Abstract
SHAW'S THEATRICAL RHETORIC, with its great expressive strength, is, essentially, an old language in a new frame. Shaw played parodistic variations on this or that speech—style borrowed from an "imaginary museum." Despite its inner flexibility, this rhetoric, with its "euphemistic" syntax and vocabulary, was backward—looking, and it tended to inhibit the expression of new states of experience in new play—forms. Yet, certain experiences — particularly the despair and the sense of waste left behind by World War 1— are repeatedly given voice in the late plays; and the search for new forms is clear in Back to Methuselah and the political extravaganzas. There are signs of a corresponding impatience with the glib rationality that often went with the received language — signs of a desire to break it down, to let a new voice come through. Instead, Shaw tended, as I shall attempt to show, to use the old dramatic language to fend off the need for new expression.
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