To Begin With

Abstract

This introduction shows how Dukore’s book, the first on the subject, analyzes the interaction of crimes, punishments, and Bernard Shaw’s comedies and non-dramatic works in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crimes: committed professional criminals, nonprofessional criminals, businessmen, believers in a cause, the police, the government, prison officials. Punishments: decreed by judges, juries, colonial governors, commissars; and administered by the police, prison warders, prison doctors. Shaw: his views of crimes and punishments in dramatic and especially non-dramatic writings, in actions in real life. This book presents him in the context of his contemporaries and his world, permitting readers to view crimes and punishments in their context, history, and relevance to his ideas in and outside his plays, plus the relevance of his ideas to crimes and punishments.