Introduction

In early May 1921, the editorial staff of The Bookman greeted with “deep regret” a recent decision by the Governors of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon to use the building as a cinema in between seasons, denouncing it as “contrary to the spirit and the meaning” of that sacred space to employ it “for the purpose of depicting on a wretched sheet the buffoonery of Charlie Chaplin and the faked adventures of farcical cowboys.”1 In response, they received a flurry of letters (including from members of the public and the theater’s board members), and, over the course of the subsequent three issues, they published representative examples penned by “distinguished literary men.” Support for The Bookman’s protest arrived from G. K. Chesterton and John Drinkwater. Literary critic George Saintsbury modestly pondered “what an excellent night-club St. Paul’s would make [as] the space under the dome would be ideal for dancing [and] there would be the amplest room from crypt to galleries for subsidiary amusements of various kinds.” Ibsen translator Edmund Gosse was appalled by what he called this “singularly flagrant and shocking instance of the vulgarity which has invaded our unhappy country.” In contrast, noting that the extra revenue would be useful toward the Memorial Theatre’s upkeep and improvement, Arthur Wing Pinero and scholar Sidney Lee disagreed, the latter detecting “no menace of any of the higher Stratfordian interests.”2 John Galsworthy went even further: “Let the theatre be henceforth used entirely for Cinema; and, with the proceeds it will earn in this age, build for Shakespeare a beautiful theatre, and keep it inviolate.”3The Bookman editors were dismayed however that some of the letters lost sight of the main issue, preferring instead to litigate the merits of a new and popular medium. Hugh Walpole opined that “the Cinema is swallowing one after another of our Theatres and is filling them with millionth-rate rubbish [so that] all our old Festivals and honourable Customs are passing away, killed by the Cinema-spirit.”4 Theater critic Sydney W. Carroll charged that “the cinema is responsible for more crime and blindness than any other entertainment agency. Its vulgarity and stupidity put Shakespeare’s clown scenes on to the level of discussions by Oxford Professors. Why not convert the Memorial into a Billiard Saloon or a Skittle Alley?”5Habitual playgoer and moviegoer Bernard Shaw of course could not resist joining the “Stratford Vandalism” controversy, and The Bookman printed his May 10 missive:The Editor could also not resist appending a comment: “The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was never intended as a memorial to Mr. Charles Chaplin. Whether Shakespeare would or would not have delighted in the film is a side-issue—and not the only one in Mr. Shaw’s letter.”6After Shaw’s letter appeared, the wags across the Atlantic at The Nation turned to verse:The Governors were undaunted and purchased a new screen and projector for the Memorial Theatre’s winter season as a cinema. After a strong turnout opening night, though, attendance steadily waned, and the scheme was abandoned in the spring of 1922.On 6 March 1926, fire gutted the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Despite the total loss of stored costumes and scenery, the resident company went forward with their planned spring season, arranging to perform (ironically enough) in a converted cinema. Less than a year earlier, at the Birthday Luncheon of 1925, Shaw had given a speech titled “The Immortal Memory of William Shakespeare, Gentleman” in which he praised the building as a worthy venue for everything except performing Shakespeare’s plays and strongly advocated for the construction of a brand-new and completely redesigned facility.8 Unfortunately, as he wrote in a 1923 piece for the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, the Memorial Theatre had been conceived as an “opera-house . . . when the last traditions of the Shakespearean tradition had been lost, and the stage cut back to the proscenium and elevated and withdrawn to an extent which destroyed all the old intimacy between the actors and the audience.”9 Thus, when word reached him of the disaster the following spring, he told an interviewer that he was “extremely glad to hear the news.” “Stratford-upon-Avon is to be congratulated on the fire. . . . The Memorial was one of those shockingly bad theatres put up in the nineteenth century, and it will be a tremendous advantage to have a proper modern building. There are a few other theatres I should like to see burned down.”10 The blaze also prompted reflection by the Bookman’s Journal:When the foundation stone was laid (2 July 1929), Shaw was present in Stratford as a member of the Executive Council of the Governors, and, when it finally opened in 1932, Ivor Brown deemed its replacement, renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, “the finest working theatre in England.”Like the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, pulled at once by both “higher Stratfordian interests” and the modern “Cinema-spirit,” this issue of SHAW looks both backwards and forwards, balancing the continued enrichment of our understanding of Shaw’s life and the legacy of his thinking and writing with an embrace of the Shavian contemporary and an eye on the future. Bernard F. Dukore kicks things off with a contemplation of Shaw’s views on heroism and in particular his treatment of the subject in the plays and screenplays of Arms and the Man and Saint Joan. Next, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel supplies the second part of his study of Shaw’s partnership with Irish producer Charles Macdona, covering the period 1925–1940 that saw the latter’s larger ambitions of “expanding the Shavian gospel” realized and later was counted following his death as among his most “distinct achievements.” My own contribution to this issue seeks to sketch more fully the relationship between Shaw and his primary Polish translator Floryan Sobieniowski, which began in the spring of 1913 and spanned more than three decades. Michel W. Pharand finishes off the first section with another splendid curation, this time of the series of seven caricatures of Shaw by J. H. Dowd that initially appeared in Punch during the summer of 1928 and serves as this issue’s cover image.Pivoting toward the consideration of Shaw’s plays, Howard Ira Einsohn anchors the center section by situating Pygmalion within the context of two foundational concepts in the thinking of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur—the capable human being and mutual recognition—to argue that he and Shaw both find the latter to provide the “best remedy . . . for healing the festering wounds that have brought civilization to the edge of the abyss.” Staying with Pygmalion, Jin Wan locates the process of self-creation it depicts within a postcolonial framework, illuminating how Lovely Is This Noble Lady (the play’s Hong Kong adaptation) “highlights clashes and negotiations between colonial, national, and local culture and complicates the dichotomy between the colonizers and colonized.” Completing the case study, Kay Li uses a 2014 performance of an excerpt from Pygmalion at a Buckingham Palace gala honoring the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and Queen Elizabeth II’s sustained patronage of it to “assess Shaw’s impact” in our own century as well as the potential for impactful revivals of his plays moving forward.Turning to The Apple Cart and On The Rocks, Tae-Yong Eom assesses the degree to which Shaw posits “reformative dictatorship” as a viable prospect to close endemic “loopholes of representative democracy.” Runfeng Wu next shifts our focus toward performance studies, analyzing Josie Rourke’s 2016 staging of Saint Joan at the Donmar Warehouse (which reset the play within contemporary corporate culture) to discern its resonance in relation to current socioeconomic challenges. The features section winds up with a bibliography of Shaw’s writings on Americans and the United States compiled by Michel W. Pharand.This issue then concludes with a review of L.W. Conolly’s new Broadview Press edition of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (which, unsurprisingly, contains lots of Shaw in it), another of Simone O’Malley-Sutton’s The Chinese May Fourth Generation and the Irish Literary Revival: Writers and Fighters, and Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín’s very last “Checklist of Shaviana.” Needless to say, Gustavo has done a tremendous job serving in this capacity since 2014, and the scholarly conversation around Shaw and his body of work is profoundly indebted to the dedication, skillfulness, and efficaciousness he brought to this invaluable bibliographic labor. In his place, we welcome Miguel Cisneros Perales, with whom SHAW readers are familiar as guest editor of “Shaw and Translation” (2022), who will carry the torch forward.