The north facade of the Casón del Buen Retiro (Madrid), which now houses the Prado Museum's study center and library, has a running inscription that reads: “Todo lo que no es tradición es plagio” (everything that is not [part of some] tradition is plagiarism). Indeed, it can be argued that there is no true originality and creativity unless one adopts a particular traditional heritage as the ground on which to anchor innovation, reaction, subversion. This is largely Shaw's modus operandi. First, this applies in a general sense, for as Charles Berst notes, “the roots of Shaw's artistic idiom are notably traditional.”1 One need read only the subtitles of many of his plays to see that—at least as a starting point—the long-standing traditions of different music and drama genres, as well as canonical authors, were part of his toolkit. Thus, we find “Jonsonian Comedy” (The Millionairess), “Topical Comedy” (The Philanderer), “Puppet Play” (Shakes vs Shav), and “Fantasia” (Heartbreak House), among many others.In the case at hand, however, the influence of classical literature and Greco-Roman antiquity in general is perhaps not that obvious. There is very little to grasp on the surface beyond the apparent hint at Virgil's Aeneid in Arms and the Man and the setting of Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion. Yet, as is often the case with Shaw, there is much more than meets the eye about him and his work. Indeed, classical literature has deep ramifications in Shaw's dramatic and nondramatic discourse—to the extent that the classical tradition plays a significant role in his configuration as an icon of culture: from Shaw's formative years to the reverberations in the form of his critical reception, long after his death. Such is the timeline that this introduction explores through the lens of the classicist.Shaw's first encounters with the classics took place even before his few years of formal education. As he recounts in Sixteen Self Sketches (however derogatory the tone of the book), My first lessons in Latin in the interval between being taught to read and write by a governess (and taught very well) and my going to school, took place privately in the house of my clerical uncle-in-law William George Carroll, where I sat with his two sons and learnt the declensions and conjugations and irregular verbs quite easily; so that when I went to school at what is now Wesley College, and was then the Wesleyan Connexional School, I at once rose to the head of the First Latin Junior.2 It is not clear whether Shaw took pride in his command of the language of Virgil and Cicero at a level higher than his peers, but he remembers that “no prize nor serious importance was attached to this [literature] or to any subject but Latin.”3Shaw certainly sustained an interest, mostly of the self-taught kind, in classical literature throughout his later life—especially, perhaps, during his early years in London, often at a table in the British Museum reading room. A brief overview of his early critical pieces at the time (1880s–1890s) reveals a number of references to classical authors that, by their sheer number and depth (but not only because of that), belie the education of a “downstart” (as he once called himself) and the intellectual scope of a Fabian socialist.4For example, in the field of music, he points his finger at the fool “who imagines that the list of Bayreuth dramas closed with the death of Wagner” by drawing parallels with classical Greek drama: “We have produced our Aeschylus: our Sophocles and Aristophanes have yet to come; and very handsomely our Wagnerians will abuse them when they do come for violating the classic traditions of Wagner.”5 Likewise, in the plastic arts, Shaw's admiration for classical Greek sculpture is made to contrast with the works on display at the Grosvenor Gallery, whose authors “perpetrate blunders in posing their figures that … any intelligent observer of Greek statuary could correct at a glance.”6 Shaw's drama criticism, in turn, sometimes also measures plays by the classical yardstick—to the extent that toward the end of his life he grants the classical Greek dramatists the highest status in aesthetic, intellectual, and didactic terms; to wit, One playwright is capable of nothing deeper than shortlived fictitious police and divorce court cases of murder and adultery. Another can rise to the masterpieces of Eschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes, to Hamlet, Faust, Peer Gynt, and: well, no matter: all these having to be not only entertaining, but immensely didactic (what Mr Rattigan calls plays with ideas), and longlived enough to be hyperbolically called immortal. And there are many gradations between these extremes: tragedy and melodrama, high and low comedy, farce and filth.7 Even his early dramatic creed, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, settles groundbreaking notions by resorting to the sources of antiquity: Doubtless I shall be reproached for puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term ideal. But what, I ask, is that inevitable passing perplexity compared to the inextricable tangle I must produce if I follow the custom, and use the word indiscriminately in its two violently incompatible senses? If the term realist is objected to on account of some of its modern associations, I can only recommend you, if you must associate it with something else than my own description of its meaning (I do not deal in definitions), to associate