George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw
Shaw in 1936
Born	(1856-07-26)26 July 1856 Dublin, Ireland
Died	2 November 1950(1950-11-02) (aged 94) Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England, UK
Occupation	Playwright, critic, political activist
Nationality	Irish
Alma mater	Wesley College, Dublin
Genre	Satire, black comedy
Literary movement	Ibsenism, naturalism
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature 1925 Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay 1938 Pygmalion
Spouse	Charlotte Payne-Townshend (m.1898–1943, her death)
Signature

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was a Nobel Prize and Oscar-winning Irish playwright, critic and socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950. Originally earning his way as an influential London music and theatre critic, Shaw's greatest gift was for the modern drama. Strongly influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he successfully introduced a new realism into English-language drama. He wrote more than 60 plays, among them Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion. With his range from biting contemporary satire to historical allegory, Shaw became the leading comedy dramatist of his generation and one of the most important playwrights in the English language since the 17th century.

"Shaw was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift, the most readable music critic in English, the best theatre critic of his generation, a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects, and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature," sums up Stanley Weintraub in the Encyclopædia Britannica.^[1] He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

As a young man raised in poverty, Shaw embraced socialism and became an early and lifelong force in the Fabian Society, a highly influential British organisation, founded in 1884, to promote a gradual, as opposed to revolutionary, socialism, that was the foundation for the British Labour Party in 1900. He tirelessly wrote and spoke on behalf of its wide-ranging vision to transform British society, advocating a minimum wage for the working-class, universal healthcare, women's right to vote, and the abolition of hereditary privilege. Not quite a pacifist because he justified war when a necessary evil (as in fighting the Nazis in WWII), he worked for a peaceable world and supported the establishment of the League of Nations. He edited the classic text "Fabian Essays in Socialism" (1889), and helped co-founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb create the London School of Economics and Political Science from a bequest by an early Fabian in 1895. He publicly opposed Britain's entry into both World Wars.

He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (Literature, 1925) and an Academy Award (Best Adapted Screenplay, 1938), the first for his contributions to literature and the second for his film adaptation of his most popular play, Pygmalion. The story of a pedantic British linguist who turns a Cockney flower girl into a lady was immortalised after his death in the 1953 Broadway musical My Fair Lady.

Life

Early years

Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street,^{[n 1]} Dublin, the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814–85) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (née Gurly; 1830–1913). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (1853–1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855–76). Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd records that in 1689 Captain William Shaw fought for William III at the Battle of the Boyne, for which service he was granted a substantial estate in Kilkenny.^[3] His descendants included men of consequence in the Protestant Ascendancy, as well as failures and alcoholics including George Carr Shaw. The family found George a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant.^[4] In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly, who in Holroyd's view married Shaw to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money.^[5] She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty".^[6]

By the time of Shaw's birth his mother had become close to George John Lee, a colourful figure in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father;^[7] there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this.^{[8][9][10][11]} The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection affected him deeply.^[12] He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players.^[4]

In 1862 Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a large house in a better part of Dublin, and also a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and he was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly;^[13] thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature.^[14]

Between 1865 and 1871 Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated.^{[15][n 2]} His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents."^[16] In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier.^[7] During this period he was known as "George Shaw", before dropping the "George" and styling himself "Bernard Shaw" after his move to London.^[17]

In June 1873 Lee left Dublin for London, and never returned. A fortnight later Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her.^{[7][n 3]} Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up.^[19] Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.^[7]

London

Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of tuberculosis. He promptly resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral . He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for another twenty-nine years.^[4]

Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in South Kensington, but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had no thought yet of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him, ghostwriting a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet.^[4] Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London.^{[n 4]} Despite the rift, Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer.^{[21][n 5]}

Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing.^[25] His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879) was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s.^[7] He was employed briefly by the Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80, and as in Dublin achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation.^[26]

