Dr. Sidney P. Albert, a philosophy professor and scholar, spent a good portion of his life collecting scholarly materials connected to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, “arguably the most important English-language playwright after Shakespeare.”* Over the span of decades, Albert carefully gathered materials to fuel his own research into Shaw’s ideas, to identify the sources of those ideas, and to track how they developed and evolved.
Albert passed away in 2013, leaving behind a significant Shaw collection. It’s a large and scholarly collection, consisting of more than 2700 items — including approximately 230 pieces of Shaw correspondence, more than 150 photographs and portraits, and a wide array of ephemera, including hundreds of Shavian theater memorabilia and associated programs of productions of Shaw plays. In addition to almost a thousand publications by Shaw, the collection includes an intelligent assemblage of relevant material from and concerning other related historical figures of Shaw’s time and intellectual circles, including biographical books and press clippings. It is both a scholar’s and a collector’s library, replete with annotated research data about persons, sources, and relations. The primary value of the collection resides in its scholarly curation: This is a collection of interconnected ideas, curated for exploration.
Albert’s book, Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in Major Barbara, published in the last year of his life, focuses on the connections between the ideas expressed in Shaw’s 1905 play (which Albert considered Shaw’s best work) and those of ancient Greek philosophers and dramatists (in Plato’s Republic and Euripides’s The Bacchae, in particular). This collection includes numerous boxes of Albert’s own index-card research notes for this book, his many published articles on Shaw, and other Shaw studies. The notes, along with drafts of his completed writings, reflect Albert’s scholarly interests — highlighting connections he found in the material he studied: how ideas expressed in correspondence, for example, found their way into Shaw’s plays, commentary, and non-dramatic works.
As a result of Albert’s intellectual focus, this collection presents a treasure trove for scholars exploring the ideas of the time, spanning Shaw’s vast range of interests. This collection will be of interest to scholars exploring politics, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, feminism, war, poverty and economics, drama, music, photography, aesthetics, world history, Great Britain and Ireland, literature, language, religion, ethics, censorship, publishing, criminal justice, philosophy, and more.
Professor Sidney P. Albert’s Bernard Shaw Collection | by Larry Albert
*Nicholas Grene, entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 1236
