Crimes Past, Crimes Present

Abstract

Some deeds we now consider crimes were not always regarded as unlawful. Others, formerly deemed criminal, we no longer regard as such. This chapter explore three of them. Shaw treats dueling in act 3 of Man and Superman. Stage censorship prevented him from dramatizing homosexuality, which in his lifetime was a crime, but he treats it in non-dramatic writings, and he was well ahead of his time; prominent in this section are the trials of Oscar Wilde, whom he knew. In plays and elsewhere, marital responsibility and divorce are prominent subjects. His non-dramatic writings include spousal rape and the legality of transmitting a venereal disease to a man’s wife, even though it was illegal to transmit it to a woman who is not his wife.