evidence: During the first half of the twentieth century, Shaw became one of the most celebrated, commented on, and quoted literary figures of the age. In the public domain and in theatrical circles he was widely regarded as a major contributor to the English dramatic tradition, and as belonging to the international company of playwrights such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Chekhov, and Pirandello as creators of some of the classics of modern drama. In the sub-title of his third large-scale biographical work on Shaw, published in 1956, Archibald Henderson boldly, if controversially, named him ‘man of the century’. But the recognition and acclaim accorded to Shaw in the outside world was not widely echoed in the groves of academe. On the contrary, Shaw was largely ignored in the dominant critical discourses of the mid-twentieth-century. In the introduction to his 1953 collection of essays on Shaw, Louis Kronenberger justifiably remarked that ‘what stands forth glaringly is the extent to which Shaw has not been written about – that is to say, by the most influential of our serious critics’.