No one has made a more significant contribution to the assembly of Bernard Shaw's biography than Stanley Weintraub. This book picks up many of the threads that constitute the immense log of his research on Shaw. It ends with a description of Shaw's curtain speech after the first performance of his first play, Widowers’ Houses, Weintraub noting that Shaw declared that “‘what he had dramatized was an unsavory reality in contemporary life, but he ‘heartily hoped that the time would come when the play … would be utterly impossible and wholly unintelligible.’ The passage of years would prove it to be neither. Although the first production achieved only two little-regarded performances, the stage had finally claimed Shaw. Now there would be no stopping him” (197).
In fall 1987 began my friendship with Fred Crawford (1947–99), the amazing SHAW Annual editor (1989–99) to whom Weintraub has dedicated Bernard Shaw Before...