it, not with Zola and Maupassant, but with Plato.8The Quintessence also showcases the influence of classical philosophers, as when Shaw again cites Plato to support the notion that “money hunger is no more respectable than gluttony, and that unless its absence or feebleness is only a symptom of a general want of power to care for anything at all, it usually means that the soul has risen above it to higher concerns.”9Despite how obviously well-versed Shaw was in all things classical, there is always something new one can discover at every turn. In fact, as noted at the outset, Shaw deliberately chooses “tradition” as the raw material of his modern, provocative ideas—a combination that constitutes perhaps the most systematic of the Shavian paradoxes. Take, for instance, the scene in Act III of Caesar and Cleopatra, when Britannus visits the top of the Lighthouse of Alexandria: rufio.Well, my British islander. Have you been up to the top?britannus.I have. I reckon it at 200 feet high.rufio.Anybody up there?britannus.One elderly Tyrian to work the crane; and his son, a well conducted youth of 14.rufio[looking at the chain] What! An old man and a boy work that! Twenty men, you mean.britannus.Two only, I assure you. They have counterweights, and a machine with boiling water in it which I do not understand: it is not of British design. They use it to haul up barrels of oil and faggots to burn in the brazier on the roof.rufio.But— (II: 239)10 Although this exchange contains several intertwined references to contemporary issues—part of the Shavian flair for historical anachronism11—the “machine with boiling water” is likely to be a reference to Hero's aeolipile, a contraption that makes clever use of steam power to create motion.Hero of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and physicist who lived in the Roman province of Egypt in the first century CE—admittedly, almost a century later than Julius Caesar. However, all the other biographical coincidences are impossible to overlook. In his Pneumatics,12 Hero lists the “building instructions” of a series of mechanical devices that were, for the most part, used as ingenious automata to awe visitors at temples and other public places. Among them, we have “a vessel from which wine or water may be made to flow separately or mixed,” “libations at an altar produced by fire,” and “trumpets sounded by flowing water.” In particular, the allusion to the aeolipile as a forerunner of the steam engine (and Britannus's failure to grasp the mechanics of the instrument because “it is not of British design”) reveals itself as a fitting device to frame the critique of contemporary British society that pervades the play—beginning with the imprecations to the audience of “compulsory educated ones” in the prologue.13The impact that the writers of Greco-Roman antiquity had on Shaw's career as a playwright can be gauged, in sum, by looking at his own ranking of their influence and standing. On 16 November 1917, at Archibald Henderson's request, Shaw fills out and sends his biographer a list of the greatest examples of dramatic literature under the suggested headings of “Comedies,” “Tragedies,” and “Serious Dramas.” After discarding the scheme of the classification on the grounds that “this heading [serious dramas] is absurd. All plays are serious,” Shaw goes on to include “the comedies of Aristophanes” and “the Greek tragedies” on his list.14 In both cases the label is rather general and is written after a “Finally” in the middle of the column—a discursive and visual symbol of how these works constitute the foundation of all great drama.Although Shaw has always been known for being largely a self-taught intellectual (he would loathe the label!), as regards classical literature no single event has proven more significant than his meeting Gilbert Murray. Shaw lived down the road from Murray at the turn of the century, they both supported the Court Theatre in its early years (many of Murray's translations of classical plays, in particular, were produced there), and together they “more or less invented the play script that could be read at home as well as performed on stage.”15 Shaw thought so highly of Murray's talent for understanding the plays he translated that by 1940 he wrote to him that “the only plays that seem to me likely to survive” this “revolutionary burst of playwriting activity in London … are the old Greek ones in your translations.”16 This admiration for and acknowledgment of Murray's genius had already crystalized, of course, in “the originality” of the part of Adolphus Cusins (Major Barbara), for which Murray “served the author as a very interesting model” (III: 197).This fruitful relationship is all the more central to the theme of this issue because it contrasts with Shaw's previous attitude toward learned men of letters who specialized in classical antiquity. Let us quote here the unkind tone Shaw employed in writing about famed translator and classicist Benjamin Jowett: I remember conversing once with the late Master of Balliol, an amiable gentleman, stupendously ignorant probably, but with a certain flirtatious, old-maidish frivolity about him that had, and was meant to have, the charm of a condescension from so learned a man.17 This is perhaps the key point when it comes to understanding the relationship between Shaw's poetic ideals and classicism: he loathes the “intellectual snobbery” of those critics who can pass judgment only by comparing—unfavorably—all