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INTRODUCTION
(Followed
immediately by “Sources Consulted” and “Abbreviations”)
To our great benefit, Shaw scholars
have been notably productive in the “grassroots” areas of scholarship, the
foundation of all sound critical work. These comprise establishing
authoritative texts of Shaw’s basic corpus of works, discovering and editing
the more elusive materials, nailing down biographical and theatrical facts, and
compiling primary and secondary bibliographies. The formidable contributions of
Dan H. Laurence and Stanley Weintraub began as far back as the early 1950s and
have yet to run their course. Their immediate spiritual offspring, all avid
Shavians who committed themselves to “pure” scholarship in conjunction with
criticism, include T. F. Evans, Sidney P. Albert, Frederick P. W. McDowell,
Warren S. Smith, Arthur Nethercot, Louis Crompton, E. J. West, Daniel J. Leary,
Bernard F. Dukore, Charles A. Berst, Margery M. Morgan, and Anthony M. Gibbs. A
host of others followed. We now have definitive editions of the plays and
prefaces, a superb (although necessarily selective) Collected Letters
and several complementary editions of correspondence, the diaries, facsimiles
of some of the early and middle plays, a large volume of interviews and
recollections, a number of well-edited volumes of works by Shaw on various
subjects, a detailed chronology, and a sumptuous compilation of Shaw’s writings
on drama and theatre.1
In the realm
of bibliography, for the most part we have been extremely fortunate. After
forty years of labor ferreting out, examining, and describing everything by
Shaw that he could locate, in 1983 Laurence published the widely acclaimed Bernard
Shaw: A Bibliography, and then kept his nose to the grindstone through the
rest of the century, publishing a 125-page supplement in 2000. In the early
1980s a large team of volunteer Shavians, assembled by Helmut Gerber and led by
J. P. Wearing, Donald C. Haberman, and Elsie B. Adams, began compiling a
massive bibliography of commentary on Shaw for the “Annotated Secondary
Bibliography Series on English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920” published
by Northern Illinois University Press. The three volumes of G. B. Shaw: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him came out
in 1986. Another series of individual compilers had inadvertently assisted them
by turning out an annual “Continuing Checklist of Shaviana” for the Shaw
Bulletin / Shaw Review / SHAW: The Annual
of Bernard Shaw Studies starting in the 1950s. The latest of these
compilers, the apparently indefatigable John R. Pfeiffer, took the job over in
1972 and—far from abandoning it after 30-odd years—has gradually increased the
checklist’s coverage of both secondary and primary works.2
One of the
chief advantages of these two distinguished secondary bibliographies lies in
their chronological form. G. B. Shaw arranges its 9,000 entries in
alphabetical sequences for each year from 1871 to 1978 according to the
earliest publication date of the item. Since most of the entries are annotated
and the range of sources is remarkably varied in both language and nature, it
has the enduring characteristic of being by far the best research tool for
tracing the evolution of critical and popular reactions to Shaw and his plays
from the beginning to the late 1970s. The annual checklists of Shaviana, also
annotated, take what comes to view each year, and thus keep us relatively
up-to-date on current publications by and about Shaw since the closing date of G.
B. Shaw. However, no attempt is made to make these listings comprehensive.
Pfeiffer’s consistent policy has been to stay “ahead of the latest publication
of the relevant serial bibliographies,” which translates to not pursuing
“retrospective items.”3 Rather than digging out, recording, and
annotating all the current references
from the continuing bibliographies in the MLA Bibliography, Victorian
Studies, Irish University Review, Modern Drama (through the
terminal date of its checklist, 1999) and other sources, he has noted their
existence and left the tracking down to others. In recent years, as a wealth of
online sources developed, he has applied this policy to them as well. This is
doubtless the only feasible commitment for one person (with occasional help) to
adopt.
For everyday
purposes, however, most researchers into the wealth of Shaw material do not
want to have to burrow through bibliographies that list items unselectively and
in no meaningful order apart from “by” or “about” and year published. Preparing
to study a play or topic of their choice (or their teacher’s),
they need convenient lists of noteworthy publications on that play or topic.
The closest thing available has been Stanley Weintraub’s Bernard Shaw: A Guide to Research (1992). This is an excellent place
to start: highly authoritative in its selection and evaluation of books and
articles on the major aspects of Shaw, including each play, and illuminating as
a guide to trends in Shaw research up to 1990 or so. Every actual or
prospective Shaw scholar should be closely acquainted with it. But of course it
is only a jumping-off point, as it was intended to be.
