Two of George Bernard Shaw’s most memorable pieces of dramatic criticism appeared within a span of three weeks, in May and June of 1895. They are: Sardoodledom, occasioned by a Fedora starring Mrs. Patrick Campbell and a Gismonda (another Sardou/Bernhardt concoction) starring Herself; and Duse and Bernhardt, Shaw’s thank-you note for the most extravagant sort of gift a drama critic can receive, the faceoff of two great actresses of opposed temperaments in the same two plays, Dumas’ La Dame aux cammélias and Hermann Sudermann’s Heimat, commonly known as Magda in the English-speaking theatre world. Both articles are relevant here. With respect to Fedora, GBS first complains that it contains “a bewildering profusion of everything that does not belong in a play [‘The postal arrangements, the telegraphic  arrangements, the police arrangements’, etc., etc.], all together making up for “an entertainment too Bedlamite for any man with settled wits to preconceive.”  We think of GBS first off in terms of irreverence (he surely could not have abided Winters’ churchy strictures), but he was no mean moralist himself. James Gibbons Huneker, who wrote the introduction to the two-volume collection of Shaw’s dramatic criticism published by Brentano’s in 1907, quite accurately dubs him a “Puritan.” Whereas Winter was offended by Fedora’s lack of decorum in matters of mourning and marriage, it’s Loris that Shaw cannot tolerate, contending that the sympathies solicited for him are upside down: if we must countenance heroes who are assassins, it is surely more pardonable to have killed for a cause he believes to benefit the common welfare than “to slake a passion which he has in common with a stag.” ^(I) And he asks: “Why need plays be so brutally, callously, barbarously immoral as this?” He is as repelled as Winter is, though from a different religiopolitical stance. And in fact, though it was universally conceded that Sardou possessed a marked degree of theatrical skill (“expert,” said Winter; “brilliant,” said Max Beerbohm), it is hard to find any critic writing in English who took him at all seriously as a dramatist.^(II) Writing of Sardou shortly after the latter’s death, Beerbohm lamented that “Sardou never had any ideas except for ‘situations,’ ” and that “in the whole of his vivid and honorable career created not one human character.” As to whether or not all these dismissive evaluations are entirely fair, I am not ready to attest; the “hasty ink” must have recorded other reactions. I have neither read through Sardou’s oeuvre (just Le verre d’eau, in translation, with glances at the opera-related plays) nor seen an enactment of so much as a single Sardou piece. But these highly qualified opinions are remarkably similar.