Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries shows how Shaw enlists the powerful visual component of setting, specifically gardens and libraries, to add meaningful dimensions to the other dramatic elements, such as portraying the characters in depth, refining the conflict, creating startling crises, capturing richly suggestive imagery, clarifying the structure, and developing themes, to achieve his own complex, meaningful, and compelling dramas. A study of this garden-library pattern adds up, first, to a realization of how tactile and visual this most verbal and intellectual of writers was, and how ... More

Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries shows how Shaw enlists the powerful visual component of setting, specifically gardens and libraries, to add meaningful dimensions to the other dramatic elements, such as portraying the characters in depth, refining the conflict, creating startling crises, capturing richly suggestive imagery, clarifying the structure, and developing themes, to achieve his own complex, meaningful, and compelling dramas. A study of this garden-library pattern adds up, first, to a realization of how tactile and visual this most verbal and intellectual of writers was, and how suggestive and symbolic in his evocation of reality he was, rather than direct and explicit. The study moreover shows that Shaw is keenly aware of performance values as seen in his effective use of settings. Shaw, however, does not use these settings in the same way in any two plays but rather varies his usage as he moves from play to play, giving us numerous Shavian variations on gardens and libraries. The result of such a study reveals the astonishing depth and complexity of Shaw’s dramatic genius, and a detailed analysis of these two settings, working in tandem, yields numerous fresh perspectives as we move through the plays, as well as a sense of the depth, flexibility, resourcefulness, and complexity of his genius.