The theatre may survive as a place where people are taught to act", he said in 1930, "but apart from that there will be nothing but 'talkies' soon". At that time, few people in the theatrical profession were making such prophecies, at least not in public.

When George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, the world lost one of its most well-known authors, a revolutionary who was as renowned for his personality as he was for his humour, humanity, and rebellious thinking. He remains a compelling figure who deserves attention not only for how influential he was in his time, but for how relevant he is to ours. This collection sets Shaw's life and achievements in context, with forty-two scholarly essays devoted to subjects that interested him and defined his work. Contributors explore a wide range of themes, moving from factors that were formative in Shaw's life, to the artistic work that made him most famous and the institutions with which he worked, to the political and social issues that consumed much of his attention, and, finally, to his influence and reception. Presenting fresh material and arguments, this collection will point to new directions of research for future scholars.

This book covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1880-1930. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in America from the years following the end of the Civil War to the Golden Age of Broadway, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such diverse figures as William Gillette, Mrs. Fiske, George M. Cohan, Maude Adams, David Belasco, George Abbott, Clyde Fitch, Eugene O’Neill, Texas Guinan, Robert Edmond Jones, Jeanne Eagels, Susan Glaspell, The Adlers and the Barrymores, Tallulah Bankhead, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Mae West, Elmer Rice, Laurette Taylor, Eva Le Gallienne, and a score of others. Entries abound on plays of all kinds, from melodrama to the newly-embraced realistic style, ethnic works (Irish, Yiddish, etc.), and such diverse forms as vaudeville, circus, minstrel shows, temperance plays, etc. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism covers the history of modernist American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 2,000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the American Theater in its greatest era.

This set of essays, which surveys major developments in the winding down of nineteenth-century methods of Shakespeare staging, spans the decades from the 1880s to about 1920. The Epilogue describes the American celebration of the Tercentenary of Shakespeare's death.

George Bernard Shaw has been called the second greatest playwright in English (after William Shakespeare) and one of the inventors of modern celebrity as the most famous public intellectual of his time. Beginning in the 1880s, as a critic and as a playwright, he transformed British drama, bringing to it intellectual substance, ethical imperatives, and modernity itself, setting the theatrical course for the subsequent century. That his legacy endures seventy years after his death is testament to the prescience of his thinking and his prolific creativity. This Very Short Introduction looks at Shaw's life, starting with his upbringing in Ireland, and then takes a chronological approach through his works. Considering Shaw's committed antagonism on behalf of a range of socio-political issues; his use of comedy as a mode for communicating serious ideas; and his rhetorical style that pushes conventional boundaries, Christopher Wixson provides an overview of the creative evolution of core themes throughout Shaw's long career. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.