Androcles and the Lion (Deseret Alphabet edition)

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. His best-known works include Man and Superman Pygmalion Saint Joan. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. In his will Shaw left money for the development of a phonetic alphabet for English now known as the Shaw alphabet or Shavian. He directed that his play Androcles and the Lion be published in the new alphabet. Androcles and the Lion is an adaptation of the story sometimes attributed to Aesop of a runaway slave saved from death by a lion from whose paw he had extracted a thorn. Shaw resets the play making it a meditation on Christianity and the difference between early Christians and their Roman persecutors. We include here the preface On the Prospects of Christianity. This book is in the Deseret Alphabet a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).