Telescope Farm

 

[A "telescope farm” is an observatory in a remote location with dark, clear skies (“Dark Sky Places”; see below in afterword to the second CBS News report) where amateur astronomers can house their own telescopes or rent access to existing ones.  Users control these telescopes remotely via the internet, often from the comfort of their homes, to capture high-quality astronomical images without dealing with local light pollution [see the last two articles posted below].

[Key characteristics of a telescope farm include:

•   Remote Operation: Astronomers can be located anywhere in the world and operate the equipment via an internet connection.

•   Dark Skies: The facilities are situated in locations with minimal light pollution, such as rural Texas or regional Australia, which allows for much clearer and more detailed observations than those possible in or near urban areas.

•   Automated Infrastructure: The sites feature automated systems, such as sheds whose roofs open and close in unison, to protect the equipment and facilitate remote, often scheduled, operation.

•   Accessibility: This business model makes high-quality astrophotography and research accessible to amateur stargazers and researchers who may not have the resources, location, or time to operate a personal observatory. 

[Companies like Starfront Observatories in Rockwood, Texas, in the U.S. and iTelescope in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia, are examples of businesses that provide these services.] 

“LIGHT POLLUTION IS WASHING OUT THE NIGHT SKY.
A REMOTE TELESCOPE FARM HELPS STARGAZERS
BRING THE COSMOS TO THEIR SCREENS”
by David Schechter, Aparna Zalani, and Jojo Macaluso

[I was watching the evening news last Wednesday, 12 November, when I caught a report about a telescope farm in remote Central Texas.  The story fascinated me, even though I’m not an amateur astronomer.  I immediately downloaded the online report from the “Eye On America” segment of that evening’s CBS Evening News, and did a little additional ‘Net surfing, to make a potential post for future use on Rick On Theater.

[As it happens, I’m in the process of finishing another post that’s waking more time than I anticipated, so I decided to go ahead and post “Telescope Farm” now, just because I think it’s an interesting story.]

By day, a row of plain-looking sheds in sleepy Rockwood, Texas, looks like nothing more than a place to store farm tools and feed. But when the sun dips below the horizon, their roofs peel back in unison to reveal a hidden network of hundreds of telescopes. 

The so-called telescope farm is the brainchild of amateur astronomer Bray Falls, who turned his passion into a business when he co-founded the company Starfront Observatories 18 months ago.

“It has not gotten old yet. It’s so cool, every single time,” Falls said of the transforming sheds.

Starfront rents space to customers who ship their telescopes to the farm and control them via the internet from the comfort of their homes. The remote location allows amateur stargazers to take stunning pictures they wouldn’t be able to from home, because the sky in Rockwood is much darker than where they live — helping solve one of amateur astronomers’ biggest problems: light pollution. 

The night sky has gotten harder to see due to a 10% yearly increase in light pollution over the past decade, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Science [see below]. 

Starfront’s customers live all over the world, including Europe, Asia and the Middle East, Falls said.

Chuck Ayoub in suburban Detroit has a garage full of telescopes, but he hardly uses them anymore after shipping one out to Texas.

“The big difference are the dark skies. I am 20 minutes from downtown Detroit, and that light pollution is a killer,” Ayoub said.

Most nights, Ayoub livestreams his telescope feed to his large social media following. There’s also a small camera at the base so he can see his telescope in action.

From the Starfront property, Falls and others are identifying celestial objects no one has ever seen before, such as a photo he calls the “Crown of Thorns” nebula. The discoveries are furthering our understanding of space, even as our ability to see it is fading.

When asked about the threat posed by light pollution, Falls said, “It really prevents people from dreaming, like seeing what’s above them, just awe. You get the tingles, you get the goosebumps.”

But now, it’s a feeling you can get — even from your basement in Detroit.

[David Schechter is a national environmental correspondent and the host of “On the Dot with David Schechter,” a guided journey to explore how we’re changing the earth and earth is changing us.  His work has been honored with a 2021 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for reporting about climate change.  He’s also a two-time winner of the national Murrow Award for documentary, three-time Scripps Howard National Journalism Award winner, recipient of the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Reporting and a James Beard Award Finalist.

[Aparna Zalani is an award-winning journalist for CBS News and Stations with over 25 years in journalism.  Before joining the CBS News Innovation Lab, she reported for MSNBC on major stories like the 2000 Florida election recount, the 9/11 attacks, and the 2011 Japanese tsunami.  An alumna of the NBC Page Program, Aparna joined the special projects unit at CBS Texas in 2013, working on local and state investigations, and covering medical and health stories.  She began her career in India at United Television (UTV), reporting for India Business Week.

[Jojo Macaluso is a Broadcast Associate at CBS News since January 2024; her prior experience includes positions as a News Assistant and a Production Intern at CBS News, as well as internships at NPR and dot.LA.  Macaluso has also contributed as a Quality Assurance Tester at UserTesting and a Technical Assistant at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.]

*  *  *  *
“LED LIGHTS ARE ERASING OUR VIEW OF THE STARS
— AND IT'S GETTING WORSE”
by David Schechter, Haley Rush, and Chance Horner

[This report on light pollution (the target of the embedded link above) is also from CBS News, broadcast on 1 September 2023.]

America’s rapid adoption of LED lighting saves money and uses less electricity. But it’s also making it harder to see the stars. 

Light pollution comes from excessive artificial light that causes the sky to glow and obscures the light of the stars, and the problem is growing fast. New research in the journal Science found the night sky is getting 10% brighter every year.  

Experts say much of that light pollution is driven by the growth of cheaper, cleaner and brighter LED lighting. 

“The most common kinds you see, the sort of bright white ones, are absolutely making the problem much worse,” said Stephen Hummel, the dark skies senior outreach coordinator at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. 

A light pollution map of the United States shows the widespread nature of the problem. The eastern half of the United States is almost entirely blanketed by some level of light pollution. And while the night sky is hardest to see in big cities, the view of the night sky is also degraded in suburban and rural areas. 

“(Light) basically gets reflected from the sky and creates what we call air glow,” said Ohad Shemmer, an astronomer at the University of North Texas, who studies black holes. “The Milky Way is gradually disappearing from view. Many of the fainter stars are disappearing.”

Government regulation is driving the rapid switch to LEDs. In 2007, Congress mandated that all lightbulbs be three times more efficient. That policy finally took effect on August 1 of this year [2023], effectively banning new incandescent light bulbs in favor of LEDs and compact fluorescents.  

But there are unintended consequences. 

Research shows too much light at night can interrupt our sleep cycle, potentially contributing to health issues like certain cancers and heart problems. It’s also a major factor in the decline of insect populations which require darkness to navigate, and it contributes to the death of hundreds of millions of birds each year that fly into brightly lit buildings.   

The McDonald Observatory is in the Big Bend region of far West Texas. It’s home to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the largest of its kind in the world. At night it collects the faint lights of outer space on an exceptionally large mirror. A dark night sky is essential to that work. 

“If the sky got too bright, eventually there would be no point in building big telescopes on the ground at all,” said astronomer Steven Janowiecki, who is the telescope’s science operations manager. 

To protect the night sky, the Observatory helped organize the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. It covers an area of 15,000 square miles across West Texas and portions of northern Mexico. The certification is granted by the nonprofit DarkSky, which has more than 70 chapters across the country. 

The reserve is a partnership of parks, communities and local groups that have all agreed to better lighting practices by swapping out their bright white LED streetlights for amber-colored ones that do not scatter as much light up into the sky and by installing covers that point light downward. 

The Alpine [Texas] City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in 2021 regulating outdoor lighting. Nearly all the city’s 200 streetlights have been updated from white to amber. The ordinance gives businesses and homes 5 years to convert to dark sky friendly lighting or face a daily fine of $50. 

“[Dark skies are] our product,” said Chris Ruggia, the director of tourism for the City of Alpine. “It’s the experience of coming here, and if we want that to continue, to provide some kind of prosperity in the community, we have to take care of it.”  

Ruggia says there are local programs to help homeowners cover the associated costs of making the switch and that there has been little controversy around the mandate. But he anticipates that might change as the deadline approaches. 

“There’s going to be some conversations that aren’t easy, especially as the time limit runs out,” he said. 

The American Lighting Association, which represents lighting manufacturers, acknowledges the problem of light pollution is “more extensive than originally thought.”  In response, it says many of its manufacturers now make shielded outdoor light fixtures to direct light away from the sky. 

