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Shaw for the Here and Now

Shaw characterized himself, with some truth and some irony, as "an old Victorian." After all, he was born in 1856. Queen Victoria would reign for forty-five more years. Yet, deep into the next century, no longer our own, he would write, in closing the Preface to Back to Methuselah and he would be nearly a Methuselah himself, living on to 1950 "It is my hope that a hundred parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at iconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring up the curtain." That self-assessment says much about Shaw's views of his work and hopes for its future. Shaw expected to be surpassed but not entirely superseded. He thought of his plays not as artifacts fixed in period, but as parables, which gave them staying power. Was he too sanguine? Are some of G.B.S.'s plays too rooted in their times and places to be given new lives for new audiences and readers? Can we still ring up the curtain on them? Are some of them only now for literary archeologists? Are many, if not all, of his plays replete with possibilities for the here and now?