George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856–2 November 1950) was a world-renowned Irish author. Born in Dublin, he moved to London when he turned twenty.
Having rejected formal schooling (toward which he had an enduring antipathy), he educated himself by independent study in the
reading room of the British Museum; he also began his career there by writing novels for
which he could not find a publisher.
His first success was as a music and literary critic, but he was drawn to drama and authored more than sixty plays during his career. Typically his work is leavened by a delightful vein of
comedy, but nearly all of it bears earnest messages Shaw hoped his audiences would embrace.
Politically an ardent socialist, he wrote many brochures and speeches for the
Fabian Society and became an accomplished orator in furtherance of its causes. Those
included gaining equal political rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the
working class, rescinding private ownership of land and promoting healthful lifestyles.
He married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived.
They made their home in Ayot St. Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries incurred on falling
from a ladder.
He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) and an
Oscar (1938). These were awarded for Shaw's contribution to
literature and the film Pygmalion, respectively. (It is not the case that
Al Gore shares this distinction, as the Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth was not
awarded to Gore personally).
Biography
George Bernard Shaw was born to George Carr Shaw (1814-1885), an unsuccessful grain merchant and sometime civil servant, and
Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, née Gurly (1830-1913), a professional singer. He had two sisters, Lucinda Frances (1853-1920), a
singer of musical comedy and light opera, and
Elinor Agnes (1854-1876).
Shaw briefly attended the Wesleyan Connexional School, a grammar school operated by the Methodist New Connexion, moved to a private school near Dalkey, transferred to Dublin's Central
Model School and ended his formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. Boy and man, he was
always bitterly opposed to schools and teachers, saying
"Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons
and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." [1]
He epitomized this attitude in the prologue of Cashel Byron's
Profession where young Byron's educational experience is a fictionalized description of Shaw's own formal schooling
and underscored it later in his Treatise on Parents and Children.[2]
Just before Shaw’s sixteenth birthday (1872), his mother left home and followed her voice teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, to
London. The daughters accompanied their mother,[3] but Shaw
remained in Dublin with his father, first as a reluctant pupil, then as a clerk in an estate office, where he worked efficiently,
albeit discontentedly, for several years.[4] In
1876, Shaw joined his mother’s London household. She, Vandeleur Lee, and his sister Lucy, provided him with a pound a week while
he frequented public libraries and the British Museum reading room where he studied earnestly and began writing professionally.
He earned his allowance by ghost-writing Vandeleur Lee’s music column,[5] which appeared in the London Hornet. Between 1879 and 1883, due to a series of rejected
novels, his literary earnings remained negligible. His situation improved after 1885, when he became self-supporting as an art
and literary critic.
Image:GeorgeBernardShaw-Nobel.jpg
Influenced by his reading, he became a dedicated Socialist and a founding member of the Fabian Society, a middle class organization established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread of
socialism[4] by peaceful means. In the course of
his political activities he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow Fabian; they married in 1898. In 1906 the
Shaws moved into a house, now called Shaw's Corner, in Ayot St Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire; it was to be
their home for the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a flat in London. During his final years Shaw enjoyed
attending to the grounds at Shaw's Corner; his death when he was 94 resulted from injuries from falling from a ladder while he
was pruning a tree. His ashes, mixed with those of his wife, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan
in their garden.[6]
Shaw's plays were first performed in the 1890s. By the end of the decade he was an established playwright. He wrote sixty-three plays and his output as novelist, critic,
pamphleteer, essayist and private correspondent
was prodigious. He is known to have written more than 250,000 letters.[7]
Literary works
The International Shaw Society provides a detailed chronological listing of Shaw's writings.[8] See also George Bernard Shaw, Unity Theatre[9]
Criticism
As a music, art, and drama critic he wrote under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto"
("basset horn") for the Wolverhampton Star and, as GBS, for Dramatic Review
(1885-86), Our Corner (1885-86), and The Pall Mall Gazette (1885-88). Shaw chose the pseudonym because it sounded
European, and because nobody knew what a Corno di Bassetto was.[10] From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the drama critic for Frank Harris’ Saturday Review. His earnings as a critic made him self-supporting.
Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to music columns (many
of them defending the work of the German composer Richard Wagner). The Perfect Wagnerite, printed in 1898, typifies Shaw’s
views on Wagner. Conversely, Shaw disparaged Brahms, deriding A German Requiem by saying "it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class
undertaker."[11] As drama critic for the Saturday Review, a
post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw also championed the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written the influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism(1891). His music criticism has been collected in Shaw's
Music (1981).[12]
Novels
All of the five unsuccessful novels written between 1879 and 1883, at the start of his career eventually were published. They
were:
- Cashel Byron's Profession (London, The Modern Press, 1886)
- An Unsocial Socialist (London, Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1887)
- Love Among the Artists (Chicago, Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1900, UK, 1914)
- The Irrational Knot, Being the Second Novel of his Nonage (revised, New York, Brentano’s, 1905)
- Immaturity (London, Constable, 1931) His first novel. Written in 1879, it was the last one to be printed.
Plays
Although an earlier fragment exists, Shaw began working on his
first play destined for publication,Widower's Houses, in 1885 in collaboration with critic William Archer, who supplied the structure. Archer decided that Shaw could not write a play, so
the project was abandoned. Years later, Shaw tried again and, in 1892, completed the play without collaboration. Widower's
Houses, a scathing attack on slumlords, was first performed at London's Royalty Theatre on December 9, 1892. Shaw would later
call it one of his worst works, but he had found his medium.
His first significant financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield's American production of
The Devil's Disciple (1897). He went on to write 63 plays, most of them
full-length.
Often his plays succeeded in America and Germany before they did in London. Although major London productions of many of his
earlier pieces were delayed for years, they are still being performed there. Examples include Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the
Man (1894), Candida (1894) and You Never Can Tell (1897).
With the exception of Oscar Wilde, the humor in Shaw's writing was unmatched by his
contemporaries, and he is remembered for his comedy. However, his wittiness should not obscure his important role in
revolutionizing British drama. In the Victorian Era, the London stage had been regarded
as a place for frothy, sentimental entertainment. Shaw made it a forum for considering moral, political and economic issues. In
this, he considered himself indebted to Henrik Ibsen, who pioneered modern realistic
drama.
As his experience and popularity increased, his plays became increasingly verbose, which did not detract from their success.
These works, from what might be called the beginning of his "middle" period, include Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and
Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906). From 1904 to 1907, several of his plays had their London premieres
in notable productions at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne. The first of his new plays to
be performed at the Court Theatre, John Bull's Other Island (1904),
while not especially popular today, made his reputation in London when King
Edward VII laughed so hard during a command performance that he broke his chair.
By the 1910s, Shaw was a well-established playwright. New works such as Fanny's First
Play (1911) and Pygmalion (1912) — on which My Fair Lady (1956) is based — had long runs in front of large London audiences. A musical adaptation
of Arms and the Man(1894)—The Chocolate Soldier by Oscar Strauss (1908)—
was also very popular, but Shaw detested it and, for the rest of his life, forbade musicalization of his work, including a
proposed Franz Lehar operetta based on Pygmalion; the Broadway musical My Fair
Lady could be produced only after Shaw's death.
Shaw's outlook was changed by World War I, which he vigorously opposed, despite incurring
outrage from the public as well as from many friends. His first full-length piece presented after the War, written mostly during
it, was Heartbreak House (1919). A new Shaw had emerged--the wit remained, but his faith in humanity had dwindled. In the
preface to Heartbreak House he said
"It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate
it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in
a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness."
Shaw had previously supported gradual democratic change toward socialism, but now he saw more hope in government by benign
strong men. This sometimes made him oblivious to the dangers of dictatorships. Near his life's end that hope failed him too. In
the preface of Buoyant Billions (1946-48), his last full-length play, he asks
"Why appeal to the mob when ninetyfive per cent of them do not understand politics, and can do nothing but mischief without
leaders? And what sort of leaders do they vote for? For Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon with their Popish plots, for Hitlers
who call on them to exterminate Jews, for Mussolinis who rally them to nationalist dreams of glory and empire in which all
foreigners are enemies to be subjugated."
In 1921, Shaw completed Back to Methuselah, his "Metabiological
Pentateuch." The massive, five-play work starts in the Garden of Eden and ends thousands
of years in the future; it showcases Shaw's conviction that a "Life Force" purposefully directs evolution toward ultimate
perfection. Shaw proclaimed the play a masterpiece, but many critics disagreed. (The theme of a benign force directing evolution
reappears in Geneva (1938), wherein Shaw maintains humans must develop longer lifespans in order to acquire the wisdom
needed for self-government.)