Light pollution readings taken across the reserve show the plan is working. Astronomer Stephen Hummel says there has been a 20% reduction in nighttime light pollution there since 2020.  

But it is not just small communities that are making an impact. Hummel points to big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Phoenix that are all swapping out overly bright streetlights for ones that are dark sky friendly. 

“The problem really is not money. It isn’t infrastructure, really. It’s awareness. Light pollution is completely reversible. It’s one of the few kinds of pollution that you could solve immediately. You could flip a switch and fix the problem,” he said. 

[U.S. Dark Sky Places: There are approximately 165 International Dark Sky Places — sanctuaries for natural darkness designated by the DarkSky International (formerly International Dark-Sky Association) — across the United States.  In these places, you can often find exceptionally clear views of the night sky.

[Haley Rush is an Investigative Producer for CBS News & Stations/Local News Innovation Lab.  She brings experience from previous roles at KPTV Fox 12 Oregon, KRQE NEWS 13/KASA FOX 2, and KPLC-TV.  Rush holds a 2013 Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism from Mayborn School of Journalism – University of North Texas.  

[Chance Horner is a photojournalist and producer covering climate change and the environment for CBS News.]

*  *  *  *
“RAPID BRIGHTENING OF NIGHT SKIES GLOBALLY:
RECENT RESULTS FROM CITIZEN SCIENCE AND SOLUTIONS”

[This article was posted to the website of the American Astronomical Society on 1 March 2023.  It’s somewhat technical, and the references are mostly from scientific journals, so have included the list of sources, which I would ordinarily omit, below the article itself.  (Most of the references are likely to be in university libraries or the public systems of large cities, rather than local community libraries.  I see, however, that all have URL’s noted in the citations below, so there may be online editions accessible—though some may limit access in one way or another.)]

A recent paper by Kyba et al. (2023) [this is a link to the Science article referenced in the report above] found that light pollution of the world’s night skies has increased by as much as 10% a year since 2011, based on star counts made by citizen scientists. Paraphrasing the authors, night skies would brighten by a factor of about four over the duration of human childhood, strongly reducing the visibility of stars. This has been widely covered in the media and articles. Here, we share an overview of these results, related consequences, and one ray of hope: ground-based light pollution can be addressed through mitigating solutions that have already been successfully demonstrated.

[A citizen scientist is a member of the general public — an amateur or nonprofessional researcher — who voluntarily participates in scientific work (i.e., citizen science, also known as community science or participatory science), often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.]

Although our newsfeeds and attention are dominated by SpaceX Starlink launches and the impact on astronomy from low-earth orbiting satellites, ground-based light pollution remains the largest threat to astronomical science and to humanity’s relationship with the skies. The recent citizen-science analysis in Kyba et al. 2023 revealed that terrestrial light pollution has not gone away and is, in fact, increasing faster than expected, by as much as 10% each year over the previous year. Although even this is likely an underestimate, there is some good news: ground-based light pollution can be mitigated successfully.

Skyglow — the most familiar symptom of light pollution — is caused by atmospheric scattering of light from ground-based sources (direct or reflected). Short wavelengths are scattered most effectively leading to the familiar light domes and distinctive glow that yield a washed-out appearance to the skies above light-polluted regions at night. Anyone who has frequented a major metropolitan area well knows that seeing more than a handful of stars is rare. And as astronomers, we’re all familiar with the forlorn husks of once-productive research facilities now stranded amongst bustling, brightly lit city streets or university campuses.

As the global population continues to grow and cities expand, the problem of light pollution grows and expands with them. This seems like a faraway concern for most astronomical sites these days, with the largest telescopes being built in remote regions of the planet with little light pollution to worry about, for now. However, with growth rates as high as 10% per year, the impact of light pollution poses an increasing problem for our science.

Light pollution isn’t just bad for our astronomical sites. How many astronomers were motivated to consider an astronomy career by childhood experiences of the night sky or an astronomical event (Comet Hale-Bopp, anyone?)? As fewer and fewer people are able to experience the night sky, we lose the inspiration that drives our science, something that makes astrophysics one of the easiest physical sciences to "sell" to the public and that brings talented engineers to our field to design and run our facilities.

[Comet Hale-Bopp, formally designated C/1995 O1, last appeared over Earth in 1997. It’s predicted to appear next in about 4385 (2,360 years from now).]

Beyond these human concerns, there is increasing evidence that ground-based light pollution is responsible for disruption to human and animal circadian rhythms (Cao et al. 2023, Touzot et al. 2023), migratory patterns (Torres et al. 2020), and plant seasonal cycles (Meng et al. 2022), as well as changes in reproductive cycles of insects (Firebaugh & Haynes 2016) to name a few of the problems. It may also make urban air quality worse (Stark et al. 2011, Shith et al. 2022). Poor-quality outdoor lighting, which is the source of light pollution, wastes energy (Tatro 2020) and is in part responsible for workplace accidents (Wren & Locke 2015). So, even if your own scientific endeavors are not impacted by ground-based light pollution, it is highly likely that your life or environment is.

[The circadian rhythm is the natural, internal process that regulates the physical, mental, and behavioral changes an organism experiences over a roughly 24-hour cycle. The word ‘circadian’ comes from the Latin circa diem, meaning ‘about a day.’

[This “internal clock” is found in most living things, including humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms. It’s primarily influenced by light and darkness and regulates important functions like sleep-wake cycles, body temperature, hormones, and digestion.

[Disruptions to the circadian rhythm (e.g., from jet lag or shift work) can negatively impact health and well-being, leading to sleep disorders, fatigue, and an increased risk of other health issues like obesity and depression.]

For more than a decade, NSF’s [National Science Foundation] National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) has been leading a citizen-science program known as the Globe at Night. This program collects estimates of naked-eye limiting magnitude (NELM) and Sky Quality Meter measurements submitted by volunteers around the world. Contributions typically exceed some 10,000 to 30,000 observations per year with more than a quarter of a million data points from 180 countries over the last 17 years.

[NELM is the magnitude of the faintest star you can see with your unaided eyes in a particular night sky. It varies depending on factors like light pollution, atmospheric conditions, and your own vision, but is a common way to measure the darkness of the sky. A lower number for limiting magnitude means a darker sky where fainter stars are visible.

[Sky Quality Meter (SQM) measurements quantify the brightness of the night sky in a specific area. This measurement is typically taken in “magnitudes per square arcsecond” (mag/arsec²) using a portable device, with lower numbers indicating a darker sky. These measurements are used to monitor light pollution, with data collected by amateur astronomers and researchers worldwide.]

Kyba et al. (2023) studied the NELM estimates and based on these data inferred a global average increase in the light pollution of 9.6% (10.4% in North America) per year between 2011 and 2022. This is a much larger increase than has been reported by studies using only satellite remote sensing observations of light emissions (Kyba et al. 2017, Sanchez de Miguel 2017), which had found a roughly 2% per year increase on a global average basis. Satellite instrumentation is focused on wavelengths of 500-900 nm [nanometer, a unit of length equal to one billionth of a meter commonly used to express the very tiny dimensions of electromagnetic radiation], which misses short-wavelength optical emissions characteristic of modern white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that increasingly dominate the light budgets of cities. In addition, blue light (i.e., shorter wavelengths) is more effectively scattered in the atmosphere than other colors. These two effects give a possible reason for the lower estimate from orbital-based light pollution measures versus the ground-based estimates studied by Kyba et al. The team also points out that direct glare from poorly shielded LED street lights could blind observers near them to faint stars, biasing the NELM estimates toward brighter values without increasing skyglow locally (Bará, Bao-Varela & Kocifaj 2023).

It is probable that the global average change of +9.6% per year is in fact an underestimate of the true rate of increase in light pollution. Since artificial nighttime lighting is strongly correlated with economic performance metrics (Rybnikova 2022) and regions with high rates of economic growth are under-sampled in the Globe At Night data, it is likely that the true rate of increase exceeds 10% per year.

For our work as astronomers, this means that skies over existing observatories are getting noticeably degraded over timescales far less than one astronomer's lifetime, and the options available for sufficiently dark locations for new observatories are dwindling rapidly. This finding also demonstrates (as the authors note) that existing lighting policies are not adequate for the protection of the night sky.

There is, however, some good news — the sky glow from artificial light at night can be reduced. The strategies for cutting light pollution are straightforward: use outdoor lighting only when, where, and how it is needed (timing, area, and brightness), minimize blue light content, and use fully shielded fixtures (see Outdoor Lighting Basics for more information). Those approaches may be simple, but as the Kyba et al. study shows, more effort is needed to put these recommendations into ordinances, bylaws, and other regulations to reverse the degradation of our shared night sky, which is a millennia-old resource and inspiration for us all.

