THE SHAW THAT BORES today is yesterday's imp, the red beard, the twinkle in the eye, the puppeteer of paradoxes that turn back upon themselves. We have found the playwright inside the iconoclast, the Shaw apart from the the author of Shavianism. The task for current Shaw criticism is the final synthesis: the demonstration that the iconoclasm, so far from being a dismissible burden on the play, is vital to it.