CELEBRATING SHAW'S CHICAGO CENTURY AND BEYOND

Abstract

Broadly speaking, the geography of Shaw’s dramatic career has been determined to a large degree by major metropolitan centers in Europe and North America and the cultural experiments and avant-garde movements they generated. Moreover, as the historical record shows, the reception of Shaw’s plays in these culture capitals has produced responses ranging from horrified to indifferent to enthusiastic. Yet while scholars have examined at length Shaw’s reception in cities such as Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and New York, they have yet to explore fully the importance of Chicago, a city whose long-standing importance to Shaw’s career challenges more traditional approaches to the dramatist’s life and work. 1 In diverse ways, Chicago has displayed its love affair with GBS for more than a century; indeed, according to bibliographer Sidney Kramer, it was “from Chicago that Shaw conquered America.” 2 In the most interesting ways, Shaw’s literary and professional relationship with Chicago cuts across the encounter of publishers, artists, and intellectuals with a metropolis that not only engendered but also supported and enhanced a revolution in the arts equal to both its American and European counterparts. At one level, the significance of Shaw’s relationship with Chicago—or “Shaw-cago” as we might term it—provides us with an opportunity to consider a counter-reading of the dramatist’s relationship with America; at the same time, the points of contact between Shaw and the “Windy City” speak to an alternative sense of literary history, one that connects the Irish dramatist to American cultural and political life from the late Victorian period through our own postmillennium moment. 3