Please join us at AAS 242 in Albuquerque to hear about recent successes in mitigating light pollution, the creation of protected dark-sky places, recent documentaries on the many ways we connect to dark skies, and how good lighting practices have been implemented in lighting ordinances in different regions of the US. [This meeting of the American Astronomical Society took place on 4-8 June 2023.]

References:

•   Bará, S., Bao-Varela, C., & Kocifaj, M. 2023. “Modeling the artificial night sky brightness at short distances from streetlights”. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, vol. 296, 108456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jqsrt.2022.108456 

•   Cao, M., Xu, T., & Yin, D. 2023. “Understanding light pollution: Recent advances on its health threat and regulations” Science Direct, vol 127, 589-602. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jes.2022.06.020

•   Firebaugh, A. & Haynes, K. J. 2016. “Experimental tests of light-pollution impacts on nocturnal insect courtship and dispersal” Oecologia, 182, 4, 1203-1211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-016-3723-1

•   Kyba, C. C. M., Kuester, T., Sanchez de Miguel, A., et al. 2017. “Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in irradiance and extent” Science Advances, vol 3, 11. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1701528

•   Kyba, C. C. M., Altintas, Y. O., Walker, C.E., et al. 2023. “Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars from 2011 to 2022” Science, vol. 379, 6629, 265-268. DOI: 10.1126/science.abq778

•   Meng, L., Zhou, Y., O Roman, M., et al. 2022. “Artificial light at night: an underappreciated effect on phenology of deciduous woody plants” PNAS Nexus, vol 1, 2, pgac046. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac046

•   Rybnikova, N. 2022. "Everynight Accounting: Nighttime Lights as a Proxy for Economic Performance of Regions" Remote Sensing vol. 14,  4, 825. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14040825

•   Sanchez de Miguel, A., Aube, A., Zamorano, J., et al.  2017. “Sky Quality Meter measurements in a colour- changing world” MNRAS, vol. 467, 3, 2966-2979. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx145

•   Shith, S., Ramli, N. A., Awang, N. R., Ismail, M. R., Latif, M. T., & Zainordin, N. S. 2022. “Does Light Pollution Affect Nighttime Ground-Level Ozone Concentrations?” Atmosphere, vol. 13, 11, 1844. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13111844 

•   Stark, H., et al. 2011. “City lights and urban air”. Nature Geoscience, vol. 4, 11, 730–731. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1300

•   Tatro, K., 2020. “Light Energy: Our Wasted Resource” Consilience, vol. 22, 65-72. https://doi.org/10.7916/consilience.vi22.6731

•   Torres, D., Tidau, S., Jenkins, S., et al. 2020. “Artificial skyglow disrupts celestial migration at night” Current Biology, vol 30, 12, R696-R697. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.002

•   Touzot, M., Dumet, A., Secondi, J., et al. 2023. “Artificial light at night triggers slight transcriptomic effects on melatonin signaling but not synthesis in tadpoles of two anuran species” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology, 111386. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbpa.2023.111386

•   Wren, W., & Locke, S. 2015. “Upgraded Rig Lighting Improves Night Time Visibility While Reducing Stray Light and the Threat to Dark Skies in West Texas” SPE E&P Health, Safety, Security and Environmental Conference – Americas” March 2015. https://doi.org/10.2118/173492-MS

 

Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools

 

[The Pentagon has attempted to ban books from schools on military bases, citing concerns over “divisive concepts” and “gender ideology,” leading to the removal of titles about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues.  A federal judge ordered these books to be returned to the shelves, however, ruling that the removals were not based on pedagogical concerns but on improper partisan motivation, National Public Radio reports.  The affected schools serve the children of military personnel, and the initial bans impacted a wide range of materials, from children’s books to Advanced Placement psychology texts, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.] 

“PENTAGON’S ATTEMPT TO BAN BOOKS FROM BASE SCHOOLS
FACES BACKLASH FROM MILITARY FAMILIES”
by Nick Schifrin, Dan Sagalyn, and Morgan Till

[On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools.

[The DoD stated that the books were “incompatible with the department’s core mission” and cited the need to remove “divisive concepts.”  The order affected more than 100 schools serving children of active-duty and civilian military personnel, reports the ACLU.  (The action was a direct result of the overarching Pentagon directive to eliminate materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], as were earlier operations in the libraries of the service academies.)  The approximately 596 books and 41 curricular materials removed included books with “left-leaning ideology” on topics like racism, gender identity, LGBTQ+ history, and even some civics and historical texts. 

[Titles removed included Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds, as well as such well-known and award-winning titles as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Maya Angelou’s autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

[The policy also resulted in the cancellation of cultural observances like Black History Month and Pride Month events, and the removal of posters of historical figures like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and First Lady Michelle Obama.  The effort faced significant backlash from military families, free speech advocates, and organizations like PEN America, who characterized the actions as sweeping and ideologically driven censorship.

[The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of students in DoDEA schools, reports Virginia Mercury, an independent, nonprofit online news organization covering Virginia state government and policy.

[On 20 October 2025, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria ruled in favor of the students, ordering the immediate return of the removed books and materials.  In the “Memorandum Opinion,” the judge wrote that DoD “violated Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by removing library books at DoDEA schools and making changes to curricular material in implementation of various Presidential Executive Orders.”  The judge stated the removals were not for pedagogical concerns but were motivated by “improper partisan motivation.”  As a result of the ruling, the books are being returned to the school libraries.

[(Here I remind readers that on numerous occasions, both on Rick On Theater and elsewhere, I’ve acknowledged that I am as near a First Amendment absolutist as you can get.  I hold with the character Stephen Hopkins, the irascible delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut in the musical 1776, who says: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. . . .  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !”)

[The federal judge’s preliminary injunction is limited only to the five schools on U.S. military bases in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy, and Japan attended by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  This decision was based on a recent Supreme Court ruling that limits the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions.  The ACLU is exploring options to expand the scope of the injunction to all 161 DoDEA schools worldwide.

[The preliminary injunction is not the final ruling on the entire case; a hearing on the full merits of the lawsuit will follow.  DoDEA and the Department of Defense are still involved in the active litigation and have generally declined to comment on specifics while the case is pending.

[The transcript below is from the PBS News Hour segment on 23 October 2025.]

Geoff Bennett [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: The Trump administration made it clear from its earliest days this year that it wanted to change the culture of the U.S. military. One effort targeted books about race, gender and sexuality in the libraries of military-based schools that service members’ children attend.

But, this week, a federal judge ruled that the books taken off the shelves had to be returned and the curriculum of the military changed had to be restored.

Before the ruling, Nick Schifrin and producer Dan Sagalyn traveled outside Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to speak to military families that fought through the courts for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy, part of our Canvas coverage.

Jessica Henninger, Military Spouse [in a park with her children]: I can read to you while you eat your snackie.

Nick Schifrin: For Jessica Henninger, reading is fundamental.

Jessica Henninger [reading]: “A perfect plan, you say? A perfect way to spend the day?” [From Mac and Cheese and the Perfect Plan by Sarah Weeks (Harper, 2012).]

Nick Schifrin: And she’s tried to spend her days reading with her kids to help them better understand the world.

Jessica Henninger: Mac says: “I will get some milk for you.” Cheese says: “Let’s take some crackers too.”

Girl [Henninger’s daughter]: Yes, that’s what we have.

Jessica Henninger: You do have crackers.

I remember as a child growing up in a very small community. Books were really the only opportunity that I had to open up my world to different ideas and things outside of what I understood.

Nick Schifrin: Henninger is a soldier’s spouse and the parent of five . . .

Jessica Henninger: If it gets scary, let me know.

Nick Schifrin:  . . . who let us visit her family near Fort Campbell recently as long as we kept the kids anonymous. She supported her five children through play and education.

All of them are attending or graduating from Defense Department elementary and high schools, no matter where they have been based, from Kentucky to Vicenza, Italy.

Jessica Henninger: Our kids have consistently gotten a fantastic education, no matter where we have been stationed. And to just really be immersed in that diversity, I think, is a wonderful strength of what we have in the military.

Man [at a graduation ceremony]: I now declare you graduates of Fort Campbell High School.

