Word: shavianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Indian, half-Irish Author Menen's little parable is fair sport as far as it goes, but it is a comedown from his witty and pointed satirical novel about the British in India, The Prevalence of Witches (1948). The Backward Bride seems meant to be profound in a Shavian way when it is not trying to be like Norman Douglas' South Wind. It is as far from either model as it is from the double target roughly caricatured in the description of Professor Lissom. The professor is somewhere south-southeast of Philosopher Bertrand Russell and the plump Bloomsbury...
...queen and woman, with a new authority and cruelty. But it is Caesar who really dominates the stage: a Caesar who is neither the image on a Roman coin nor the stern voice of the Roman Capitol, but a great and contradictory man molded into a peculiarly Shavian hero. Shaw's Caesar is much more the clement conqueror than the model for dictators, a man above meanness and resentment, with a lonely rather than a loving heart. On him first Rome and then middle age have set their heavy seal. His is a sad skepticism, not quite Pilate...
Once he sounded a note strangely akin to modesty: "Do not think of my plays as Oklahomas averaging $120,000 a week or else flopping. My audiences are more or less select and . . . seldom average capacity." But elsewhere in his torrent of advice, the old man sounded reassuringly Shavian: "I rank a revival of Caesar and Cleopatra as the nearest thing . . . to a gilt-edged security...