In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, Shaw became a vegetarian.^[7] He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.^[27] In rapid succession he wrote two more novels: The Irrational Knot (1880) and Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither found a publisher; each was serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine Our Corner.^{[28][n 6]}

In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race".^[31] Here he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know ...We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it".^[32]

On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George.^[33] Shaw then read George's book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics.^[34] He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join it—he preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals.^[35]

Shaw's next attempt at drama was in 1884, Un Petit Drame, a one-act playlet in French, not published in his lifetime.^[36] In the same year the critic William Archer suggested a collaboration, with a plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw.^[37] The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892,^[38] and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career.^[39]

Fabian Society

After reading a tract, Why Are The Many Poor?, issued by the recently formed Fabian Society,^{[n 7]} Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884.^[41] He became a member in September 1884,^[41] and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2.^[42] He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also Annie Besant, a fine orator.^[41]

From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education." This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism.^[44] When in 1886–87 the Fabians debated whether to embrace Anarchism, as advocated by Charlotte Wilson, Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach.^[45] After a Trafalgar Square rally addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities, on 13 November 1887 ("Bloody Sunday"), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power.^[46] Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties.^[47]

Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices.^[48] Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone".^[49] In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is,^[42] a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms.^[50] In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".^[51]

Critic

1885–86 marked a personal and professional turning point in Shaw's life: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic.^[52] He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by a predatory widow, Jane (Jenny) Patterson. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons..^{[n 8]}

The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: Cashel Byron's Profession written in 1882–83, and An Unsocial Socialist, begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in ToDay magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form in 1886.^[7]

In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When in 1886 Archer resigned as art critic of The World, he secured the succession for Shaw.^[57] The two figures in the contemporary art world whom Shaw most admired were John Ruskin and William Morris, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms.^[57] Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of art for art's sake, and insisted that all great art must be didactic.^[58]

Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known.^[59] After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto.^[60] In May 1890 he moved back to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability."^[61] Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950.^[62]

From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at The World, he used the by-line "'G.B.S.". He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a parallel career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".^[7]

Playwright and politician: 1890s

After using the plot of the aborted collaboration with Archer to complete Widowers' Houses (it was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage.^{[n 9]}

Shaw's first box-office success was Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class.^[7] The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of sneering at heroism and patriotism,^[64] heartless cleverness,^[65] copying W. S. Gilbert's style,^{[66][n 10]} and general mediocrity.^[68] The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matinée performances to meet the demand.^[69] The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York.^[70] Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson.^[71]

The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated. Candida, which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a one-night performance in South Shields in 1895.^[72] In 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny had a single staging at Croydon.^[73] In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties.^[4]

In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the Independent Labour Party.^[74] He was sceptical about the new party,^[75] and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics.^[76] He did, however, persuade the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing indirect taxation, and taxing unearned income "to extinction".^[77] Back in London, Shaw produced what Margaret Cole, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892. To Your Tents, O Israel excoriated the government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on Irish Home Rule, a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism.^{[78][76][n 11]} In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt Hutchinson—Holroyd mentions £10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in the summer of 1895.^[80]

By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist.^[81] However, in 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" (parish councillor) in London's St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously;^{[n 12]} when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras , he was elected to the newly formed borough council.^[83]

In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry.^[84] He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed that they should marry.^[4] The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden.^[85] The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In Ervine's view, "their life together was entirely felicitous".^[4] There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited.^{[86][87][88][89][90]} In 1906 they found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "Shaw's Corner", and lived there for the rest of their lives, maintaining a London flat in the Adelphi and later at Whitehall Court.^[91]

Stage success: 1900–14

During the first decade of the twentieth century Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays.^{[92][n 13]} The first, John Bull's Other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair.^[93] The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might provoke,^[7] although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907.^[94] Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for...It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland."^{[95][n 14]} Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends;^[98] Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in 1909.^[99] Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell^[100] and James Joyce,^[101] and was a close friend of Seán O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island.^[102]