Nick Schifrin: The Defense Department runs 161 schools across 10 time zones, with 67,000 children of service members and civilian department employees. Classes run from pre-K through 12th grade.

Man: The military may choose where we go, but we choose what we do to make our lives meaningful. [He was off camera, but sounded like a young man, probably a graduating senior addressing his classmates.]

Jessica Henninger: I always vetted out the education systems when we would move places to make sure that my children had a top-notch education and that they were going to be set up for success later on in life. And so that is part of the reason why I got involved in this lawsuit.

Nick Schifrin: In April, Henninger and five other military families serving on three continents filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s Education Activity, or DoDEA, for — quote — “quarantining library books and whitewashing curricula,” calling it — quote — “systemwide censorship.”

Among 596 books the schools removed, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” and the AP psychology textbook, which has a gender and sex module, also removed, “A Queer History of the United States for Young People” [Michael Bronski], “When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times” [Maya Christina Gonzalez], and “You-Ology: A Puberty Guide for EVERY Body” [Melisa Holmes].

The schools also removed portions of the middle school sex education course.

Jessica Henninger: The determination about what is appropriate for our children to consume in the libraries and the curriculum has always been left up to the experts, the people in the school who cultivate the libraries and the curriculum.

And I think that’s where it should be. Teaching an awareness of where we came from and making sure that we don’t make those same mistakes again, that’s not political. That’s education.

Nick Schifrin:  At this point, are you considering removing your kids from DoDEA or have you heard of any cases of families thinking, you know what, we want out of the system?

Jessica Henninger: I had a very serious conversation with my husband where I told him that if our children’s education seemed like it was going to be hijacked by political ideation, that I would not feel comfortable keeping our children in the DoDEA system.

That’s a heavy conversation to have to have with your significant other who is in the military and doesn’t have a choice in where they go. Potentially talking about splitting up your family, it’s heavy.

Donald Trump, President of the United States [video clip of a speech at the Congressional Institute]: It will stop our service members from being indoctrinated with radical left ideologies [House Republican Conference, 27 January 2025].

Nick Schifrin: The changes come from a series of January executive orders that targeted — quote — “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist and irrational theories, divisive concepts that American founding documents are racist or sexist and gender ideology.”

And in a court filing, the administration wrote: “The curriculum and book reviews were undertaken to implement DoDEA’s current pedagogical approach to teaching schoolchildren regarding gender and sexuality and to better promote an inclusive environment” and — quote — “Curating a library collection or developing a teaching curriculum is an act of government speech. It is therefore not subject to rigorous scrutiny under the First Amendment’s free speech clause.”

Corey Shapiro, Legal Director, ACLU of Kentucky: This is a public school. They are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as any student in any public school in this country. It’s always important to shine a light on what the government is doing.

Nick Schifrin: Corey Shapiro is the American Civil Liberty Union’s Kentucky legal director and one of the lawyers who sued DoDEA and Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Their focus is what they call war fighting. Their focus is on removing what they see as an ideology. If that’s how they think, don’t they have the right to say, well, we believe that this is a threat to our kids and we’re in charge of the system, so therefore we can change it?

Corey Shapiro: What they don’t necessarily have the right to do and the First Amendment protects is a student’s ability to access that information. And in the library in particular, the idea that the government can somehow determine what ideas can and cannot be even just accessed by students, that’s where the First Amendment steps in and protects those kids’ ability to access that information.

Nick Schifrin: This week, the court agreed, writing — quote — “The implementation process of book removals appears to this court to be inconsistent, unstructured and nontransparent.”

The judge ordered the books returned and the curricula restored, but only in the five schools listed in the lawsuit. It’s not clear yet if the administration will appeal, but this is a larger fight for Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary: I remember coming home from public school in like 10th grade and saying: “Dad, why is Ronald Reagan always the bad guy in the textbooks?” [On an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show, 7 November 2024. The Shawn Ryan Show is a podcast that features interviews with military personnel and veterans.]

Nick Schifrin: Long before he became secretary, Hegseth criticized government education as too liberal.

Pete Hegseth: I grew up in a conservative, God-fearing regular old small-town America Minnesota, because the textbooks are written by lefties in New York City. Get your kids out of government school systems right now, if you can, if you have any way. Save money, move, get a second job, don’t take the vacation, sell the boat, whatever, drive for Uber.

Figure out what you need to do to get your kid out of the government school system because it’s about saving your kid right now.

Nick Schifrin: For Henninger and her family, they have to believe in government schools because it comes with their choice to serve the country. After graduating from a DoDEA school, their oldest daughter joined the military.

Jessica Henninger: My children have the same rights to freedom of education as every other student in this country. Just because their father is in the military doesn’t make their rights any less important.

Nick Schifrin: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Nick Schifrin in Clarksville, Tennessee [home of Fort Campbell].

[Nick Schifrin is PBS News Hour’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent. He leads News Hour’s daily foreign coverage, including multiple trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and has created weeklong series for the News Hour from nearly a dozen countries.

[The PBS News Hour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2017 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. In 2020 Schifrin received the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Media Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the News Hour teams awarded a 2021 Peabody for coverage of COVID-19, and a 2023 duPont Columbia Award for coverage of Afghanistan and Ukraine.

[Prior to PBS News Hour, Schifrin was Al Jazeera America’s Middle East correspondent. He led the channel’s coverage of the 2014 war in Gaza; reported on the Syrian war from Syria’s Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders; and covered the annexation of Crimea. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his Gaza coverage and a National Headliners Award for his Ukraine coverage.

[From 2008-2012, Schifrin served as the ABC News correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011 he was one of the first journalists to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after Osama bin Laden’s death and delivered one of the year’s biggest exclusives: the first video from inside bin Laden’s compound. His reporting helped ABC News win an Edward R. Murrow award for its bin Laden coverage.

[Schifrin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Overseas Press Club Foundation. He has a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a Master of International Public Policy degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

[As the deputy senior producer for foreign affairs and defense at the PBS News Hour, Dan Sagalyn plays a key role in helping oversee and produce the program’s foreign affairs and defense stories. His pieces have broken new ground on an array of military issues, exposing debates simmering outside the public eye.

[Morgan Till is the Senior Producer for Foreign Affairs and Defense (Foreign Editor) at the PBS News Hour, a position he has held since late 2015. He was for many years the lead foreign affairs producer for the program, traveling frequently to report on war, revolution, natural disasters and overseas politics. During his seven years in that position he reported from—among other places—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Haiti, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and widely throughout Europe.]

Shaw Sampler, Part 3: Addendum

 compiled by Rick 

[The third and last installment of this series is drawn from “A Shaw Sampler” by Kirk Woodward (31 October and 3 November 2025).  I inserted some short identifications and explanations of the names and some other references in the quotations Kirk included in his collection and their titles, and Part 3 is an expansion of some of those insertions and an addition of more explications of the contents of the essays and reviews from which Kirk selected his excerpts. 

[All the quotations in Kirk’s article are taken from George Bernard Shaw’s drama columns in the Saturday Review, for which he wrote from 1895 to 1898.  Kirk drew from a complete collection of the columns, the 1954 reprint of Shaw’s Our Theatres in the Nineties, originally published in three volumes by Constable and Company in 1932.

[For ROTters who want to read some of GBS’s theater columns, most libraries will probably have one edition or another of his collected writings, especially his reviews.  The only edition of Shaw’s collected reviews that’s currently in print is Our Theatres in the Nineties Vol. II (Creative Media Partners, 2021; hardback & paperback).  Antiquarian book sites offer a selection of volumes of the essays, including all three volumes of Our Theatres in the Nineties and the two volumes of Dramatic Οριnιοns and Essays, a selection of the columns collected in Our Theatres.

[Online sources include Dramatic Οριnιοns and Essays: Volume One [Brentano’s, 1916], Dramatic Οριnιοns and Essays: Volume Two [Brentano’s, 1922], The Saturday review of politics, literature, science and art from the HathiTrust Digital Library [with gaps], and The Saturday Review 1855-1938 from the Internet Archive.  (All four are PDF’s; the last two are the entire issue of each date of the paper.  They are all searchable and copiable).

[Kirk, a longtime friend and frequent contributor to Rick On Theater, has written a considerable amount on Shaw for this blog.  An avid fan of GBS, his past posts about the renowned Victorian-era Anglo-Irish dramatist and theater critic are: “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic” (5 September 2012), “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” (3 December 2015), “Re-Reading Shaw” by Kirk Woodward (3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016), and “Shaw versus Shakes” (8 September 2023).

