Add MS 81316

John Gielgud Archive. Letter from George Bernard Shaw to Elizabeth Bergner, with incomplete text of Shaw’s St Joan annotated by the author; 1938. Copy, circa 1986. Shaw begins neutrally with 'Ayliff has given me this book to study your proposed alterations to the text', but proceeds to fill three pages with a robust refusal to countenance any of the proposed changes, ending with the brisk 'Implacably. G. Bernard Shaw'. An autograph note by Gielgud on the back of one of his 'With the compliments of ... ' cards reads 'This is a copy of a letter from Shaw to Elizabeth Bergner after she played St Joan at Malvern. I suppose Ruth Rosen must have given it to me after Elizabeth died, though I have no memory of how I came by it.' Shaw wrote in his unmistakeable style on the title page and two blank pages of the 1924 Constable edition of St Joan, and there are 33 further pages from the text, most very heavily annotated with Shaw’s vehement disagreements with Bergner’s planned alterations.