Shadow and Substance is an award-winning four-act play written in 1937 by Paul Vincent Carroll. In 1938 it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best foreign play. First published by Samuel French in 1944. Charlie Chaplin had purchased the film rights in 1942 and wrote a script, intending to cast Joan Barry in the lead. Their subsequent relationship lead to legal troubles and a public downturn in Chaplin's popularity, so the project was never begun, and the script remains in the Chaplin archives.