[As Kirk wrote in his 2012 Shaw post, the playwright

brought into his work – not just his plays, but all his writing and speaking – elements of economics, politics, morality, religion, social relationships . . . whatever seemed to him to pertain to the world that was related to the work at hand.  In the course of his theater reviews he definitely does give a strong sense of what the play in front of him is like.  But he doesn't review it in a vacuum.  He gives his work the context of the life around it.

[In a sense, that was the impulse that led to this compilation. It started out as just identifications of the names and some of the other things mentioned in the quotations and the headlines about which I thought readers would want to know.  But that snowballed.

[I got curious about such titles as “Quickwit on Blockhead,” “Boiled Heroine,” and “Chin Chon Chino.”  That turned into looking up what essays like “Mary Anderson” (who'd stopped performing years before the essay was published), “Manchester Still Expiating,” “The Second Dating of Sheridan,” and “Alexander the Great” were about. 

[What did Manchester have to expiate?  What was Sheridan's 'second dating'?  Or his first, for that matter?  Who was "Alexander the Great"?  If it was the Macedonian conqueror, what did GBS have to say about him in a theater column?

[It obviously became too much, above and beyond mere ID’s, to leave in Kirk’s post.  It had little to do with his point; it was just to satisfy my curiosity about those mysterious, intriguing, and puzzling headlines.  So what do I do with all that irrelevant information?  Do I just dump it?  Can I do anything useful with it?  Some of it, maybe even all of it, is, as my friend suggests about all GBS’s writing, interesting.  (Well, if you’re obsessively curious, like me.)

[As this blog’s most prolific guest blogger put it, “Shaw is just too darned entertaining and quotable.”  He went on to muse: “I was . . . going to suggest that you put together a [blog] piece on the [notes], and now . . . I think that's a great idea.  Can't lose with Shaw.  Also, it's delightful stuff.”

[So, that’s what I’ve done.  Some of what follows are just my summaries of the point of Shaw's columns, but others required a bit of further research, such as Henry Irving's knighthood, Queen Victoria's jubilee, and what the "hustings" were to which GBS referred.  A few were almost most interesting because of a throw-away reference GBS made as a joke: who was "Corno di Bassetto," for example?  What about "a Mr. G. B. Shaw"?]

“Mary Anderson,” 4 April 1896

Mary Anderson (1859-1940) was an American stage actress who went on the London stage in 1883 and stayed for six years.  She performed to great acclaim before returning to the United States, where she was met with a hostile reception by the press.  This may have caused her to suffer a breakdown.

In 1888, Anderson collapsed on stage one line short of finishing a performance of Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) A Winter’s Tale (first performed in 1611).  She retired from the stage soon after at the age of 30.  She returned to England, where she married and had three children (one of whom died at birth).  Anderson died in England at the age of 80, survived by her son and daughter.

Anderson did not return to the stage when she came back to England; Shaw wasn’t reviewing a performance in the quoted piece, but the first of the retired actress’s two memoirs, A Few Memories (London: Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1896; New York, Harper & Bros, 1896).  She published A Few More Memories in 1936 (Hutchinson).

“Nietzsche in English,” 8 April 1896

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher.  He was best known for his concepts of the Übermensch and the declaration that “God is dead,” as well as the works Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and The Birth of Tragedy (1872).  Shaw’s Saturday Review column included remarks on The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche Contra Wagner; The Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist, translated by Thomas Common, the first volume of the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Graves, Henry & Co., 1896).

The Übermensch is a philosophical ideal representing a future, higher stage of human potential (the ‘overman’ or ‘beyond-man’).  Shaw used ‘Superman’ as the English translation in the title of his 1903 play, Man and Superman, which brought the word into prominence in English-language culture.

Following Shaw’s popular usage, Thomas Common’s (1850-1919; Scottish translator and critic) influential 1909 English translation of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (as Thus Spake Zarathustra), the work in which the concept is introduced, rendered Übermensch as ‘Superman.’ 

Shaw explicitly invokes and discusses Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the Übermensch, both in the main text of Man and Superman and in supplementary materials published with the play.  (See Kirk Woodward’s discussion of this play in “Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1901 to 1909” (18 July 2016).

(The creation of the Superman comic book character in 1938 helped cement the word in the public consciousness, but many modern scholars, such as Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980; German-American philosopher, translator, and poet) advocate for ‘overman’ or ‘beyond-man’ as translations to avoid the association with the physically powerful hero, which is quite different from Nietzsche’s philosophical concept.)

“Mr William Archer’s Criticisms,” 13 April 1895

William Archer (1856-1924) was a Scottish theater critic, author, and friend of Shaw’s.  He was also an early advocate for the “new drama,” particularly the works of Henrik Ibsen.

The column was about Archer’s book, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1894, a book of theater reviews written by Archer for The World (hence the quotation marks in the book’s title), a London weekly for which the reviewer wrote from 1884 to 1906. The book was published in London by the Walter Scott Publishing Co. in 1895, with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw.  (Shaw wasn’t above a little self-promotion: he refers to “my excellent preface to Mr. Archer’s book.) 

Shaw begins his commentary on Archer’s collected reviews for 1894 by lambasting “most of our theatre criticism” as “born stale: it is hardly sufferable as news even on the day of its birth,” for which he blames the newspaper publishers and editors.  Then he proceeds to justify his praise of Archer as “the best of critics.”  (Shaw also takes a line to point out that “in his epilogue [Archer] insists that there is nobody like G. B. S.”) 

 “Criticism on the Hustings,” 20 July 1895

A ‘husting’ was a platform from which candidates in an election gave speeches.  By the mid-19th century, the formerly plural form, ‘hustings,’ took the meaning of a ‘political campaign,’ especially in the expression “on the hustings,” and the plural form was used as a singular noun.

Shaw’s column starts as a disparagement of political “criticism”—which we understand as reportage and commentary—as compared to artistic criticism, particularly theatrical.  (At the time, the United Kingdom was in the throes of a general election from 13 July to 7 August 1895, to which Shaw made reference.  The Conservative Party won a large majority and the Marquess of Salisbury [1830-1903], Conservative leader, regained the Prime Ministership [1895-1902].)

The Saturday Review theater critic’s discussion then morphs into an assertion that modern—in this instance, late-19th-century—staging practices aren’t beneficial to Shakespearean (and, one presumes, other classical) plays, proposing that plays from earlier eras be mounted in the manner of the stages for which they were written.

“A Musical Farce,” 9 January 1897

This is a review of a three-act bit of “brainless sentiment and vulgar tomfoolery” called A Man about Town which premièred in February 1897 and seems to have played for a total of 18 performances.  Written by “Huan Mee,” which seems to have been a pseudonym for the brothers Charles Herbert Mansfield (1864-1930) and Walter Edwin Mansfield (1870-1916); it may have been a pun on “You and Me.” 

The Mansfields were both journalists who collaborated on short stories, novels, and this musical.  Their usual fare was sensational fiction, detective tales, and mysteries, so A Man about Town was a departure for the writers.  (There’s little information on the plot or characters of the farce.  Shaw doesn’t supply any details of either, though he fairly demolishes not only the performances—especially the dancing—but the musical farce as a genre as well.)

If the identification of the Mansfields as “Huan Mee” is correct—I couldn’t confirm it—then even less is known about the play’s composer, Albert Carpenter.  He was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily composing light music and works for the British musical theater. 

“Satan Saved at Last,” 16 January 1897

The reference in the title of the above review is to The Sorrows of Satan, a play adapted in 1897 by Herbert Woodgate (dates unknown) and Paul M. Berton (1856-1918) from the 1895 novel of that name by Marie Corelli (1855-1924).

The plot of the stage adaptation follows the novel’s Faustian storyline of a starving writer, Geoffrey Tempest, who is visited by a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimanez. Lucio, who is secretly the Devil, guides Geoffrey to fame and fortune, which leads him down a path of socialite life, wealth, and moral compromise.   The stage play injects some structural and tonal shifts, particularly the addition of melodrama and physical comedy.

Shaw opens his review by stating, “I wish this invertebrate generation would make up its mind either to believe in the devil or disbelieve in him.”  He then backs off somewhat, adding, “Let me not, however, dismiss ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ too; for I take Miss Marie Corelli to be one of the most sincere and independent writers at present before the public.”

