George Bernard Shaw, writing to The Daily News in 1905 to make clear his position on Shakespeare, claimed that the playwright had attempted ‘to make the public accept real studies of life and character in – for instance – Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well’ but had failed to overcome the public’s philistine preference for ‘a fantastic sugar doll, like Rosalind’. The eighth point of his polemic was ‘That people who spoil paper and waste ink by describing Rosalind as a perfect type of womanhood are the descendants of the same blockheads whom Shakespeare, with the coat of arms and the lands in Warwickshire in view, had to please when he wrote plays as they liked them.’

Shaw was attacking not a handful of eccentrics, but the main body of Victorian critical opinion in the theatre and out of it. It is the intention of this article to describe the principal features of this orthodoxy, and to examine some of its theatrical manifestations.