“It is only by the ideas which they embody that Mr. Shaw’s stage-works will live. Should those ideas ever become commonplaces—an unlikely contingency!—his plays possess, apart from their humour and wit, no quality which can save them from the doom of oblivion. They contain but the smallest amount of story, no plot worth speaking of, and very little emotional stress or conflict; any catastrophe they set forth is of a strictly intellectual sort.”
| + − | Ath. 1907, 2: 107. Jl. 27. 1500w. |
“The latest is the most interesting volume of Brentano’s new edition of Shaw, because none of the three plays in it has appeared in print before and only one of them has been played often enough in this country for many people to see it.”
| + | Ind. 63: 879. O. 10, ’07. 860w. |
“If only to find the secret that is in Mr. Shaw’s heart, his prefaces are to be read. There are the plays to be read, as well—two of them as good plays as Mr. Shaw has ever done, and all three as amusing and stimulating in print as on the stage, all three brilliantly successful devices for compelling you to swallow the powder of the ‘paper-apostle’ in the jam of the ‘artist-magician.’”
| + + − | Lond. Times. 6: 197. Je. 21, ’07. 1890w. |
“As a study of actual social conditions, or as drama, [Major Barbara] is quite worthless, being wholly unreasonable and packed, as is the writer’s habit, with all kinds of false and reckless generalizations, cynical extravagancies, and perverse misrepresentations; but it is, nevertheless, highly entertaining in its witty, bumptious, paradoxical and wholly irresponsible fashion.”
| − + | Nation. 84: 19. Jl. 4, ’07. 350w. |
“The present writer is considering not Mr. Shaw the playwright, but Mr. Shaw, the clairvoyant, the acute observer and the critic of things as they are in the year of grace, 1907, the philosopher, if you will, of the open eye and mind. He is, as a matter of fact, the very inspiration of critics whether of literature or of life, for he is inexhaustively suggestive because he is marvelously perceiving.”
| + | N. Y. Times. 12: 437. Jl. 13, ’07. 2370w. |