Shaw’s plays, essays, and frequent public statements offer clues not only to the specific controversies he courted, but also to the general mindset of a man who actively used controversy to fashion challenges to what he saw as a complacent and stagnant society. Contemporary theory can give us new insights into Shaw’s strategy for effecting social change and attempting to bring about the socialist utopia he so determinedly sought. The methods Shaw employed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century might even find new currency today, when literature in general and theatre specifically occupies an ever-shrinking part of the public’s consciousness. His taking of unpopular stances highlighted the causes he championed, even as they drew scorn for Shaw himself.
In “Predatory Rent: Widowers’ Houses Comes of Age,” Katrina Dunn examines Shaw’s first serious effort as a playwright, the resoundingly unpopular Widowers’ Houses. Its premiere at the Independent Theatre Society in December of 1892 merited only two lack-luster performances followed by general press condemnation. Dunn places Shaw’s theatrical indictment of slum landlordism into dialogue with economic geography and the contemporary housing justice movement to suggest that, in the face of recent catastrophic increases in housing costs in many countries (stemming from trends growing out of the ones Shaw identifies in his play), Widowers’ Houses has finally come of age and deserves exploration on the progressive stages of today. Shaw inverted the pattern of a polite comedy of class-crossed lovers to deliver instead a meditation on the property-based exploitation of the destitute, populated by recognizable nineteenth-century stage types rendered unlikeable by their Shavian accoutrements. Dunn applies this drama to the twenty-first century’s neoliberal fantasies of cities as pure exchange value, where investors and developers leverage housing as commodities, trading in futures, and engaging in predatory pricing.
Turning to Shaw’s political activism, Virginia Costello explores in “Shaw’s Unpopular Political Views: On Suffering and Executions” how Shaw relished the role of being, at least temporarily, unpopular. Examining Shaw’s opposition to the politically motivated executions of both the Haymarket anarchists and the Spanish radical writer Francisco Ferrer, Costello analyses Shaw’s response to these executions in order to offer insight into his character. Both the prosecution of suspects in the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and the 1909 execution of Ferrer for his alleged involvement in an insurrection in Barcelona provided Shaw with different but related ways to challenge societies gripped in a fear of violent revolution. Costello argues that when Shaw provoked or offended his readers, viewers, critics, audiences, or government officials, it was almost always a deliberate act. She demonstrates how Shaw’s public discourse was fundamentally built around provocation.
Finally, in “‘Shaming the Devil About Shelley’: Reading Shaw Reading Shelley,” Eric Powell links Shaw’s contrarian views with those of his hero, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Famously, at the first general meeting of the newly formed Shelley Society, Shaw took to the podium and declared: “Like Shelley, I am a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian.” This was intended to be, and was received by some present at the meeting, as a shocking provocation. Powell explores how in a scathing—and, typically, humorous—polemic with the Shakespearean title “Shaming the Devil about Shelley” Shaw tried to explode what he called “The Shelley Myth” of the poet as a beautiful and ineffectual angel, claiming him instead as a central figure in the history of socialism. He examines what Shaw’s engagement with the events surrounding the centenary celebrations of Shelley’s birth in 1892 might offer to both Shaw studies and Shelley studies.