“Mr Pinero on Turning Forty,” 3 April 1897

The column is a review of two plays: The Physician, an 1897 play in four acts by Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) and The Princess and the Butterfly, or The Fantastics, an 1895 comedy in five acts by Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934).  The headline refers to the fact that both plays are “all about being over forty.”  In both cases, Shaw finds this tedious.  The reviewer points out that it is 1897 and Pinero was born in 1855 (making him 42), Jones was born in 1851 (making him 46), and he, himself, was born in 1856 (making him 41), and yet, “the world is as young as ever.”

Pinero (1855-1934) was an English playwright.  His best-known plays are The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) and Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898).  Like Shaw, Pinero was heavily influenced by Ibsen.  Both writers sought to address social issues in their work, though Shaw preferred a more didactic, problem-focused style, while Pinero concentrated on the people affected by the problem, which Shaw felt weakened the overall argument.

Jones’s playwriting echoes the realistic style of Henrik Ibsen, but from a conservative viewpoint and he engaged in extensive debates with liberal-minded writers such as Shaw.  He frequently introduces religious themes into his plays, often exploring the moral turmoil that arises when personal desires conflict with religious doctrines, though his resolutions often remain conservative.

The latter portion of Shaw’s review is devoted to an evaluation of the acting, which doesn’t save either play.  He remarks that “[t]he two authors have not been equally fortunate in respect of casting.”  “In ‘The Princess’ matters are better balanced,” asserts Shaw. “. . .[O]ut of twenty-nine performers . . . hardly six have anything to do that could not be sufficiently well done by nobodies.”

“Chin Chon Chino,” 6 November 1897

The title of the above review of The Cat and the Cherub (1896) by Chester Bailey Fernald and The First Born (1897) by Francis Powers, two examples of what Shaw saw as theatrical Orientalism by Western dramatists, is a phrase meant to imitate how the Chinese language sounds to ignorant Westerners.  It doesn’t have any basis in that or any other East Asian tongue.

Fernald (1869-1938) was an American writer and Powers (1865-1940), also American, was a writer, screenwriter, and actor in both theater and film; neither had any connection to China or Asia.  Shaw derided both plays as faux-Chinese.  By calling the plays "Chin chon chino," Shaw signals that they are not genuine portrayals of Chinese culture but rather a clumsy, inauthentic performance meant to appeal to audiences' Orientalist tastes he labels “Chinatown plays.”

“Mr Heinemann and the Censor,” 2 April 1898

William Heinemann (1863-1920) was an English publisher and the founder of the Heinemann publishing house in 1890 in London.  (The imprint no longer exists as a single entity but has been divided and sold over decades to various owners.  It continues today as multiple imprints with the Heinemann name under different publishing houses focusing on different categories of publications.)

Shaw’s column is a satirical commentary on the illogical nature of the British theatrical censorship system.  He mocks the hypocrisy of the Lord Chamberlain, Great Britain’s official theatrical censor, who approved Arthur Wing Pinero’s controversial 1893 play The Second Mrs Tanqueray while banning Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (written in 1893; not produced in London until 1902).

As Shaw’s publisher, Heinemann was not subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s authority over theatrical performances.  He was free to publish the full, uncensored texts of Shaw’s plays.  By publishing the banned play.  Heinemann made it available to the public despite its suppression on the stage—thus revealing the hypocrisy of British censorship.

“Toujours Daly,” 13 July 1895

Augustin Daly (1838-99) was an American drama critic, theater manager, playwright, and adapter who became the first recognized stage director in the United States.  He maintained a standing company in New York City and opened Daly’s Theatre there in 1879, and a second one in London in 1893.

Daly was recognized as the first modern stage director because he assumed control of all aspects of a production, from casting and rehearsal to staging and costume.  He was responsible for the creative vision of his shows, which was a new concept for the time.  His method involved centralizing creative power, moving it away from the actor and placing it firmly with the director. 

His intense and sometimes severe methods led to him being called “the autocrat of the stage” for the strict rules he imposed on actors, including fines for forgotten lines or late appearances.

The column was a review of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written 1589-1593; first performed, 1594-1598) at Daly’s Theatre and Madame Sans-Géne, an 1893 historical comedy-drama by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908; French dramatist) and Émile Moreau (1852-1922; French playwright and librettist) at the Garrick Theatre.  (The Sardou-Moreau play was performed in French and starred Gabrielle Réjane [1856-1920; known simply as “Réjane”], who’d led the Paris première in 1893.)

“Quickwit on Blockhead,” 5 June 1897

Taking off from The English Stage (J. Milne, 1897) by Augustin Filon (1841-1916), translated by Frederic Whyte (1867-1941) from Le Théâtre anglaise (C. Lévy, 1896), Shaw reflects on what he perceives as the intellectual superiority of French theater critics to their English counterparts.  Filon was a French professor of rhetoric and the author of a number of books on contemporary English politics, art, and literature. 

Duruy, then the French minister of education, appointed Filon the tutor of the Prince Imperial Napoléon (1856-1879; only child of Napoléon III [1808-1873; President of France: 1848-1852; Emperor of the French: 1852-1870] and Empress Eugénie [1826-1920] from 1867 to 1875.  Upon the fall of the Second French Empire and Napoléon III’s deposition, Filon accompanied the Prince Imperial into exile to Chislehurst, Kent.  After the prince’s death in 1879, Filon settled in England with his family, living in Croydon in South London, where he died at 74.

Filon published several books of criticism of both English and French theater in addition to The English Stage: Le Théâtre anglais contemporain (“The contemporary English theater”; Calmann-Lévy, 1906); De Dumas à Rostand: Esquisse du mouvement dramatique contemporain (“From Dumas to Rostand: an outline of the contemporary dramatic movement”; Armand Colin, 1898; The Modern French Drama: Seven Essays [Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1898]).

(The critical essays that made up the 1906 Le Théâtre anglais contemporain, which was not published in an English edition, originally ran in the French literary journal Revue des Deux Mondes starting in 1895.)

Using French author and teacher Filon as the exemplar, Shaw characterizes the French writers as “quick-witted,” while considering the English to be “blockheads” who lack the critical insight of their French colleagues.  (Shaw never uses the words of his headline in his column itself.)

“Manchester Still Expiating,” 12 February 1898

In the 1890s and into the early 1900s, there were discussions among Manchester’s wealthy and influential figures, as well as the intellectual and artistic leaders, of establishing an “endowed theater” in the city.  Also called a “public theater,” this was a non-commercial, publicly funded (by a government subsidy or a private endowment) institution that would be freed from the constraints of the box office.  This would allow it to prioritize artistic merit and innovative drama over purely commercial appeal.

Manchester at the time had a powerful intellectual and reformist tradition, making it ripe for an art-oriented theater.  It was, however, also a thriving industrial city with noisy, dirty, crowded streets.  Its art establishments were, in Shaw’s view, its “expiation”—recompense for the hard life it offered its residents.

In 1907, tea heiress and theater patron Annie Horniman (1860-1937) bought the Gaiety Theatre and established the Manchester Playgoers' Theatre as a short-lived repertory company.  In 1908, she transformed the Players’ Theatre into the Gaiety Theatre to put Shaw’s plan into action.  The endeavor lasted until 1921, but its influence set the tone for British theater that followed—and was clearly a model for the non-profit theater of the modern-day U.S.

“The New Ibsen Play,” 30 January 1897

The play of the headline is John Gabriel Borkman (1896), Henrik Ibsen’s [1828-1906] next-to-last play.  Though it continues the social commentary of the Norwegian dramatist’s work of the preceding thirty years, this play is a bridge from the naturalism of those plays to the symbolism of When We Dead Awaken (1899), his final work.

This Shaw essay, a somewhat unusual occurrence, is about the columnist’s sense of disappointment that Ibsen’s new play, which was published (in Danish) in 1896 and had its world première in Helsinki, Finland, in 1897, was unlikely to see an English staging soon due to the resistance of Henry Irving and his Lyceum Theatre, which Shaw saw as the most likely London producer, to mount it.

What makes this column unusual is that in it, Shaw references “[t]he appearance some weeks ago in these columns of a review of the original Norwegian edition of Ibsen’s new play.”  That review, entitled “Ibsen’s New Play,” ran uncredited six weeks earlier on 19 December 1896.  Then, on 8 May 1897, 14 weeks after Shaw’s lament, he published “John Gabriel Borkman,” his review of the first performance of William Archer’s English translation of the play by the New Century Theatre at the Strand Theatre on 3 May.

(One correction, I believe, is necessary here.  Like all of Henrik Ibsen’s plays (and other writings), John Gabriel Borkman was first published, not in Norwegian—there wasn’t yet a recognized written form of a Norwegian language [there was a spoken Dano-Norwegian dialect]—but in Danish. 

