Had Shaw died in the same year that Queen Victoria did (1901), he would not be known as one of the greatest playwrights in English since Shakespeare, but he would still be recognized as one of the major figures of the literary and intellectual scene in late Victorian England. Though some of the plays he wrote before the turn of the century may be counted as successful dramas, his major contributions to the intellectual and literary climate of the 1880s and 1890s were as a critic, a polemicist, and a personality. He was acquainted personally with many of the major writers and celebrities of the period, and had he not been so controversial--often outrageous and even antagonistic--he might have been presumed to have been consciously forging a career for himself as a man of letters. And in another way he was doing precisely that: by spending long hours in...