"G.B.S."

There's a famous cartoon by E. Reed that depicts a giant Bernard Shaw standing alongside a much smaller William Shakespeare. They are both pointing towards a pedestal bearing the words "Man and Superman," one of Shaw's best-known plays. The pedestal rests on a base labeled "All the World's a Stage Society." The latter alludes of course to Jacque's line from "As You Like It," and my take on the cartoon is that it implies Shaw surpasses Shakespeare as the master playwright of the English stage.

Shaw began writing "Caesar and Cleopatra" in 1898, but nine years passed before a full production was performed in England. The play was actually published before that production, in a volume entitled Three Plays for Puritans with two other Shaw plays, "The Devil's Disciple" and "Brassbound's Conversion." Shaw himself wrote an informative preface about each of the plays, which you can read in an electronic book version of the 1906 edition of Three Plays for Puritans by clicking here. Note that Shaw's own title for this preface to "Caesar and Cleopatra" is "Better than Shakespear." Does Shaw mean to corroborate the above-mentioned view of his lofty stature among playwrights? (Whether he did or not, I am at a loss to explain why Shaw dropped the final "e" in Shakespeare.)

Shaw once wrote of his life, "Things have not happened to me; on the contrary it is I who have happened to them; and all my happenings have taken the form of books and plays. Read them, or spectate them; And you have my whole story : the rest is only breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleeping, wakening and washing, my routine being just the same as everyone's routine."
[Quoted in Peters, Sally, Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. ix].