Bernard Shaw and the Censors: Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen(Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)

“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.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Who Is the Censor?.- Chapter 2: The Critic and Emerging Playwright versus British and American Censors.- Chapter 3: Shaw’s Campaign Against the Censors: Press, Public Opinion, and Parliament.- Chapter 4: Shaw and Movie Censorship in Britain and the United States.- Chapter 5: The Erosion of Stage and Screen Censorship.

About the Author :
Bernard F. Dukore is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Theatre Arts and Humanities, Virginia Tech, USA. His books on theatre and film include Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw (2017), Bernard Shaw: Slaves of Duty and Tricks of the Governing Class (2012), Shaw's Theater (2000), and Sam Peckinpah's Feature Films (1999). 

Review :
"​In Bernard Shaw and the Censors Dukore draws on his extensive Shavian expertise and brings together, for the first time, Shaw’s main public quarrels as a banned author on stage and on film within a broad chronological context. As such, the volume will appeal to a wide readership in the fields of film and drama, not to mention Shaw aficionados.” (Anne Etienne, Theatre Notebook, Vol. 75 (1), 2021)