Widowers' Houses = Le case dei vedovi

This critical edition presents a new annotated translation of George Bernard Shaw’s first play Widowers’ Houses (1892) into Italian and provides an introductory essay that investigates the play’s genesis, its relevance within Shaw’s corpus, its main themes, and critical reception and stage history both in Great Britain and Italy. The edition includes the play’s English text, along with the English-Italian text of Shaw’s "Preface" to "Plays Unpleasant", part of which "Widowers’ Houses" originally was. Mistakes in the past Italian translations of "Widowers’ Houses" – most patent among which is the play’s title, that had always been translated in the singular (“Le case del vedovo”) rather than in the plural form (“Le case dei vedovi”), thus also implicating that the title's Biblical intertextuality had never been identified – are discussed in the introductory essay and addressed in the text. The edition aims to reassess both Shaw’s Italian and transcultural reception by offering a critical apparatus and new text for a play that represented a turning point in the author’s career.