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Thanks onedoug. About the nicest thing that the arrogant swine G.B. Shaw ever wrote about Shakespeare was that he could tell a great story, provided someone had told it to him first.

"There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious from of indignity. To read Cymbeline and to think of Goethe, or Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied moderation of statement which years of public responsibility as a journalist have made almost second nature to me." -- the blowhard George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, btw, also attended one of Samuel Butler's lectures on the subject of Homer, and left convinced that the author of the Odyssey was a woman (or one of the ancient ghoti, if you understand the reference).

[sidebar: Shaw vs. Churchill]

Monty Python -- The Oscar Wilde Sketch

The scene takes place in 1895, in the drawing room of Wilde's London home. Holding court amid a roomful of sycophants, Wilde (played by Graham Chapman) competes with the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (Michael Palin) and the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler (John Cleese) to impress Queen Victoria's son Albert Edward (Terry Jones), the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII. As for the historical basis of the sketch, "There seems to be no evidence for the convivial triumvirate of Whistler, Wilde, and Shaw," writes Darl Larsen in Monty Python's Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorized Guide, "especially as late as 1895, when Whistler was caring for his terminally ill wife and Wilde was in the early stages of his fall from grace." Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest opened in February of that year, and shortly afterward he became embroiled in a legal battle with the Marquess of Queensberry that led eventually to his imprisonment for homosexuality. -- Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw Engage in a Hilarious Battle of Wits