Modern drama

Abstract

Shaw, like Joyce and Yeats, dominates the genre in which his genius flourished: one in which the work of Synge, O’Casey and Beckett is to be found as well as many very good plays by other Irish authors, many of them written within the traditions established in the Abbey Theatre’s repertoire. Shaw, whose first play was staged in 1892, expressed his own view of himself in Shakes versus Shaw, a brief puppet play staged at Malvern in 1949, making a comparison — which had often occurred to him earlier — between himself, an advanced thinker, and Shakespeare, less intelligent, though a superb poet.