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George Bernard Shaw

Born: 26 July 1856
Dublin, Ireland
Died: November 2, 1950
Occupation: Playwright, critic, political activist
Nationality: Irish
Genres: Social Realism
Influences: Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry George
Influenced: Socialism and Fabianism in UK

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Ireland but spent most of his adult life in England. Famed as a playwright, he wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) and an Oscar (1938) for Pygmalion). He was a strong advocate for socialism and women's rights, a vegetarian and tetotaller, but a vocal enemy of formal education.

Contents

[edit] Biography

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) was born in Dublin, Ireland 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); both died of tuberculosis.

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 gave this attitude flesh and blood in the prologue of Cashel Byron's Profession, and underscored it in his Treatise on Parents and Children.

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, but Shaw remained in Dublin with his father while reluctantly completing his formal schooling, then working discontentedly as a clerk in an estate office.

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,which appeared in the London Hornet.) Between 1879 and 1883, thanks to a series of rejected novels, his literary earnings remained negligible. His situation improved after 1885, when he became able to support himself as an art and literary critic.

Influenced by his reading, he became a dedicated Socialist and an active member of the Fabian Society, a middle class organization, founded in 1884 to promote the gradual spread of socialism 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 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. The house and grounds, now called Shaw's Corner, is a National Trust, open to the public.

Candida and Arms and the Man, both staged in 1884 were his first successful theatrical productions. The latter made his reputation as a playwright. During the fifty years thereafter he wrote more than sixty 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, possibly an all-time record.

He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925), and an Oscar (Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay in 1938 for Pygmalion). Shaw died in 1950 at the age of 94 as the result of injuries incurred by falling from a ladder while he was attempting to prune a tree.

Shaw in 1934
Shaw in 1934

[edit] Literary works

[edit] Criticism

As 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). From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the drama critic for Frank Harris’ Saturday Review. His income 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 controversial work of the German composer Richard Wagner). ThePerfect Wagnerite, printed in 1898, exemplifies Shaw’s views on Wagner. 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 his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism(1891). His music criticism has been collected in Shaw's Music (1981), Bodley Head Ltd, London. ISBN: 0370302494

[edit] 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)
  • Immaturity (London, Constable, 1931) His first novel. Written in 1879, it was the last one to be printed.

The full texts of three of his novels are available online

[edit] Plays

Shaw started working on his first play, Widower's Houses, in 1885 in collaboration with critic William Archer, who supplied the structure of the play. Archer decided that Shaw could not write a play (an opinion he apparently never changed), so the project was abandoned. Years later, Shaw tried again and, in 1892, completed the play without collaboration. Widower's Houses, which excoriated 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 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.

Although major productions in London 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 (1895).

His first financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield's American production of The Devil's Disciple (1897). Often his plays succeeded in America and Germany before they did in London.

The humor in Shaw's writing was unmatched by any of his contemporaries excepting Oscar Wilde, but his wittiness should not obscure his important role in revolutionizing British drama. In the Victorian Era, before Shaw's ascendancy, the London stage was regarded as a place for frothy, sentimental entertainment. He made it a forum for considering moral, political and economic issues. In doing this, he acknowledged his indebtedness to Henrick Ibsen, who was the pioneer of 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 plays to be performed at the Court Theatre, John Bull's Other Island (1904), is not especially popular today, but it made his reputation in London when, during a command performance, King Edward VII laughed so hard 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) was based—had long runs in front of large London audiences. (Even though Oscar Straus's The Chocolate Soldier (1908)--an adaptation of Arms and the Man (1894)--was very popular, Shaw detested it and, for the rest of his life, forbade any musicalization of his work, including a potential Franz Lehar operetta based on Pygmalion. My Fair Lady was producible only after Shaw's demise.)

Shaw's outlook was changed by World War I, which he vigorously opposed, despite incurring great outrage from the public and from many friends, as well. His first full-length piece presented after the War, written mostly during it, was Heartbreak House (1919). A new Shaw was emerging, 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."

He saw more hope for government by benign strong men like Nietzsche's Superman and his belief in such a model made him oblivious to the defects of socialistic dictators like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.

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. Shaw proclaimed it a masterpiece, but many critics did not share that opinion.

