Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw – serie

Bernard Shaw and William Archer is the final volume in the series on the Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw. Throughout their four decades of friendship the two men campaigned for the ‘New Drama’ and the ‘New Theatre." In the early years of their activities, Archer led the campaigns with his theatre reviews and his books on contemporary British theatre. He also translated, published, and helped stage the London premieres of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. During the 1890s both Archer and Shaw used their theatre reviews to support their campaigns, and Shaw began to step forward as a playwright. As Shaw established himself as a leading modern playwright, Archer wrote dozens of reviews and articles, often arguing with Shaw over his philosophical ideas that increasingly became a defining feature of his discussion plays such as Man and Superman and Major Barbara. The two colleagues loved to debate with one another in public, and these feisty arguments regularly carried over to the letters, which bear witness to the vital partnership between a theatre critic and a playwright.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) once quipped that it is "up to the author to take care of himself." This rich selection of Shaw's correspondence with his US and UK publishers proves how much the dramatist lived up to his own words by providing the details of his steady involvement in the publication of his works.Covering nearly sixty years of a very productive career, Bernard Shaw and His Publishers is a first-hand account of Shaw's efforts to control all aspects of his works. The letters reveal Shaw's thoughts on issues ranging from pricing, advertising, copyright, and royalties, to typeface, margin size, paper choice, binding, and colour. Complete with full annotations by Michel W. Pharand, this volume sheds new light on Shaw and his working habits, as well as on the history of early-twentieth-century publishing, and will appeal to Shaw scholars and theatre researchers, as well as book and print-culture historians.