Completed 31 July 1907, Bernard Shaw’s short story “Aerial Football, the New Game” appeared initially that November in both the very first volume of the British periodical The Neolith and Collier’s Weekly in America.1 When Collier’s editors later awarded $1000 to its author for the best story of that quarter in February 1908, Shaw penned an indignant letter.No previous winner had ever returned the prize nor, needless to say, denounced it, and Collier’s (as Shaw likely did too) immediately recognized an irresistible publicity opportunity.Chronicling the “entertaining aftermath” to their most recent quarterly fiction contest, Collier’s published his letter in their 25 April issue as well as their puckish retort:Collier’s prefaced their piece with a Shakespearean epigraph from Julius Caesar:In the play, Marc Antony then queries the crowd: “Was this ambition?” Contrasting the conspirators’ image of an aspirational tyrant with an image of honorable Brutus, he turns each image inside out to denote its opposite, and his rhetorical savvy deftly shapes public opinion. If, for Collier’s, Shaw’s refusal was typical GBS behavior—in short, orneriness and self-promotion —other American media outlets perceived the private rebuff in dynamic tension with the public persona.The Writer reproduced Shaw’s entire letter in its “Personal Gossip About Authors” section3 while other periodicals eagerly added their respective two cents about the rebuff. Republishing both the letter and the Collier’s response, The Literary Digest proclaimed “English illusions concerningMr. G. Bernard Shaw” to be “well-nigh destroyed.”4 Accolades for Shaw’s magnanimousness with the gesture also appeared in the British press; as The Evening Standard declared:In a piece likely written by editor and literary critic Frank Moore Colby, The Bookman paraphrased Shaw’s letter and the return of the award money “which he had as plainly earned as if it had been a payment of $5 for washing the windows of the building in which that magazine is published”:“The only interest we have in this small affair,” it goes on, “is its bearing on the myth of a Bernard Shaw, thinker, philosopher, reformer, serious man, head of a cult, centre of Shavian circles”:“To these,” it concluded, “we commend his letter to Collier’s”:Nearly two decades later, the story around “Aerial Football” still got tossed around. Only a few months into its first year of publication (1925), The New Yorker recounted the 1908 episode in a “Talk of the Town” feature and added an update. According to “Modest Mr. Shaw,” the playwright had turned down a request made in 1921 by the Evening Post to republish “Aerial Football,” saying he intended to soon produce his own book of short stories. With still no sign of it appearing, that spring, a “prosperous magazine which knew of the Evening Post’s offer mentioned it in making another, of as much money as prosperous magazines, even in these author’s-bonanza days, are paying for some of their stories, brand new.”“In reply,” the piece continued,A year and a half later, of course, Shaw would receive another award (this time, the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature) and again sincerely considered declining it. In a 9 November 1926 letter, Shaw announced to his solicitor J.G. Godard, “I have majestically refused the Nobel Prize; but as Nobel did not believe that anybody could refuse money, and therefore made no provision for the present contingency, it looks as if the money must remain suspended in mid-air to all eternity unless I pocket it and then hand it back with a clear title.”The following decade, when Archibald Henderson included the anecdote in his 900-page biography The Playboy and the Prophet (1933), The Bookman anchored their review “with a certain nostalgia” upon its vivid recall and again reprinted Shaw’s rebuke in its entirety. The review cautioned that “even at the time when the letter quoted above was written [some] were inclined to stress the Playboy rather than the Prophet, and would not be inclined to take too seriously Professor Henderson’s claim that this is a ‘masterpiece of Shavian humour and irony.’” Following an extended quotation from its own 1908 commentary on the prize refusal, The Bookman, while not claiming to intend “a work of supererogation,” concludes by asking: “Has any sounder judgement of Shaw [than its own critic’s] appeared anywhere since that time, in nine hundred pages or in nine?”8As Henderson observes, this incident reveals the “multiplicity of diverse impressions which Bernard Shaw succeeds in evoking, [from] the opinion at one end of the scale that Shaw, as a great man of letters, was entirely justified in his indignant protest [and] the opinion at the other end of the scale that Shaw was playing a spectacular and sensational prank, and indulging in a rather expensive form of advertisement.”9 The extended meta-commentary around his prize refusal is further characterized by a pretty dazzling display of savvy professional self-promotion on the part of Collier’s as well as The Bookman and more generally illustrates the ongoing staking out of positions to negotiate the contours of GBS that extends to 2022. As Shaw well understood, GBS is not a singular creation but a collaborative, performative campaign.This