Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

“This original study will no doubt draw attention to St. John Hankin’s work, which may in turn receive further scrutiny from scholars, students, and theatre practitioners.”

Michel Pharand, Queen's University

This book proposes a vibrant intertextual dialogue between St. John Hankin’s manners comedies and what are considered Bernard Shaw’s “minor” Edwardian comedies and, after the war, some of his most experimental “extravagant” plays. Engaging thematic topics ranging from philanthropy and parenting to marital alliances and comic endings, their dramaturgy was truly in conversation over form and content as they re-purposed one another in a vital wrangling to direct the creative evolution of modern British comedy.

This book tracks dramaturgical affinities between some of Bernard Shaw’s late “extravagant” plays and those of Noël Coward, in particular their recasting of one another’s style and the tradition of manners comedy. While Coward’s first play (The Young Idea) all but plagiarizes You Never Can Tell and Shaw responds with his own depictions of the idle rich, their experimental plays in the 1930s also ambitiously engage issues of race and Empire, topics further outside their respective idioms.

“Christopher Wixson mines Shaw’s rarely-explored engagement with the work of Noël Coward, examining both writers' highly experimental plays from the 1930s in light of such important issues as postwar disillusionment, racial difference, and post-coloniality.”

Michel Pharand, Queen's University