It is easy enough to know who Bernard Shaw was although like many of his characters he went under several  names, Bob, Sonny, George, G.B.S., Redbarn Wash, G. Bernard Shaw; but who are his contemporaries? What did we mean as editors when calling this book series, Bernard Shaw and his Contemporaries? Born in 1856 and dying in 1950, Shaw had millions of contemporaries, and while we might not interpret the moniker too strictly, it may be worth while to offer an idea of how this book series Bernard Shaw and his Contemporariescame about. 

With the demise of the Florida Shaw series edited by Richard F. Dietrich under the imprint of the University Press of Florida, for which we each had written a volume, an opportunity arose for another publisher to take on the mantle of a scholarly Shaw themed series of books. With advice from Don Wilmeth, long-standing theatre and Shaw scholar and book editor, we presented a proposal to Palgrave Macmillan. As prospective editors, we felt that such a new series would need to broaden its scope to include different critical approaches: traditional literary and dramatic criticism, yes, but also any of the many different critical approaches flourishing in contemporary cultural studies, something that should be apparent from our recent books Steven Watt’s Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect (2018) and Sophie Hatchwell’s Performance and Spectatorship in Edwardian Art Writing (2019). And not only in approach: Shaw’s influence, let it not be forgotten, was global, and so at a time when a resurgent China is everywhere evident, with its own international ramifications, Kay Li’s Bernard Shaw’s Bridges to Chinese Culture (2016)could not be more opportune. Such openness to both approach and subject-matter becomes almost a requirement when considering the manifold literary output of Bernard Shaw, made all the more necessary by the paradoxical position Shaw holds in present-day literary and cultural studies.

Thus, while he dominated like no other modern writer the culture of his life and times, an influence that persisted at least ten years beyond his death due in no small part to the success of first the musical and then the movie My Fair Ladyadapted from his most popular play, Pygmalion, this once overwhelming if inevitably ephemeral fame has been replaced in today’s critical literature not by a considered reassessment of his texts, but by an almost complete absence of commentary. Hence such perverse results as a recent anthology devoted to the New Journalism that erupted in the 1890s under such editors as W.T. Stead and “Tay Pay” O’Connor that manages to completely ignore the contributions of the best-known New Journalist, Bernard Shaw, who worked under both editors. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism (2017) aims to restore the balance. While in the burgeoning literature on economic inequality produced over the past five years, practically no mention, let alone analysis, has been made of the contribution of Shaw (a founding member of what became the British Economics Association—along with Robert Palgrave, under whose name this series is published!). Yet as a writer and lecturer on political economy, Shaw in fact instigated the modern debate on poverty and what should constitute economic equality, including the question of redistribution of income, in the years before World War; Peter Gahan’s Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914 (2017) remedies that omission while at the same time seeking to make sense of that middle period in Shavian dramaturgy between Major Barbaraand Heartbreak House. 

In the theatre world, at least, Shaw remains a classic, with relatively frequent revivals of his plays in the English speaking world, along with those from other giants of the modern literary theatre, Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, Brecht, O’Neill, Williams, Miller, Beckett, and Pinter. But in critical commentary, Shaw not only practically disappeared from general view, he was forcibly dismissed by some eminent literary critics, a reaction that began in his own lifetime. To some degree this is normal: a younger generation will almost always want to break free from the shackles of the older. However, while we can forgive the harangues of John Osborne, for whom the burden of influence of Shavian theatre in the 1950s must have been stultifying, we can less easily forgive dismissals from such an influential cultural critic as Raymond Williams, himself writing in an English twentieth century tradition of cultural criticism Shaw more than anyone else made possible. The series has been fortunate, therefore, that leading Ibsen scholar Joan Templeton has for the first time tackled this curious cultural phenomenon in Shaw’s Ibsen (2018), where with forensic precision she demonstrates beyond dispute how a succession of twentieth century literary critics, including illustrious names in both Ibsen and Shaw studies, accepted as true, despite all the evidence, the falsehood that Shaw misrepresented Ibsen’s theatre as socialist and therefore a type of Shavian theatre (Shaw had not even finished a single play when he wrote The Quintessence of Ibsenism). More importantly, Templeton shows this was to misunderstand fundamentally the type of writer and readerShaw as critic was: always open to different types of theatre other than his own, not only of Ibsen, but also of Tchekov, Tolstoy, and Strindberg to name the most prominent of his contemporaries.

Bernard Shaw and his Contemporarieshas already begun to effect a course correction addressing today’s critical concerns with ramifications as to how we might reassess early twentieth century European modernism, of which Shaw was among the leading early exemplars in both the German and English speaking countries, including in his native Ireland. We were very pleased, therefore, that the first proposal that came our way following the announcement of the series in 2014 resulted in David Clare’s Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook (2016), which skillfully reinserts Shaw into the discourse of that efflorescent national literature from the first half of the twentieth century.

The series seeks to position Shaw as inextricably a part of both his own historical context as well as today’s understanding of those times. However the chief focus of interest of any particular book will not necessarily always be Shaw. “His contemporaries” is as important a part of the title as “Shaw.” As a playwright especially he made a point of being open to his fellow writers and interacting with them—not always without friction, whether the playwrights of high society plays in the 1890s, fellow dramatists–particularly Granville Barker–from those few epoch-making years (1904-1907) of the repertory experiment at the Court Theatre in London, the Abbey Theatre playwrights Synge, Gregory, Yeats, Robinson, and, later, O’Casey in Ireland, and those of the 1930s/40s like T. S. Eliot, Denis Johnston, Eugene O’Neil, Noel Coward, and Terrence Rattigan. We were very pleased, therefore, to welcome the proposals of both non-Shaw focused studies in the series to date, Eglantina Remport’s Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre (2018)on playwright and Abbey theatre director Augusta Gregory, a close personal friend of Shaw’s, and The Case for Terence Rattigan, Playwright by John Bertolini (2016) about a highly successful younger contemporary, whose own fame would quickly be eclipsed, whether justifiably or not (and that is Bertolini’s question), by the new  generation of “angry young men” at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s.

The manifold aspect of Shaw’s own writing we also wanted to feature, not just his plays. Likened variously as a playwright to such notable writers of high comedy in the western theatrical tradition as Aristophanes, Euripides, and Molière, as a thinker Shaw is  equally hard to pin down: something like a modern-day combination of Plato’s Socrates, Voltaire, and Swift. He made substantial, and still relevant, contributions to such cultural and social subjects as modern medical practice, possibilities for a modern theology, censorship, criminology, and on what we call today (post-)colonial studies. Christopher Wixson’s Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising (2018) provides insights into one surprising field Shaw impacted; Bernard Dukore’s Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw (2017) provides a comprehensive study of Shaw’s still pertinent, and sometimes controversial views on criminology; and Bob Gaines’s anthology Bernard Shaw’s Marriages and Misalliances (2017) brings together many of today’s leading Shaw scholars to address that bedrock issue of both theatre and social life, marriage. As the anthology’s authors show, marriage for Shaw, a champion of women’s rights, comes down to the question of the status of women both inside and outside the home. Four books in the series so far have been authored by women, and one features a woman playwright Shaw contemporary. We look forward to more. Indeed we expect future volumes to lead us along many different paths, whether familiar or unexpected, and so welcome proposals from any direction.