(From 1380 until 1814, Norway was in a political union with Denmark [known as Denmark-Norway]. During this period, Danish became the official administrative and written language of Norway.  Even after Norway separated from Denmark in 1814, Danish remained the dominant written language because there was no standardized written Norwegian language.

(Ibsen, active in the latter half of the 19th century, was educated in this linguistic environment and wrote in the standard, educated written language of his time, which was Danish.  His works, including John Gabriel Borkman, were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal Boghandel in Copenhagen.  This circumstance didn’t change until a year after Ibsen’s death, when the 1907 spelling reform, the first of several, moved the written Norwegian closer to the spoken language and further away from Danish.)

“L’Oeuvre,” 30 March 1895

Aurélien-Marie Lugné (1869-1940; French actor, theater director, and scenic designer) founded the Paris theatre company, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (literally, the “Theater of the Work”).  He was known by his stage and pen name, Lugné-Poe (taken in homage to Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849; American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic; best known for his poetry and short stories involving mystery and the macabre]).

L'Oeuvre (sometimes written L’Œuvre) produced experimental work by French Symbolist writers and painters at the end of the nineteenth century.  Like his contemporary, theatre pioneer André Antoine, he gave the French premières of works by the leading Scandinavian playwrights Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg (1849-1912; Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter), and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910; Norwegian writer; received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Literature).

With periodic pauses in production, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre has operated in various locations from 1893 to the present.  Lugné-Poe retired in 1929 and others have led the company as his successors. 

The quoted column covers performances at London’s Opera Comique of the Théâtre de I'Œuvre de Paris of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm and The Master Builder and Maurice Maeterlinck’s (1862-1949; Belgian symbolist playwright, poet, and essayist; Flemish but wrote in French) L’Intruse (Interior; published, 1894; premièred, 1895) and Pelléas ét Mélisande (Pelléas and Mélisande; published, 1892; premièred, 1893). 

Of the overall experience of seeing the work of Lugné-Poe’s company, Shaw wrote: “In the Théâtre de I'Œuvre there is not merely the ordinary theatrical intention, but a vigilant artistic conscience in the diction, the stage action, and the stage picture, producing a true poetic atmosphere, and triumphing easily over shabby appointments and ridiculous incidents.”  He went on to lament, however, “Of course, this is so much the worse for the Théâtre de I'Œuvre from the point of view of the [London] critics who represent the Philistinism against which all genuinely artistic enterprises are crusades.”

(Rosmersholm is mentioned in passing several times in a collection of reports on the 2006 Shaw Festival in Canada: “The 2006 Shaw Festival” [8 and 11 December 2015], “Design for Living (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [29 March 2012], and “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [25 September 2012].  There’s a script report of a different Maeterlinck play, Aglavaine et Sélysette [Aglavaine and Selysette] in “More Script Reports V: Classics (Continued)” [18 January 2022], posted on Rick On Theater.)

“Lorenzaccio,” 26 June 1897

Lorenzaccio is an 1834 Romantic French play about Lorenzino de’ Medici (1514-48) by French dramatist, poet, and novelist Alfred de Musset (1810-57).  In the production Shaw reviews at the Adelphi Theatre, Sarah Bernhardt played the title role.

The nickname “Lorenzaccio” comes from the Italian suffix -accio, which has a pejorative meaning, turning the diminutive and innocent-sounding “Lorenzino” (little Lorenzo) into “nasty Lorenzo” or “bad Lorenzo.”  Lorenzino earned this insulting name for his debauched and erratic behavior, which included decapitating ancient statues and committing the assassination of his cousin, Alessandro de’ Medici (1510-37), first Duke of the Florentine Republic (1532-37).

“Boiled Heroine,” 28 March 1896

This review with the intriguing title is of an 1896 play entitled True Blue by actor and dramatist Leon Outram (1855-1901), who went to the U.S. in 1886, and Stuart Gordon, a Royal Navy lieutenant about whom little is known.  (Not to be confused with the contemporary (1947-2020) American filmmaker, theater director, screenwriter, and playwright of the same name.)

The play is a nautically-themed comic melodrama involving a love triangle and a humorous, if ridiculous, plot.  The title of Shaw’s column mocks a scene in which a villainess plots to do away with her rival by trapping her in a ship’s boiler.  True Blue seems to have had little history after its 1896 premiere.

“Alexander the Great,” 12 June 1897

The Alexander of the title of Shaw’s review isn’t the Macedonian conqueror of the 4th century BCE, but Alexandre Dumas père (1802-70), French author, famously, of the adventure novels The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-46).  He also wrote the stage comedy Un mariage sous Louis XV (“A Marriage under Louis XV,” 1841), which, under the title A Marriage of Convenience, had its London premiere in 1897.

Marriage is a translation of the Dumas play by prolific English dramatist Sydney Grundy (1848-1914), most of whose works were adaptations of European plays.  Shaw spends most of his column lauding the script and production of Marriage before dismissing two other performances, Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a reading by William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society and Settled Out of Court, a play in four acts by Estelle Burney (English actress and dramatist, active 1891-1899), at the end of his notice.

“The Two Latest Comedies,” 18 May 1895

The plays reviewed here are The Home Secretary, an 1895 play by R. C. Carton (1853-1928; English actor and playwright) and The triumph of the Philistines: and how Mr. Jorgan preserved the morals of Market Pewbury under very trying circumstances, an 1895 comedy in three acts by Henry Arthur Jones.

Shaw opens his review by declaring that he would forego an introduction and get straight to his assessment of Carter’s The Home Secretary, “for, to tell the truth, I am forgetting it so rapidly that in another half-hour it may all have escaped me.”  Of the play, Shaw says simply, “Mr. Carton has a second-hand imagination and a staggering indifference to verisimilitude.”

A few words about the office of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, or the Home Secretary, which may be unfamiliar to those of us who live on this side of the pond: in 1895, he was one of the most senior and influential ministers in the British government.  The office was responsible for the internal affairs and interests of England and Wales, overseeing areas like crime, national security, and immigration.  The role involved managing law enforcement, responding to social issues like child labor and factory safety, and addressing concerns about national security and espionage. 

The Home Secretary was responsible for creating and enforcing laws related to these areas, often by setting standards and creating inspectorates to ensure compliance.  The position’s responsibilities have changed many times over the years, though it has been compared to the interior minister of other nations. 

The Home Department, however, bears little similarity to the U.S. Department of the Interior.  It’s closest to today’s Department of Homeland Security with the law-enforcement responsibilities of the Department of Justice.  The law-enforcement concerns for the modern U.K. Home Department were transferred to the Ministry of Justice in 2007.  (As far as the character in Carton’s “hopelessly slovenly play” is concerned however, GBS asserts: “Though supposed to be a Home Secretary, he presented us with exactly the sort of Cabinet Minister who never goes to the Home Office.”)

Jones’s play “with the nineteen-word title” is a comedy/satire that uses the fictional town of Market Pewbury and its residents to critique the rigid social conventions and moral hypocrisy prevalent in late 19th-century English society. 

Shaw allows that it’s well crafted, but posits that “when Mr. Jones claims the sympathy of the audience for the Philistine as against the Puritan, the Puritan snatches the sympathy from him; for the idealist, being the higher if more dangerous animal, always does beat the Philistine.”  In the end, Shaw concludes, “The acting is hardly as good as the play.”

“Shakespear and Mr Barrie,” 13 November 1897

J. M. Barrie (1860-1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best known as the creator of Peter Pan (play: 1904; novel [Peter and Wendy]: 1911).  Shaw’s review is of productions of Barrie’s play The Little Minister (adapted in 1897 from his 1891 novel of the same title) and The Tempest (1610-11) by William Shakespeare. 

“At the Pantomime,” 23 January 1897

Shaw wasn’t a devotee of pantomime (or any of “the mere sillinesses and levities of the theatre,” so he’d never seen a Christmas “panto” of Oscar Barrett (1847-1941), a renowned director and producer of the entertainment, until he reviewed Aladdin at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the subject of the review above.

British pantomime was a popular musical-comedy theatrical entertainment, particularly during the Christmas season.  It was a boisterous form of family entertainment that combined a loose retelling of a fairy tale or folk story with a mix of topical humor, slapstick, and often risqué comedy, with audience participation.  It developed in the 18th century—when it was a “dumb show” or dance and gesture—and was at its peak as a popular entertainment throughout the 19th century.  It continues into the 20th and 21st, especially during the Christmas holidays.

