evidence: George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) came to an English theater settled into the well-made play, a theater that had not known a first-rate dramatist for more than a century. The pap on which its audiences had been fed, not very different from television fare today, provided a soothing escape from the realities of the working world. Instead of fitting himself to this unreal mold, Shaw offered reality in all its forms: social, political, economic, and religious. He was a didact, a preacher who readily acknowledged that the stage was his pulpit. In startling contrast to his contemporary Oscar Wilde and Wilde’s fellow aesthetes, Shaw asserted that he would not commit a single sentence to paper for art’s sake alone; yet he beat the aesthetes at their own artistic game. Though he preached socialism, creative evolution, the abolition of prisons, and real equality for women, and railed against the insincerity of motives for war, he did so as a jester in some of the finest comedy ever written. [...] Davis, Tracy C. George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. [...] Innes, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.