His next play, Saint Joan (1923), is generally conceded to be one of his best. Shaw had long thought of 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, passages that are equal to Shaw's major works. His last full-length work was Buoyant Billions (1946–48), written when he was in his nineties.

Shaw's published plays come with lengthy prefaces. These tend to be more about Shaw's opinions on the issues addressed the plays than about the plays themselves. Often, his prefaces are longer than the play. 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.

[edit] Prose

His overriding motivation for writing was to further humanitarian and political agendas. To that end he kept his audiences attentive and entertained by superb displays of wit and humor while expounding ideologies that might have otherwise seemed tedious. The ruse worked, to a degree: People flocked to see his plays and hear his lectures, most finding them hilarious, but they disregarded thoughtful content and skipped over the conjoined prefaces and essays--intended to inform and teach--much as one discards the protecting packing in the carton of a gift. He was acutely aware of that; his preface to Heartbreak House (1919) attributes the rejection to the need, after four long years of grim privation, of post-World War I audiences for frivolities more than to their inborn distaste of instruction. Rightly or wrongly, it is now almost too late to matter; the burning issues of that era have mostly been resolved or conveniently forgotten.

His was a crusading nature. Once he espoused a cause he furthered it with fierce intensity and [all the power of his intellect, heedless of all slings and arrows. For example, Commonsense about the War (1914) lays out Shaw's strong objections at the onset of World War I. His thoughts ran counter to public opinion and cost him dearly at the box-office, but he never compromised.

Like all explorers of waters yet uncharted, he was sometimes wrong as well as being often right: Thus, he joined in the hysterical public attacks on vaccinating against smallpox, a dire disease that might have killed him when he contracted it in 1881. However, right or wrong, on any subject, he did not hesitate to bare his heart and soul; he deserves deep respect for that.

No one should claim to know the man while remaining unfamiliar with his prose. A good introduction to his thinking is Socialism and Liberty (1928), which offers his opinion on nearly everything. It is an excerpt from The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism(1912), a 495-page book detailing all aspects of socialistic theory as Shaw interpreted it. Another essay, Treatise on Parents and Children(1910) seems almost freshly written. It holds food for thought for any modern reader.

Much of Shaw's prose was written as prefaces to plays.

[edit] 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, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw : A Correspondence / The Shaw - Terry Letters : A Romantic Correspondence, (Christopher St. John, Editor), to the boxer Gene Tunney (Collier’s Magazine 23 June 1951) and to H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells (Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw) (J. Percy Smith, Editor) have also been published.. Eventually the volume of his correspondence became insupportable, as can be inferred from apologetic letters written by assistants.

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.

Shaw had an enduring friendship with G. K. Chesterton, the Roman Catholic-convert British writer. The e-text of their famed debate, Shaw V. Chesterton is available, as is a book, Shaw V. Chesterton, a debate between George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton (2000 Third Way Publications Ltd. [ISBN 0-9535077-7-7])

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 adapted Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, 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.

[edit] Shaw's legacy

When his life ended, Shaw was a world figure and a household name in Great Britain. His ironic wit endowed English with the adjective "Shavian" to describe to such clever observations as "England and America are two countries divided by a " common language."

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.

Concerned about the vagaries of English spelling, he willed a portion of his wealth (probated at £367,233 13s [2]) to fund the creation of a new phonemic alphabet for the English language.When he died he did not leave much money, so no effort was made to start the project. However, his estate began to earn significant royalties from the rights to Pygmalion when My Fair Lady, a musical adapted from the play by his comrade film producer Gabriel Pascal, became a hit. My Fair Lady, a musical adapted from the play by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe It then became clear that the will was badly worded and the Public Trusteefound grounds to challenge it. In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only a small portion of the money 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.

The Shaw Theatre, Euston Road, London was opened in 1971 and named in his honour.

The Shaw Festival, an annual theater festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, began as an eight week run of Don Juan in Hell 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.

[edit] Socialism and political beliefs

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.”

Shaw maintained that each social class worked to serve its own ends, and that those in the upper echelons had won the struggle.He believed the working class had failed to promote its interests effectively, which made him highly critical of the democratic system of his time. Shaw's writing, as evinced in plays like Major Barbara and Pygmalion, has class struggle as an underlying theme. Notwithstanding that, Shaw was not a Marxist in the traditional sense, and abhorred the aggressiness of Trade Unionism.

