Question

G b shaw views about Shakespeare?

Answer 1

William Shakespeare was, famously, a playwright and an actor. George Bernard Shaw was, famously, a playwright and a critic — and a particularly acerbic critic of Shakespeare, whose cult he insisted had mushroomed by the 20th century far beyond what the man’s dramaturgy merited, and whose characters he declared “have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort.”
Whew. Mayhap we should see about renaming the Folger.
Or mayhap not: Shaw was also famously a bombastic old curmudgeon (even in his youth), a genius gadfly given to making outrageous claims to get an audience’s attention, then using his peerless wit and erudition to make a watertight case for the more measured position he’d actually come to argue. (Or the opposite position: Shaw is forever giving equal time to the opponents of his own ideas.)
Indeed he would over the course of his long life shower much praise on Shakespear, to use the spelling Shaw preferred, and would even lend his name and pen to the earliest efforts to establish a national theater in England.
True, his utter impatience with “Bardolatry”—his efficiently dismissive coinage for the breathless Victorian fanboying that elevated Shakespeare to the ranks of the prophets and the philosophers—that impatience would remain with him to the grave. (Makes one long for a comic one-act that imagines him meeting a young Harold Bloom for cocktails at the Algonquin, doesn’t it?)
Saint Joan, onstage at Folger Theatre this month, may well be the most Shakespearean of Shaw’s major plays in its matter and its style, as dramaturg Michele Osherow notes. (There is Caesar and Cleopatra to consider, but that’s more of a counterargument, and best left for another season.) Look to the ephemera, though, and you’ll find a scattering of charming artifacts, each one testament to Shaw’s lifelong entanglement with Our Boy Bill