The present
bibliography complements and supplements Weintraub’s little volume. A Selective,
Classified International Bibliography of Publications About
Bernard Shaw fills in and adds to the fields for which he supplies the
basics, including references in Roman-alphabet foreign languages and
“analytics” for books that have chapters or sections which are relevant to
specific topics. It is an enumerative rather than a discursive bibliography,
lacking commentary except for brief identifying or clarifying annotations when
desirable, and leaving dissertations to others. This was also true of my work
that spans the entire field of post-Ibsen drama and theatre from 1966 to 1990, Modern
Drama Scholarship and Criticism ...: An International Bibliography. But
because the present compilation focuses on a single dramatist and adds a whole
spectrum of references not directly relevant to drama and theatre, its
standards of selectivity differ markedly from those I applied when I treated
each dramatist in more limited bounds. Such topics as Shaw’s fiction, musical
involvements, economic and political views, and relations with other countries
were scantily represented in the earlier work. There, the measure I applied for
every entry on a play was “substantial,” which excluded many commentaries that
users might have found useful or at least interesting. For the new
bibliography, I deliberately sought out references that would amplify
categories such as “Shaw and Women” or “Science Fiction and Utopian
Literature,” and I saw no disadvantage to applying a more liberal outer
boundary for discussions of plays (short of reviews) than I had before. Thus,
for example, the section “Shaw and Music” has about seventy entries and the one
on Man and Superman well over a hundred. I even concocted a category
labeled “Introductory, Popular, and Laudatory Works” because I knew that some
Shavians would appreciate having these publications identified as such rather
than omitted. My overall objective was to supply Shaw researchers with a single
source that would satisfy nearly all of their needs in the realm of secondary
bibliography.
One of the means to this end is
to screen out the irrelevant and undesirable. With this in view, certain types
of publications were deliberately excluded. The bibliography does not include
books and pamphlets intended as mere “Study-Aids” (
A technique that I adapted
from non-scholarly reference works designed for college libraries, in this case
drama bibliographies, is known by the technical term of “analyzing composite
books”—that is, indexing them by chapters or sections that deal with individual
plays or other discrete topics. I applied this technique so extensively in Modern
Drama Scholarship and Criticism that I uncovered thousands of “new”
bibliographical items for scholars. But there I did not index books about a
playwright by their treatments of individual plays, lest a work that
encompassed all world dramatists since Ibsen far exceed the 50,000 entries of
other kinds in the two fat volumes. Dealing with Bernard Shaw alone in the
present compilation (and anticipating cyberspace), I could do this. Therefore
Shavians will find those sections duly listed along with the articles—many of
which are more tentative or ephemeral than chapters in books. Fully a quarter
of the entries on Man and Superman, for instance, are “analytics” of
this sort. Unexpected fringe benefits emerge: chapters on plays in books
replace earlier articles, keeping users from citing the outdated versions. And
discoveries transpire: who would have thought that a book entitled Pygmalion’s
Wordplay (by Jean Reynolds) would include a discussion of Man and
Superman?—or that a 55-page essay on the play would turn up in Arnold Silver’s
Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side, along with a twelve-page treatment of the
preface?
A feature that might well
prove controversial is the division of the entire bibliography into post- and
pre-1940 references. The latter are treated as an appendix and have only two
alphabetized categories: works that are not primarily about individual plays
and those that are. I believe most scholars would agree that “modern” Shaw
criticism began in the forties with sophisticated studies by Eric Bentley,
Francis Fergusson, Arthur Mizener, and a few others, capped by the landmark
books of Bentley and William Irvine. My guess was that a large proportion of
Shaw researchers would welcome such a principle of exclusion which shortened
the lists of publications in the various categories of the main bibliography,
especially those on the plays. The pre-modern entries include several of
genuine interest: the earliest book-length evaluations by H. L. Mencken,
Holbrook Jackson, and G. K. Chesterton; comments by dramatists who knew Shaw,
including fellow Irishmen Yeats, Gregory, and O’Casey; the reactions of Eliot
and Pirandello to Saint Joan and of Joyce to The Shewing-up of Blanco
Posnet; and the broad intellectual perspectives of Jacques Barzun and Edmund
Wilson. But most Shavians casting an eye over the two-hundred-odd references,
the great majority plucked from volumes one and two of G. B. Shaw, will
agree that they have more of an historical or even anthropological interest
than a practical use.
If that feature proves less
of a benefit than a shortcoming, it will be one of at least four that users
should bear in mind. The others are:
• The classifications can be quite arbitrary at
times. Many wide-ranging critical studies are also strongly biographical, and
vice versa; I have rarely listed one in the sections for both. Under “Shaw’s
Beliefs and Theories,” the subdivision “Religion / Philosophy” began as two
sections and evolved into one out of sheer despair from trying to attain a
valid division. And my three sub-categories within “Shaw and Sociology /
Economics / Politics” overlap as much as Shaw’s involvement with them permeates
his drama.
• The term “international” in my title implies
somewhat more than the reality: to find commentaries in non-Roman-alphabet
languages users will have to go elsewhere, notably to G. B. Shaw, the SHAW checklists, and the Annual
Bibliography of English Language and Literature, plus Internet databases
such as WorldCat, the MLA International Bibliography, and the International
Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ). There they will find
rich material in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and other languages that posed
linguistic and transcription difficulties that I began evading when I tackled
my first checklist for the journal Modern Drama in 1974.
