Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries by Tony Jason Stafford, and: Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia by Matthew Yde (review)

Abstract

Tony Jason Stafford. Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. xii + 169. $74.95. Matthew Yde. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. x + 247. $80.00. Two recent monographs indicate robust ongoing critical conversation around Bernard Shaw's work. The authors are both astute and attentive readers of plays, and both books admirably strive to forge new interpretive directions and shine light on areas that have vexed scholars and theater practitioners alike. Together, they rattle some sacred, garden-variety assumptions about Shaw. Emily Dickinson conceptualized curiosity as the Garden in Brain, a formulation that might have delighted Shaw who, as Tony Jason Stafford details in Shaw's Settings, seems to have had gardens on brain. Stafford's rich study proceeds from assertion that, as unquestionably brilliant as Shaw's dialogue is, his copious paratextual material (verbose prefaces, literary stage direction) is far from irrelevant to theatrical experience of plays and essential not only to understanding their meaning but in revealing Shaw's visual artistry and dramaturgical prowess. In particular, Stafford traces playwright's adept and varied deployment of two recurrent settings, garden and library, through nine major plays that span three decades, to demonstrate how meaningfully Shaw intertwines stage environment with verbal pyrotechnics and discussion-based dramatic style for which he is so well known. Stafford approaches plays as both literary and performance texts and deftly illustrates how Shaw employs these two settings in his campaigns against (among other things) capitalism and romantic idealism, tracking their incarnations from Widowers' Houses to Back to Methuselah. As archetypes, gardens and libraries signify human advancement and achievement while at same time being status symbols, indicating that level of British society that, as Stafford writes, Shaw ironically targeted for his assaults on ... hypocrisy, pretentiousness, hollowness, superficiality, and irrationality (6). While appearance of gardens and libraries approaches a kind of ubiquity in plays, Stafford points out that Shaw never uses them as settings in quite same way twice, thematically or textually. Rather, in a certain sense, pattern is that there is no pattern, or, as GBS proclaimed, the golden rule is that there are no golden rules. Stafford's thesis then is broad, claiming that Shaw chooses gardens and libraries as backdrops neither haphazardly nor frivolously, but deliberately, in order to achieve each play's intended effect and meaning. After a brief introduction, bulk of his study analyzes tropes' varying formulations, assigning each chapter to a specific play and unpacking its unique intratextual configuration. Each begins by establishing a critical context for play being discussed and proceeds to make clear ways in which author's reading builds upon, sometimes diverges from, and even discovers blind spots among other scholarly perspectives. Throughout, Stafford's mining of material is fruitful, from his discovery of fecund semantics of character names (most fascinatingly in Mrs. Warren's Profession) to his interpretive assessment of Shaw's specified contents of Morell's bookshelves in Candida and Roebuck Ramsden's study in Man and Superman. These close readings convincingly emphasize importance of place (including even Shaw's designation of weather) to characterization, conflict, and articulation of each play's political and philosophical points. In Shaw's Settings' final pages, Stafford reiterates generalized convergences in Shaw's varying usages of garden and library within architecture of theatrical text: how they help articulate character and metaphor and serve to create visual and performance effects. …