In 1882 Henry George's views on land nationalization gave depth and direction to Shaw’s political convictions. Shortly thereafter he applied to join the Social Democratic Federation led by H. M. Hyndman who introduced him to the works of Karl Marx. However, the newly-formed Fabian Society conformed more closely to his views, so he joined it instead, in 1884. He was an active Fabian, writing a number of their pamphlets, and supplying money to set up the independent socialist journal The New Age. He argued that owning property was a form theft and campaigned for an equitable distribution of land and capital. He was involved with the formation of the Labour Party. A clear statement of his position can be found in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism, also known as The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Having visited the USSR in 1930s and met Stalin, Shaw became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. He declared that all the stories of a famine were slander after a carefully managed short tour of the country (Stalin privately disparaged him). Having been asked why he didn't want to stay permanently in the Soviet 'earthly paradise', Shaw ironically remarked that England was a 'hell' but of course he was a small devil himself. He wrote a somewhat ironic defense of Stalin's espousal of Lysenkoism, in a letter to the 1946 Labour Monthly. He also "simply did not believe" that the Holocaust had happened.[3]

[edit] Vegetarianism

G.B. Shaw became a vegetarian while he was twenty-five, after hearing a lecture by H. F. Lester [4] In 1901, remembering the experience, he said "I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian." [5] 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 killing animals for food 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."[6]

The following was taken from the archives of The Vegetarian Society, UK

...the big story of the July issue of The Vegetarian Messenger was the tribute to George Bernard Shaw, celebrating his 90th birthday on the 26th of that month. He had, at that time, been a vegetarian for 66 years and was commended as one of the great thinkers and dramatists of his era. "No writer since Shakespearean times has produced such a wealth of dramatic literature, so superb in expression, so deep in thought and with such dramatic possibilities as Shaw."

[edit] Works available as e-books

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:


[edit] Plays

Plays Unpleasant (published 1898)

Plays Pleasant (published 1898):

[edit] Novels

  • Cashel Byron's Profession (London, the Modern Press, 1886)[42]
  • An Unsocial Socialist (London, Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1887)[43]
  • The Irrational Knot (revised, New York, Brentano’s, 1905)Immaturity (London, Constable, 1931)[44]

[edit] Essays

[edit] References and footnotes

  1. ^ (George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Letter, August 7, 1919, to Thomas Demetrius O'Bolger. "Biographers' Blunders Corrected," Sixteen Self Sketches, Constable (1949)
  2. ^ Oxford Dictionary of National biography
  3. ^ Baker, Stuart E., Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts, p. 177. University Press of Florida: Gainesville, Florida: 2002.
  4. ^ Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (N.Y.: Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc., 1956), 777
  5. ^ Who I Am, and What I Think, Sixteen Self Sketches,' Constable (1949)
  6. ^ Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, ch. 9 ((Atheneum Press, 1963)

[edit] Further reading

  • Ohmann, Richard M., Shaw: The Style and the Man, Wesleyan University Press, 1962
  • Holroyd, Michael, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition, Random House, 1998

[edit] See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] External links


The Plays of George Bernard Shaw
Plays Unpleasant : The Philanderer, Mrs Warren's Profession, Widowers' Houses
Plays Pleasant : Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell
Three Plays for Puritans : Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, The Devil's Disciple
Back to Methuselah, a cycle of 5 plays : In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden), The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day, The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170, Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000, As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920
Other Plays : Androcles and the Lion, The Apple Cart, The Doctor's Dilemma, Fanny's First Play, Geneva, Heartbreak House, John Bull's Other Island, Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Misalliance, Pygmalion, Saint Joan


Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1901-1925)
v • d • e

1901: Prudhomme | 1902: Mommsen | 1903: Bjørnson | 1904: F.Mistral, Echegaray | 1905: Sienkiewicz | 1906: Carducci | 1907: Kipling | 1908: Eucken | 1909: Lagerlöf | 1910: Heyse | 1911: Maeterlinck | 1912: Hauptmann | 1913: Tagore | 1915: Rolland | 1916: Heidenstam | 1917: Gjellerup, Pontoppidan | 1919: Spitteler | 1920: Hamsun | 1921: France | 1922: Benavente | 1923: Yeats | 1924: Reymont | 1925: Shaw

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