• Lastly, a necessary forewarning: it was
beyond my present powers to verify a large proportion of the entries in the
bibliography—far from the 98% I attained for volume two of Modern Drama
Scholarship and Criticism. That work took an enormous amount of time and
mobility that I simply could not manage in my advanced retirement. My current
efforts at verification were restricted to whatever I could glean from Internet
and the collections of my own University’s library and nearby Cornell’s—along
with unconscionable exploitation of interlibrary loan services. (I am greatly
indebted to our ILL office, headed by the indefatigable and efficient Helen
Insinger.) Nevertheless, I did succeed in amending a host of incomplete and
inaccurate references drawn from other sources. In turn, I strongly urge users
to inform me of whatever corrections and additions they come across so that I
can incorporate them as they arrive.4
The format used in this
compilation generally conforms to the one I employed in Modern Drama
Scholarship and Criticism. In an attempt to gain greater intelligibility
and economy than standard American practice offers, techniques common in
library catalogs and European bibliographies have been grafted upon basic
American conventions, and others have been devised to enhance clarity without
wasting space. It has been a relief, however, to abandon the un-user-friendly
presence of innumerable abbreviations, particularly of journal titles (there is
only one). A quick reading of the abbreviations list below should make it
virtually unnecessary to consult it again. I was also able to reduce to a
minimum the space-saving technique of treating a section of an analyzed book as
an incomplete entry with an item-number reference to the main entry (indeed,
item numbers are not used at all); the full entry is given in each analytic
unless it is printed in one of the twenty collections of essays on Shaw.
The only type of book
entry that may require explanation derives from my attempt to list whatever
previously published articles (or sections of books) were reprinted, revised,
or otherwise incorporated into a given book, thus clarifying for users which of
these can be ignored. One clear-cut example should suffice (Mayne’s preface
gives the parenthetic information that follows):
Mayne, Fred. The wit and satire of
Bernard Shaw. NY:
Finally, a word about
topics excluded. Despite the open door of a section called “Miscellaneous,” I
drew the bottom line at “Shaw and telepathy” and “Shaw and cricket.” No entries
treat his vegetarianism, his alphabet bequest, or his bad driving. And nothing
could induce me to include the following:
Froese, Rainer. ‘Ghoti: keep it
simple: three indicators to deal with overfishing.’ Fish and Fisheries 5
i 2004 86-91 (Shaw attacked English spelling by demonstrating that ‘fish’ could
be spelled ‘ghoti’: ‘gh’ as in ‘rough,’ ‘o’ as in ‘women,’ and ‘ti’ as in
‘palatial’)
NOTES
1. See “Essential Volumes of Writings by Shaw”
below and, for reference works referred to here and subsequently, the section
“Bibliographic and Reference Works.”
2. I am greatly indebted to Professor Pfeiffer
for introducing me to many of the online databases that I used in compiling
this bibliography.
3. Letter from Pfeiffer. He also noted that he
follows the principle of “indiscriminate inclusion.”
4. Several passages in this introduction derive
from my article, “Tracking Down Shaw Studies: The Effective Use of Printed and
Online Bibliographical Sources,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies,
25 (2005), 165-78.
Following is a list of the sources I
consulted in the process of compiling this bibliography, supplementing those
listed in the “Bibliographic and Reference Works” section below. It is limited
to those which actually yielded at least one entry that I found nowhere else;
with the vast wealth of online databases available now, I experimented with
dozens of unlikely ones and, on occasion (PsycINFO, for example), was
pleasantly surprised. The article noted in the last footnote above gives
details on the most useful sources.
Online Sources
1. Books
and Parts of Books
MLA
International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and
Literatures (FirstSearch)
Annual Bibliography of
English Language and Literature (accessible online in some libraries)
WorldCat (FirstSearch)
Books in Print
(FirstSearch)
RLN Bibliographic File
World Shakespeare
Bibliography
Online
catalogs of research libraries: Harvard, Yale, Library of Congress, New York
Public Library, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale, Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale
2. Articles
MLA
International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and
Literatures (FirstSearch)
Annual Bibliography of
English Language and Literature (accessible online in some libraries)
Article First (FirstSearch)
Academic Search Premier
Google Scholar
International
Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ)
OneFile (Info Trac)
ProQuest—Research
Library
Biography and
Genealogy Master Index
Historical Abstracts
International Ibsen
Bibliography
PsycINFO
Reader’s Guide
(Retrospective)
RILM Abstracts of
Music Literature (FirstSearch)
World Shakespeare
Bibliography
Sources
Not Online
Annual Bibliography of
English Language and Literature (accessible online in some libraries)
Essay and General
Literature Index
International
Bibliography of Theatre (ceased in 1999)
Biography Index
American Humanities
Index
Annual
checklists in Modern Drama (1991-99), Victorian Studies, Irish
University Review, and Journal of Modern Literature (ceased in 2001)
Film Literature Index
International Index to Film Periodicals: An
Annotated Guide
Current issues of over
100 literary and theatrical periodicals from 1998 to date
The only journal abbreviation is SHAW for
SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies
Abbreviations for months are not listed
Dept. Department
diss. dissertation
ed. editor,
edited, or edition
NY
Penn
pp. pages
Pr. Press
publ. published
repr. reprinted
rev. revised
Univ. University
UP University
Press
vol. Volume