"Dukore's style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous
amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will
doubtless be the last word on the topic."
- Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw
Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001).
"This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships
to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long
twentieth century."
- - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University,
Ireland
A fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book
describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against
censorship - of his plays and those of others, of his works for the
screen and those of others - he sometimes won but usually lost. We
forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty
reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We
think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of
the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as
ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called "disgusting,"
"immoral", and "degenerate." Yet it took over three decades and a world
war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs
Warren's Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for
Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions
for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and
cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of
its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.
