ABSTRACT
When George Bernard Shaw revised Act 5 of Cymbeline in 1936, he had been thinking about the play – and particularly about its heroine, Imogen – for at least 40 years. 1 Ellen Terry sought his advice on playing Imogen in 1896, when his career as a playwright was only beginning but he had already established himself as an expert on Shakespeare in his theatre reviews for the Saturday Review. His unflinching criticisms of English actors reveal someone who had been an exhaustive reader of Shakespeare from childhood. His being an Irishman among English may have sharpened his sense of the pretension which he so often accused English actors and managers of allowing to shape, and ruin, their interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. 2 With characteristic half-irony, Shaw puts forward his own readings of Shakespeare as the correct ones, accusing the English of fundamentally inaccurate portrayals of Shakespeare’s characters, and wildly mistaken cuttings of Shakespeare’s plays. And in his confidence in his own unerring understanding of Shakespeare, Shaw rewrote Shakespearean characters time and again, turning them over repeatedly to uncover meanings hidden by what he saw as late-Victorian prudishness mixed into corrosive, sentimental bardolatry.
