Abstract
The first subsection, “Circumventing the Law,” examines crimes and their social context in Shaw’s dramatic and non-dramatic writing, notably slum landlordism, sweatshops, insider trading on the stock exchange, burglary, thefts that are not unlawful, thefts by the poor as payback to those of the wealthy, crimes exonerated by magistrates during wartime, the suspension of civil liberties in wartime, and law as administered by governors of crown colonies. The second subsection, “Legalized Criminality,” explores laws that define what constitutes crime; it studies actions that are unethical but break no laws, such as deeds committed by businessmen, as in John Bull’s Other Island and Heartbreak House. It explains why a murder, in The Doctor’s Dilemma, is not a murder according to law.
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Dukore, B.F. (2017). The Malleability of the Law. In: Crimes and Punishments and Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62746-5_5
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