Temple of Bernard Shaw

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), Irish-born writer, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature's great letter writers.
A visionary and mystic, inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions. Leavening even his most serious works for the stage with a comic texture, he turned what might have been treatises in other hands into plays animated by epigrams and lively dialogue.
Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin. His impractical father, an unsuccessful merchant, had emerged from the Protestant Irish gentry; for extra income his mother taught voice pupils. After attending both Protestant and Catholic day schools, Shaw, at the age of 16, took a clerical job; thereafter he was self-educated. When his parents' marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876.
Early Career
The next decade was one of frustration and near poverty. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers: Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), a novel about prizefighting as an occupation that anticipates the theme of prostitution as an antisocial profession in the play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), and An Unsocial Socialist (1883). By the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a spellbinding orator, and tentatively, a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. Through the Fabian Society's founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw met the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom he married in 1898.
Shaw's early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns (many of them championing the controversial work of the German composer Richard Wagner) from 1888 to 1890 under the signature "Corno di Bassetto" (basset horn), later under his own initials. Shifting to the Saturday Review as drama critic, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw became the champion of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).
The First Plays
Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses (produced 1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren's Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs. Warren's Profession was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion), published in 1901, fared slightly better. The Devil's Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the Revolution, became a success in the United States because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements Shaw had set out to satirize. Shaw's next work, Man and Superman (1903), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions; these are the substance of the nonrealistic, almost operatic, third act, "Don Juan in Hell," often since produced independently. Man and Superman was in repertory with John Bull's Other Island (1904), originally written for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin but rejected as a slur on the Irish character; the pair established Shaw's popular reputation in London as playwright and sage.
High Comedy
In Major Barbara (1905, eventually made into a motion picture) and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Shaw continued, through high comedy, to probe society's complicity in its own evils. In the first play, the principles and practices of a munitions manufacturer are discovered to be religious in the highest sense, in contrast to the public and private hypocrisies of the Salvation Army and its benefactors. In The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw produced a satire both on the professions and on the artistic temperament.
With the discussion plays that followed-Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911)-Shaw moved into what might be described as serious farce; intellectual comedy with his usual verve for dialogue, but introducing nonrealistic elements that he later exploited more fully. Although Fanny became his longest running hit up to that time, the most durable of the three has proved to be Misalliance. The mystical side of Shaw, meanwhile, found expression in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), about the sudden conversion of a horse thief, and in Androcles and the Lion (1913), which concerned true and false religious exaltation, and used the traditions of the medieval miracle play and of the Victorian Christmas pantomime.
Shaw's comic masterpiece, Pygmalion (1914; many years later popular also as a film and as the basis for the musical comedy My Fair Lady), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.
The Postwar Years
Pygmalion was as ebullient in its outlook as Shaw's next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intellectual watershed of World War I (1914-1918) caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1921); they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed.
For Saint Joan (1923), Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw's hands Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius.
The Last Plays
Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen. Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence on November 2, 1950.
To the end, Shaw continued to publish brilliantly argued prefaces to his plays and to flood publishers with books, articles, and cantankerous letters to the editor. Among his other work, the novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) remain useful compendia of his ideas. Thousands of his sparkling letters have also been published, for example, those to English stage luminaries Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.
Although he founded no "school" of playwrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of manners, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time. His bold, critical intelligence and sharp pen, brought to bear on contemporary issues, helped mold the thought of his own and later generations.

Contributed by:
Stanley Weintraub

"Shaw, George Bernard," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 97 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1996 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.