Shaw, George Bernard
Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950),Irish playwright and critic. ‘Shakespeare is a far taller man than I am’, wrote Bernard Shaw, ‘but I stand on his shoulders’. The theatre criticism of GBS in the Saturday Review between 1895 and 1898 shows his deep love and knowledge of Shakespeare's plays which ‘began when I was a small boy’. Yet these reviews are crammed with attacks on the ‘poor foolish old Swan’. In one notorious piece he wrote: ‘With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, who I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his’. These reviews, and much that he wrote in the prefaces to his own plays, were a form of artistic electioneering in which Shaw attacked the sentimental bardolatry of Henry Irving and other leading actor-managers who, while worshipping Shakespeare, diminished his work. What especially bothered Shaw was that...
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