modern drama to, for example, the ancient Greeks. In Shaw's own words, The high and mighty criticism, which consists merely of complaints that melodramas are not classical, tragedies not high comedies, Mr Pinero not Aristophanes, and Mr Henry Arthur Jones not Sophocles, is as foolish as it is necessarily barren. A critic who cannot criticize Punch and Judy on its own plane is no critic, but only a partisan of his own favorite plane. Nay, a critic who cannot enjoy a good performance of Punch and Judy is not likely to be a very safe judge of Aristophanes.18 By virtue of yet another of those typically Shavian paradoxes, Shaw, in the guise of a true classical sage himself, was able to go full circle and become one of the authors he so often borrows from in the eyes of others. It is indeed significant that a number of scholars have chosen Shaw to illustrate and personify the essence of ancient authors and attitudes. Perhaps the best-known example is Crombie's likening Plato's criticism of Homeric literature with “Shaw sticking pins into Shakespeare.”19 In a similar vein, C. L. R. James, in his book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary, derides Lucian (ca. 125–180 CE) by calling him “the Bernard Shaw of his day,” who, “like many other Greek philosophers and intellectuals, sneered at the games.”20 A much more obvious comparison is drawn by Alleyne Ireland when he explores how “Aristophanes—the Bernard Shaw of his day—convulsed Athenian audiences with his satires on local politics.”21 To quote but one more example, Carroll E. Simcox calls “Greek comic poet Meander, the Bernard Shaw of the ancient world.”22 The list goes on.23Thus far, the discursive method in this introduction has leaned toward the classical references in Shaw's critical writings because the essays that follow will provide readers with plenty of intriguing connections between the Greek and Roman authors of antiquity and Shaw's plays. Niall W. Slater (“Nostoi and Nostalgia in Heartbreak House”) begins by analyzing the multiple classical literary sources that inform the play's structure, especially seafaring tropes and different nostoi (returns home). Heartbreak House is further connected with Homeric epic through the role of various characters as “avatars of Odysseus.”In “Bernard Shaw's Dionysian Trilogy: Reworkings of Gilbert Murray's Translation of Euripides's Bacchae in Major Barbara, Misalliance, and Heartbreak House,” Peter Gahan provides a detailed and multifaceted account of the influence of Gilbert Murray's scholarship and traductological work in the composition of these three plays. Furthermore, the single most important element that Shaw adroitly incorporates into this “trilogy” is the Dionysian—which informs the subtextual (especially) religious element throughout this “Dionysian trilogy” and echoes the “Dionysian zeitgeist socially, politically, and culturally.”Matthew Yde's “Dialectical Drama and the Ideal State: The Platonic Dimension of Shavian Dramaturgy and Political Theory” draws intriguing parallels between Shaw's dramaturgy and the Platonic dialogue, on the one hand, and Plato's political ideals as illustrated in The Republic and the goals of Fabian Socialism, on the other. These parallels account for certain elements of Shaw's style and, Yde further contends, that “the notion of designing an ideal society, such as Plato does in The Republic, was central to Shaw's life's work.”Daniel Leary (“Virgilian Echoes: Arms and the Man and the Aeneid”) takes on a subject that has been discussed profusely in the past and chooses the less trodden, far subtler path of “echoes.” In an essay where style and theme symbiotically coexist, Leary illustrates Shaw's assemblage of his sui generis epic through “a four-stage approach” taken “from Dante's reading of scripture” (Literal, Tropecal [sic], Moral, and Anagogical). As his argument unfolds, we understand how—although originally trying his hand at a crowd-pleaser—“the epic impulse took over and [Shaw] wanted to instruct on an epic level, open a path to meaning.”In “Shaw's Joan of Arc and Heaney's Antigone as Classically Modern Heroines,” Biljana Vlašković Ilić contrasts the outlook and literary method of two very different Irish writers in their take on two classical heroines. Throughout the essay the notions of classicism and modernity are deeply intertwined, for these authors' “use of classical forms and themes sheds light on the power politics of their respective times.” In both cases, the final outcome hinges on the power of the spoken word and discursive strategies.Kay Li (“The Shavian Protagonists and Shaw's Changing Use of Classical Myths”) offers a chronological evolution of how Shaw utilized myths for stylistic and ideological purposes, especially as he has many of his main characters “structurally configured and supported through manipulations of classical myths.” Shaw becomes more heavily reliant on myths as he progressively “becomes a visionary and a mystic.” These myths include traditional Christian and Nordic narratives as well as the central elements of classical mythology.Finally, “Shaw and Classical Literature: A Selected Bibliography” collects the available primary sources (i.e., books by or about Greco-Roman authors that Shaw owned) and secondary sources (previous scholarship on the theme of this issue).This special theme issue was planned as a survey of how much there was left to say on this subject. I am happy to report that Shaw, as usual, remains inexhaustible.