Because 'night, Mother lacks conventional act and scene divisions, deciding how to divide up the play for this study at first proved problematic. However, Potter's "Changes in Shaw's Dramatic Rhetoric: Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, and Heartbreak House" has provided me with some useful concepts. In this article, Potter tells of re-establishing scene breaks rather than relying on the ones provided by the playwright. In doing so, the literary critic creates divisions that facilitate studies of the play's rhetorical features. For such studies, Potter extends the following definition of "scene": "A scene consists of all the action and representation between two rhetorically determined moments in an act. The rhetoric of the work determines the line after which one may say that a new scene has begun" (227). Potter also claims that if a critic establishes "specific scene boundaries...by listing the first line and the last line [of the scene], other critics will at least know the field under analysis" (228) and may choose to work with them or establish their own boundaries for analysis. I use empirical methods to examine these "scenes" and discuss the structure of 'night, Mother's dialogue in more detail.

The following table shows the boundaries for the textual divisions I use throughout my thesis and throughout the tables and discussions included in this site.