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Shaw, Bunyan, And Puritanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Norbert F. O'Donnell
Norbert F. O'Donnell*
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio
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Extract

Although the importance which Bernard Shaw attached to the work of John Bunyan has often been remarked, no one has systematically explored the many passages concerning Bunyan scattered through Shaw's prose in order to determine what Bunyan meant to him and what influence Bunyan may be assumed to have had on his art. Aside from its intrinsic interest, such a study is of considerable importance because of the widespread acceptance, especially by hostile biographers and critics, of G. K. Chesterton's idea that Shaw was in a quite unmetaphorical sense a puritan. A study of Shaw's responses to the puritan Bunyan suggests that the famous Shavian “puritanism” was merely one of the many masks which G.B.S. held between himself and a world which he meant to irritate, entertain and instruct.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , June 1957 , pp. 520 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 520 George Bernard Shaw (London, 1909), pp. 48–52, 105–108, et passim.

Note 2 in page 520 Everybody's Political What's What? (New York, 1944), pp. 65–66—hereafter cited in the text as What's What.

Note 3 in page 520 Sixteen Self Sketches (New York, 1949), p. 165.

Note 4 in page 520 Preface, Androcles and the Lion, xiv, 78. Aside from those toEverybody's Political What's What?, Sixteen Self Sketches, Three Plays by Brieux, and Too True to Be Good, all references to Shaw's work are to The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, Ayot St. Lawrence ed., 30 vols. (New York, 1930–32). As yet no single collection contains all of Shaw's work.

Note 5 in page 522 Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw, Playboy and Prophet (New York, 1931), p. 502.

Note 6 in page 522 Ibid., p. 189.

Note 7 in page 526 Bernard Shaw (Norfolk, Conn., 1947), pp. 73–74.

Note 8 in page 526 Preface, Three Plays by Brieux (New York, 1913), p. vii.

Note 9 in page 527 The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Edmund Venables, rev. Mabel Peacock (Oxford, 1926), p. 55. All references to The Pilgrim's Progress are to this edition.

Note 10 in page 527 John Bunyan (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 153.

Note 11 in page 527 “Grace Abounding,” The Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding, and A Relation of his Imprisonment, ed. Edmund Venables, rev. Mabel Peacock (Oxford, 1900), p. 310.

Note 12 in page 528 Men and Supermen, The Shavian Portrait Gallery (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 210.

Note 13 in page 530 In the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans (ix, xxvii), he acknowledges basing the character of Mrs. Dudgeon in The Devil's Disciple on Dickens' Mrs. Clennam with “perhaps a touch of” Mrs. Gargery.

Note 14 in page 532 Our Theatres in the Nineties, xxvi, 131.

Note 15 in page 532 I am indebted to Professor Milton Crane of the Univ. of Chicago for his suggestion of the idea developed in this paragraph.

Note 16 in page 533 Three Plays for Puritans, ix, 196.