Barrett, who started as a composer and musical director, worked at Drury Lane starting in the 1880s and took over as manager in 1896-97.  The theater was already famous for its Christmas pantomime and Barrett continued the tradition and expanded it.  Aladdin was one of the season’s most enduring productions.

“Michael and His Lost Angel,” 18 January 1896

Michael and his Lost Angel was a new play of modern English life in five acts by Henry Arthur Jones.  In the play, Michael, a rigidly moralistic clergyman, compels a girl who has committed what he believes to be a deadly sin to confess it publicly in church.  He subsequently commits that sin himself with a worldly woman named Angel. 

His fall from grace torments him and he laments the loss of his spiritual anchor, the idealized memory of his deceased mother, whom he has always considered his guardian angel. 

Shaw lauds Jones, whom he labels a “born dramatist,” for the dramatic construction of his plays.  But he holds back his full-throated praise because, he says, “It is a play without a hero.”  Shaw sees that Michael, though behaving penitently before his congregation, is not actually sorry for what he’s done.  If he were a true hero, as Shaw would have written him, Michael would have embraced his lack of remorse and marched out through his shocked and shamed parishioners, with colors flying and head erect and unashamed.”

“The Immortal William,” 2 May 1896

The title of this review, a phrase Shaw used often, refers to William Shakespeare, the subject of The Shakespeare Anniversary Celebration the reviewer attended on 23 April 1896, the date traditionally commemorated as the Bard’s birthday.

(Although his exact birthdate isn’t recorded, Shakespeare’s birth is traditionally dated as 23 April 1564, a best guess based on his baptism record and the customs of the time.  Records of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon show that Shakespeare was baptized there on 26 April 1564.

It was customary at the time for infants to be baptized within three days of their birth, so, 23 April is a logical approximation for the day of the Bard’s birth.)

“La Princesse Lointaine,” 22 June 1895

La Princesse lointaine is an 1895 classical romance by French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand (1868-1918), the world-famous author of 1897’s Cyrano de Bergerac.  Translated as The Far Princess, The Distant Princess, or The Princess from Afar, it was written for Sarah Bernhardt and premiered at her theater in Paris.  Shaw reviews the play with Bernhardt in the title role when she brought the production to London.  There is a “script report” of La Princesse lointaine on this blog.

“The Chili Widow,” 12 October 1895

The Chili Widow is an 1895 play adapted by Arthur Bourchier (1863-1927; English actor and theater manager) and Alfred Sutro (1863-1933; English dramatist, writer, and translator) from Monsieur le Directeur (1895) by Alexandre Bisson (1848-1912; French playwright and novelist) and Fabrice Carré (1855-1921; French playwright and librettist).

The Chili Widow was a comic melodrama which ran for over 300 performances at its début engagement the Royalty Theatre.  While a detailed plot description isn’t available, the play is centered on a series of misunderstandings concerning the lives of two couples whose paths to “marital bliss” are complicated by external factors or “meddling.” 

While the specific origin of the title The Chili Widow isn’t recorded in available sources, the name likely refers to the main female character, the widow, possessing a “spicy,” “hot-tempered,” or “fiery” personality.

Shaw’s principal reaction to the performance was that he “was astonished to find that Mr. Bourchier . . . has actually founded . . ., with apparent success, a new school of stage art.  At least it is new to the regular professional stage . . . .  It is the school of the romping, gleeful amateur . . . .”

“‘The Spacious Times,’” 11 July 1896

“The Spacious Times” of the title of Shaw’s essay is a common reference to the era of the reign of Elizabeth I (1533-1603; reigned: 1558-1603).  (It comes from an 1832 poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809-92], A Dream of Fair Women.)  Its usual context is an evocation of the grandeur of the Elizabethan age, referencing its expansion, adventure, and flourishing arts.

In a rare instance of Shaw’s enclosing a column title in quotation marks, however, the critic is using the phrase in an ironic way.  The column is a review of a reading of Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-93) Doctor Faustus (1592), but Shaw was a harsh critic of Marlowe, whom he labeled the “true Elizabethan blank-verse beast,” and the Elizabethan dramatists—including Shakespeare.

The presentation was by the Elizabethan Stage Society, founded and directed by William Poel (1852-1934), who devoted his career to recreating performances using the staging techniques of the Elizabethan era—a practice Shaw lauded.

In a burst of self-deprecating humor, Shaw explains that Poel, in creating the E.S.S. announcement of the presentation, quoted some “eminent authorities” in praise of Marlowe’s merits, among them, “a Mr. G. B. Shaw.”  The critic, alluding to his frequent disparagement of Marlowe’s talents, observes that “Mr. Poel was supposed by many persons to be quoting me.  But though I share the gentleman’s initials, I do not share his views.”  Be assured, though, that “G. B. Shaw” was, indeed, this essay’s author.  There is no other of that name or those initials.)

“Mr Grundy’s Improvements on Dumas,” 17 July 1897)

The review is of The Silver Key, an 1897 comedy in four acts, adapted from Alexandre Dumas père’s Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1839) by Sydney Grundy.

“Ibsen Triumphant,” 22 May 1897

Ibsen’s triumph, it seems, isn’t just the superiority of his plays over all others of the day, but how thoroughly he’s eclipsed the playwriting of all the work that went before he was introduced on the stages of London.  This column begins as an encomium to the Norwegian’s dramaturgy in comparison to the native writing of the decade before he made his debut, then morphs into a review of a production of The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s 1884 tragicomedy, considered the first modern masterpiece in that genre.

“Why Not Sir Henry Irving?”  9 February 1895

Henry Irving (1838-1905) was a British actor-manager; he took complete responsibility for the productions in which he played the leading roles.  In this column, Shaw seems to be giving a tongue-in-cheek critique of Irving’s apparent campaign for a knighthood.  Shaw notes that while worthy practitioners in other fields have been honored with knighthoods, no actor had been.

Declaring that actors should be as worthy of recognition as, say, painters, Shaw asserts that Irving should be so considered.  On 18 July 1895, Henry Irving did become the first actor in England to be awarded a knighthood. 

(Shaw, himself, was offered a knighthood in 1909, he declined the honor on principle.  The offer was made privately through the office of Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928; British statesman and Liberal Party politician), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1908-1916), not announced publicly before Shaw could decline it.)

“Ghosts at the Jubilee,” 3 July 1897

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was celebrated on 22 June 1897 to mark the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne of England.  (The actual anniversary fell on 20 June 1897.) 

The “Ghosts” of the title are the ones in the Ibsen play of 1881: Ghosts, first staged in 1882 in Chicago in Danish. 

Shaw felt himself “cut off by my profession from Jubilees; for loyalty in a critic is corruption.”  Nevertheless, he wondered, upon seeing a performance of Ghosts, “how far life had brought to the Queen the lessons it brought to Mrs. Alving.”  This musing launched the reviewer into a review not of the play so much as the list of deprivations placed upon women at the “the last quarter of the hour of history called the nineteenth century.”

“The Second Dating of Sheridan,” 27 June 1896

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) was an Anglo-Irish playwright, poet, and politician.  He’s best known as the author of The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), post-Restoration comedies of manners.  This column is about an 1896 performance of the latter play.

The “second dating” refers to Shaw’s notion that the various aspects of human society “date”—that is, pass out of consequence—at different rates, some sooner than others, making plays that focus on or are motivated by those society traits obsolete after different time spans.  Shaw also observes that sometimes, those obsolescent societal concerns become more embedded in human behavior, and the plays pronounced “dated” can return to significance, and he declares that Sheridan’s School for Scandal, which had passed into irrelevance in the 19th century, now at the cusp of the 20th century, once again speaks to audiences of the human condition.

“Some Other Critics,” 20 June 1896

Shaw discusses Dramatic Essays, an 1896 collection of reviews by John Forster (1812-76) and George Henry Lewes (1817-78) reprinted from, respectively, the Examiner (1835-38) and the Leader (1850-54), with notes and an introduction by William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (1872-1946). 

In addition to Forster and Lewes, Shaw mentions in passing William Hazlitt (1778-1830), Arthur Bingham (A B) Walkley (1855-1926), other critics of the past.   He also makes humorous mention of a music critic called “Corno di Bassetto.”  (That’s a pseudonym used by none other than G.B.S., himself.  The name is Italian for ‘bassett horn,’ an obsolete musical instrument which Shaw assumed no one would know.)