Methuselah was followed by Saint Joan (1923), which is generally
conceded to be one of his better works. Shaw had long considered writing about Joan of Arc,
and her canonization supplied a strong incentive. The play was an international success, and is believed to have led to his Nobel
Prize in Literature. He wrote plays for the rest of his life, but very few of them are as notable—or as often revived—as his
earlier work.
The Apple Cart (1929) was probably his most popular work of this era. Later
full-length plays like Too True to Be Good (1931), On the Rocks (1933), The Millionairess (1935), and
Geneva (1938) have been seen as marking a decline. His last significant play, In Good King Charles Golden Days has,
according to St. John Ervine,[13] passages that are equal
to Shaw's major works.
Shaw's published plays come with lengthy prefaces. These tend to be more about Shaw's
opinions on the issues addressed by the plays than about the plays themselves. Often his prefaces are longer than the plays
themselves. For example, the Penguin Books edition of his one-act The Shewing-up Of
Blanco Posnet (1909) has a 67-page preface for the 29-page playscript.
Polemical writing
In a letter to Henry James dated 17 January, 1909, Shaw said:
“I, as a Socialist, have had to preach, as much as anyone, the enormous power of the environment. We can change it; we must
change it; there is absolutely no other sense in life than the task of changing it. What is the use of writing plays, what is the
use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.”[14]
Thus he viewed writing as a way to further his humanitarian and political agendas.
His works were very popular because of their comedic content, but the public tended to disregard his messages and enjoy his work
as pure entertainment. He was acutely aware of that. His preface to Heartbreak House
(1919) attributes the rejection to the need of post-World War I audiences for frivolities, after four long years of grim
privation, more than to their inborn distaste of instruction.
His crusading nature led him to adopt and tenaciously hold a variety of causes, which he furthered with fierce intensity,
heedless of opposition and ridicule. For example, Common Sense about the War (1914) lays out Shaw's strong objections at the onset
of World War I. His stance ran counter to public sentiment and cost him dearly at the box-office, but he never compromised.
Shaw joined in the public’s hysterical attack on vaccination against smallpox,[15] a dire disease that might
have killed him when he contracted it in 1881. In the preface to “Doctor’s Dilemma” he made it plain he regarded traditional
medical treatment as dangerous quackery that should be replaced with sound public sanitation, good personal hygiene and diets devoid of meat. Shaw became a vegetarian while he was twenty-five, after hearing a lecture by H. F. Lester.[16] In 1901, remembering the experience, he said "I was a cannibal for twenty-five
years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian."[17] As a
staunch vegetarian, he was firmly anti-vivisectionist and antagonistic to cruel sports for the balance of his life. The belief in
the immorality of eating animals was one of the Fabian causes near his heart and is frequently a topic in his plays and prefaces.
His position, succinctly stated, was "A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."[18]
As well as plays and prefaces, Shaw wrote long political treatises, such as Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), [19] and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism (1912),[20], a
495-page book detailing all aspects of socialistic theory as Shaw interpreted it. Excerpts of the latter were republished in 1928
as Socialism and Liberty,[21] Late in his life he
wrote another guide to political issues, Everybody's Political What's What (1944).[22]
Friends and correspondents
Shaw corresponded with an array of people, many of them well-known. His letters to and from Mrs. Patrick Campbell were adapted for the stage by Jerome
Kilty as Dear Liar: A Comedy of Letters; as was his correspondence with the poet Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (the intimate friend of Oscar Wilde), into the drama Bernard and
Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship by Anthony Wynn. His letters to the prominent
actress, Ellen Terry,[23] to the boxer Gene Tunney,[24] and to H.G. Wells,[25] have also been published. Eventually the volume of his correspondence
became insupportable, as can be inferred from apologetic letters written by assistants.[26]
Shaw campaigned against the executions of the rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, and
he became a personal friend of the Cork-born IRA leader Michael Collins,
whom he invited to his home for dinner while Collins was negotiating the Anglo-Irish
Treaty with Lloyd George in London. After Collins's assassination in 1922,
Shaw sent a personal message of condolence to one of Collins's sisters. He had an enduring friendship with G. K. Chesterton, the Roman Catholic-convert British
writer.[27]
Another great friend was the composer Edward Elgar.
