Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward Conversation Pieces

This book tracks dramaturgical affinities between some of Bernard Shaw’s late “extravagant” plays and those of Noël Coward, in particular their recasting of one another’s style and the tradition of manners comedy. While Coward’s first play (The Young Idea) all but plagiarizes You Never Can Tell and Shaw responds with his own depictions of the idle rich, their experimental plays in the 1930s also ambitiously engage issues of race and Empire, topics further outside their respective idioms.

“Christopher Wixson mines Shaw’s rarely-explored engagement with the work of Noël Coward, examining both writers' highly experimental plays from the 1930s in light of such important issues as postwar disillusionment, racial difference, and post-coloniality.”

Michel Pharand, Queen's University

Chapter 1. Introduction: Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward.- Chapter 2: Born Bosses and Lost Dogs.- Chapter 3: “Native” Revolts.- Chapter 4: Entropical Turns.- Chapter 5: Why The Life Force Would Not.

Christopher Wixson is Professor of English and Theatre at Eastern Illinois University, USA. His scholarly writing has appeared (in most cases, more than once) in Modern Drama, Studies in English Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, Comparative Drama, ELT, Notes on Contemporary Literature, Pamphlet, The Harold Pinter Review, SHAW, The Shavian, American Drama, and The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. He is the author of Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising: Prophet Motives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Bernard Shaw: A Very Short Introduction (2020). Since 2017, he has served as the General Editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.