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An an introduction, I offer two facts that tell us what kind of a writer George Bernard Shaw was.

First, take one of his most famous plays, Man and Superman (1903). It is superficially a three-act romantic comedy of contemporary English manners; it's often even staged that way. Except that it has four acts. Its third act is double the length of the others and interrupts the plot with a surreal dream-sequence set in Hell, where the damned conduct a Platonic dialogue. Moreover, the play has a 50-page preface, an "Epistle Dedicatory" to the fellow author who inspired Shaw to write it, in which the dramatist explains his intentions at length. As if this weren't enough, Man and Superman is followed by a 70-page revolutionary tract written by its radical protagonist. And the most important fact of all is that the slender three-act comedy on which all this verbosity hangs isn't really very interesting compared to the long preface that introduces it, the long Platonic dialogue that bisects it, and the long polemical treatise that concludes it. Shaw was acclaimed as the best Anglophone playwright of his generation, and perhaps the best Anglophone dramatist of all after Shakespeare, yet one of his best plays is about 60% non-play, and the non-play parts are much the most thought-provoking and entertaining.

Second: when W. B. Yeats was founding the Abbey Theater in Dublin with the aim of producing a cultural renaissance to bolster nationalist resistance against the British Empire, he supposedly solicited a drama from Shaw. (Like Yeats himself, Shaw was born to the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, though he was a Londoner for most of his adult life.) When Shaw submitted John Bull's Other Island (1904), a long, loquacious satire on Irish servility and fecklessness in the face of English power�

[The Irishman] can't be intelligently political, he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninety-eight. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a torture that you can't bear it without whisky.

—Yeats rejected the play with the claim that it would be too difficult to stage. Given Shaw's characteristically long and complex stage directions—written as much for the page as for the stage—this is plausible. But more likely he was troubled by Shaw's abrasive and hyper-articulate satire, in which a stupid, sentimental, and cynical English liberal land developer moons over the Irish yeomanry he intends to dispossess by opening a hotel and golf course in a rural Irish town. This is a far cry from the romantic nationalist theater Yeats wanted to promote, whether in his own and Lady Gregory's symbolic dramas of the Celtic Twilight or in the vernacular energies of Synge. Though a more experimental writer than designations like "realist" or "satirist" would suggest, Shaw was already, early in his career, out of step with the emergent modernism that would define so much of the 20th century's literary culture.

So what can Shaw mean to us today? Even this boastfully didactic writer's loud political stances—his feminism, his socialism—only seem to chime with those in fashion now. Yet as a feminist he praised women as the natural "Life Force" that would enable a eugenic program to breed a superior person fit for the post-liberal future, the Nietzschean "Superman" of his famous play's title. Though a founding member of the Fabian Society, which was committed to pursuing socialist policies in England gradually through the electoral process, Shaw came in the end to praise Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin as strong men who did what had to be done without democratic constraint.

Literarily, he has been somewhat eclipsed as the prevailing Anglo-Irish playwright and polemicist of his time by Oscar Wilde, at least in academe. The two writers shared an Irish Protestant heritage, an ambition to march on literary London from the colonial periphery, and a canny awareness of how emergent celebrity culture demanded that authors fashion themselves as icons and stars, hence Wilde's logo-like green carnation and Shaw's self-branding as "GBS." Both sought to modernize often insular English literature and cultural criticism with outside influences from Flaubert and Mallarmé to Marx and Nietzsche to Ibsen and Tolstoy. But Wilde was an aesthete, eventually converting to Catholicism, while Shaw was a puritan, his secular freethinking Protestant to the core. Moreover, Wilde called himself a socialist just as Shaw did, but a perusal of his Soul of Man Under Socialism will quickly show that he was really an anarchist and individualist.

A comparative essay on the two writers by David J. Gordon in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw assesses them as divergent Nietzcheans. Like Yeats and Lawrence, Shaw descends from the power-mad proto-fascist Nietzsche who dominated the 20th century's baleful first half, or so Gordon argues; on the other hand, Wilde is heir to the Nietzsche who anticipated postmodern liberalism, who said that life was justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon and that truth was just an effect of language. Wilde was effectively martyred by his own society, while Shaw (though controversial) became celebrated, eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. But Shaw may remain captive to that bygone time; Wilde, by contrast, feels like one of us. (Ironically, the homosexual Wilde, who denounced nature in the name of artifice, had two children; the heterosexual Shaw, who celebrated the Life Force and breeding, had none.)

Despite all of these obstacles to his continued fame, Shaw is still a lively, readable classic, a living voice that comes across the century that separates us from most of his major work. If his plays seem too stagey and mechanical after a century of naturalism and experimentalism, his intentions were maximally inventive, and his drama's prefaces, postfaces, and other paratexts are relevant and eloquent reflections (or, occasionally, harangues) on still-urgent questions.