Bernard Shaw's Beginnings on the London Stage

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 470-481
Author(s):  
Irving McKee
Keyword(s):  
New Drama ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
London Stage

In 1892, at the age of thirty-six, Bernard Shaw was a notorious socialist and a bachelor, living with his musical mother and sister in London. He had begun paying his way seven years before as a critic of art; now he assayed music; soon, in 1894, it was to be weekly evaluation of the drama. Four of his six novels—five of them written while his mother supported him—had appeared obscurely and unprofitably. In 1891 a young Dutch friend and fellow critic, Jacob T. Grein, had produced Ibsen's Ghosts to inaugurate the new Independent Theatre in support of Shaw's almost solitary campaign for the New Drama. Grein sought but could not at first find an adequate English play in the new vein. “This was not to be endured,” Shaw later recalled. “I had rashly taken up the case, and rather than let it collapse, I manufactured the evidence.” He had embarked upon Widowers' Houses in 1885 only to lay it aside uncompleted; he now finished it, and Grein produced it on 9 December 1892 at the Royalty Theatre, on quite unfashionable Dean Street in Soho. It was Shaw's first appearance on any stage.

Margaret Macnamara: a ‘New Woman’ of the Independent Theatre Movement

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 112-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Lufkin
Keyword(s):  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
Female Participant ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
State University ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Louisiana State University ◽  
New Drama ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
Fabian Society

In this article Patricia Lufkin examines the work of Margaret Macnamara, a remarkable feminist playwright whose work has fallen into obscurity but who deserves attention as an important female participant in the Independent Theatre Movement and the Fabian Society. Macnamara’s associations and collaborations with key figures of the time, including George Bernard Shaw, are explored, and her progressive thought and participation in key organizations demonstrated. Importantly, Lufkin analyzes Macnamara’s play The Gates of the Morning (1908), highlighting its feminist critique of religion and its patriarchal influence. The critical response to her work was mixed, yet both positive and hostile reviews acknowledged that the play was a competent and stirring example of the new drama of progressive ideas, and helped to bring the ‘woman question’ to the forefront of people’s minds. Patricia Lufkin received her PhD from Louisiana State University, and is now teaching at Arkansas State University Mid-South. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century British theatre, most significantly on the life and work of Macnamara and Samuel Beckett.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

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