issue of SHAW provides nourishment for its own impatient readers who clamor for more Shaw, starting with three important studies that expand our knowledge of the playwright’s life. Peter Gahan kicks things off with an in-depth overview of Shaw’s political and artistic involvement with the Irish Literary Revival in the early twentieth century. During a volatile time, his commitment was profound; as Gahan shows, Shaw “continually wrote, proposed, critiqued, [and] projected,” a “brilliant, cantankerous, generous, willfully paradoxical, indefatigable visionary” serving a nation pursuing its destiny. Next, Philipa Clare Parker hopes to remedy the “cursory, if not denigratory” treatment Ayot Saint Lawrence neighbors Clare and Stephen Winsten have received from biographers with a fuller view of what she calls their “symbiotic relationship” with Shaw during the last years of his life.Jesse M. Hellman’s focus is Shaw’s sister Elinor Agnes, who died of tuberculosis in March 1876 at the age of twenty-one. While she is barely mentioned by biographers, Hellman maintains that Shaw’s own rare reticence on this subject is indicative of the “unresolved mourning and the traumatic grief he experienced at her death.” As much as Agnes remains a bit of a mystery, his essay movingly teases out clues from various sources to try and pinpoint—especially via My Dear Dorothea, written in January 1878—how deeply Shaw felt her loss and to what extent she informed Shaw’s creation of so many vibrant young, female characters including Dolly Clandon and Eliza Doolittle.Next, Bernard F. Dukore provides a lively overview of Shaw’s views on taxation, a subject that remains in our own time a ubiquity among campaign promises from both sides of the political spectrum. Dukore traces how Shaw assessed the practice through multiple lenses, from its necessity for municipal infrastructure to its role in Fabian cultural and economic reform to its corruption by capitalist profiteering, concluding that, although “paying his share may not have been built into Shaw’s DNA, it was part of the fabric of his life, however inconvenient it was.”Jean Reynolds anchors the center section of this issue, dedicated to enriching our appreciation of various Shaw plays. She directs us in “Love and Language from A to Z” through perhaps his most delightful short play Village Wooing, illuminating its significant connective tissue with Pygmalion and what she calls its “unwritten parts” with intriguing and rich implications about the acts of reading and writing. Also engaged with the treatment of love and marriage onstage, Justine Zapin approaches Getting Married as a revision of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts in which Shaw makes space in the form and content of his play for a more humane marital contract for women and one that allows for “equanimity in love across social classes.” She argues persuasively that this discussion play par excellence “builds a case (slowly, and discursively) for an environment where women can freely articulate their own sense of self and have means by which to satiate their needs.”Rounding out the middle, Andrew Kimbrough provocatively situates Saint Joan and its preface in dynamic relation to both the history of the psychiatry of voice hearing and contemporary empirical research, arguing that Shaw anticipated a late twentieth-century rejection of “the nineteenth-century medical model of auditory hallucination” which pathologized the phenomenon, deeming it inconsistent with the “apparent teleological inclination of the universe towards progress and refinement.”The next two essays in this volume fruitfully explore Shaw’s intertextual relations, placing a couple of his most famous plays in conversation with the work of other authors. Mary Christian insightfully pairs George Eliot with Shaw, as each criticized the efficacy of traditional religious doctrine and institutions yet understood the ways in which faith can be a source of personal animation as well as social reform. Using Romola and Major Barbara as case studies, Christian puts their respective visions in dialogue with one another, with Eliot advocating for a “humanistic” model of “individual compassion and fellowship” and Shaw pushing for a system “grounded in economic equity and cooperation with the Life Force.” Then, James Armstrong guides us through two plays forged in 1918—Back to Methuselah and Luigi Antonelli’s A Man Confronts Himself—that “juxtapose immortality with the grotesque business of ordinary life.” The more obscure play conservatively casts the former as “unnatural” and even “inhuman” while Shaw radically endows it with “salvation” and “freedom” as they navigate a world devastated by war and a raging flu pandemic.The features section winds up with Kay Li’s introduction of the “Shaw Bot,” a collaborative artificial intelligence project of the International Shaw Society, the Shaw Festival, IBM Canada, and York University to disseminate information about and generate interest from students and the public about Shaw and his writing. This issue concludes with reviews of recent notable scholarly volumes about Shaw and another of the new Oxford World’s Classics editions of his plays as well as Gustavo A. Rodríguez-Martin’s essential “Checklist of Shaviana.”