The latter dedicated one of his late works, Severn Suite, to Shaw; and Shaw exerted himself (eventually with success) to
persuade the BBC to commission from Elgar a third symphony, though
this piece remained incomplete at Elgar's death. Shaw's correspondence with the motion picture producer Gabriel Pascal, who was the first to successfully bring Shaw's plays to the screen and who later tried to
put into motion a musical adaptation of Pygmalion, but died before he could realize it, is published in a book titled
Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal (ISBN 0-8020-3002-5). A stage play based on a book by Hugh Whitemore, The Best of
Friends, provides a window on the friendships of Dame Laurentia McLachlan, OSB
(late Abbess of Stanbrook) with Sir Sydney Cockerell and Shaw through adaptations from
their letters and writings. ==
Socialism and political beliefs
Shaw asserted each social class strove to serve its own ends with the upper and middle classes winners in the struggle and the
working class the loser. He excoriated the democratic system of his time, saying workers, ruthlessly exploited by greedy
employers, lived in abject poverty and were too ignorant and apathetic to vote intelligently.
In 1882, influenced by Henry George's views on land nationalization, Shaw concluded
private ownership of land and its exploitation for personal profit was a form of theft and advocated equitable distribution of
land and natural resources and their control by governments intent on promoting the
commonweal. Shaw believed income for individuals should come solely from the sale of their
own labour and that poverty could be eliminated by giving equal pay to everyone. This ideology led Shaw to apply for membership
the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), led by H. M. Hyndman who introduced him to the works of Karl Marx. Shaw never
joined the SDF, which favored reform by outright revolution, and he never was a Marxist. Instead, in 1884, he helped found the
Fabian Society, which accorded with his view that reform should be gradual and induced by
peaceful means rather than by outright revolution. He was an active Fabian, writing many of their pamphlets, lecturing and
supplying money to set up the independent socialist journal The New Age. As a Fabian
he participated in the formation of the Labour Party. [[The Intelligent Woman's
Guide to Socialism and Capitalism]].[20] provides a clear statement of his socialistic views. As evinced in
plays like Major Barbara and Pygmalion, class struggle is a motif in much of Shaw's writing.
After visiting the USSR in the 1930s and meeting Stalin, Shaw became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. The
preface to his play On the Rocks (1933) is primarily an effort to justify the pogroms conducted by the OGPU. In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, he
dismisses stories of a Soviet famine as slanderous and calls reports of its exploited workers
falsehoods.[28] Asked why he did not stay permanently in
the Soviet 'earthly paradise', Shaw jokingly explained that England was a hell and he was a small devil. He wrote a defense of
Stalin's espousal of Lysenkoism, in a letter printed in the January 1949 issue of Labour
Monthly.[29]
Shaw's legacy
In his old age, Shaw was a household name in Britain and Ireland and he was famed throughout the world. His ironic wit endowed
English with the adjective "Shavian" to characterize observations like "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest
joke in the world."[30]
Concerned about the vagaries of English spelling, he willed a portion of his wealth (probated at £367,233 13s)[31] to fund the creation of a new phonemic alphabet for the English language. The money available was insufficient to support the project, so it
was neglected for a time. That changed when his estate began earning significant royalties from the rights to Pygmalion
once My Fair Lady—a musical adapted from the play by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe—became a hit. However, the
Public Trustee found grounds to challenge the will as being badly worded.[32] In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only £8600 for
promoting the new alphabet, which is now called the Shavian alphabet. The
National Gallery of Ireland, RADA and the British Museum all received
substantial bequests. His home, now called Shaw's Corner, in the small village of
Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire is now a
National Trust property, open to the
public. The Shaw Theatre, Euston Road, London, opened in 1971, was named in his honour. Near
the Shaw Theatre entrance opposite the new British Library there is a contemporary
statue, Saint Joan, comemorating the writer. His birthplace on Synge Street in Dublin now houses a small Shaw Museum.
The Shaw Festival, an annual theater festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, began as an eight week run of Don Juan in Hell (as the long third act dream sequence of Man And Superman is called when
staged alone) and Candida in 1962, and has grown into an annual festival with over
800 performances a year, dedicated to producing the works of Shaw and his contemporaries.
Works available online
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Novels
The full texts of Cashel Byron's Profession (London, The Modern
Press, 1886), An Unsocial Socialist (London, Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1887), and The Irrational Knot, Being
the Second Novel of his Nonage (revised, New York, Brentano’s, 1905) are available online.[3]
Drama
- Plays Unpleasant (published 1898)
- Plays Pleasant (published 1898):
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