Man and Superman followed, and was a success both at the Royal Court and in Robert Loraine's New York production. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army;^[103] The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics;^[104] and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London in 1907.^[105]

Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by the biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce"; in a 1983 study, R. J. Kaufmann suggests that Shaw was "godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias" to the Theatre of the Absurd.^[106] These plays included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity.^[107] Fanny's First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances.^[108]

Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than Blanco Posnet, ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913.^[109] It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna in 1913, and in Berlin shortly afterwards.^[110] Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a play—that it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful. ... Hence arose an urgent demand on the part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first."^[111] The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended.^[112] The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured in the piece in the US.^{[113][114][n 15]}

Fabian years: 1900–1913

In 1899, when the Boer War began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like Home Rule, to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from the society when it followed Shaw.^[117] In the Fabians' war manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it".^[118]

As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics.^[119] Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the Memorial Hall conference in February 1900 that created the Labour Representation Committee—precursor of the modern Labour Party.^[120] By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished".^[121] Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in the London County Council elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as "[making] absolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics.^[121] Nationally, the January 1906 general election, produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body".^[122]

In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells, who had joined the society in February 1903.^[123] However, Wells's ideas for reform—particularly his proposals for closer cooperation with the ILP—placed him at odds with the society's "Old Gang", led by Shaw.^[124] According to Cole, Wells "had minimal capacity for putting [his ideas] across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity".^[125] In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself".^[125] Wells resigned from the society in September 1908;^[126] Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later speculated whether the Fabian Society would have benefited if the Old Gang had withdrawn earlier, and given Wells his chance.^[127][128]

Although less active—he blamed his advancing years—Shaw remained a Fabian. In 1912 he invested £1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called The New Statesman, which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously.^[129] He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor, Clifford Sharp, who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions—"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw.^[130]

World War; Ireland

After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable.^[132] Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "[h]is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present."^[133]

In April 1916, in the New York Times, Shaw was scathing about Irish nationalism, writing: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these patriots of mine leave the Bourbons standing."^[134] Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential.^[134] A few weeks later, after the suppression of the Dublin Easter Rising, Shaw held to this position while expressing horror at the summary execution of the rebel leaders. In How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), he envisaged a federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. However, as Holroyd records, by this time the separatist party Sinn Fein was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were superseded.^[135]

Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by the British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by Field Marshal Haig to visit the Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism".^[136]

Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war. The Inca of Perusalem, written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 in Birmingham.^[137] O'Flaherty V.C., satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917.^[138] Augustus Does His Bit, a genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917.^[139]

1920s

In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland,^[140] and joined his fellow-writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions.^[141] The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to the partition of Ireland between north and south, a prospect that dismayed Shaw.^[140] In 1922 civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the Irish Free State.^[142] Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met Michael Collins, then head of the Free State's Provisional Government.^[143] Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, he was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces.^[144] In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death".^[145] Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual nationality twelve years after the Irish Free State was established.^[146]

Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway in November, and was coolly received: "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it".^[147] After the London premiere in October 1921 The Times concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection".^[148] St John Ervine in The Observer thought the play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword.^[149]

Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah, written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'".^[7] It is a cycle of five interrelated plays depicting evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD.^[150] Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention.^[151] The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently.^[152][153] Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays.^[7]

This mood was short lived. In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity".^[154] He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject.^[7] He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there,^[155] and at its London premiere the following March.^[156] In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan", and he was offered the literature prize for 1925. He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs".^{[157][n 16]}

After Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924 spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.^[160] The book was published in 1928 and sold well.^{[4][n 17]} At the end of the decade Shaw produced his final Fabian tract, a commentary on the League of Nations.^[162] He described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World".^[163]

In 1922 Shaw had welcomed Mussolini's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the "indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock", Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant".^[164] Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his ODNB biographical sketch comments that Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade; Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.^[7]

Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", The Apple Cart, written in late 1928. It was, in Ervine's view, unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist anti-democratic line that appealed to contemporary audiences. The premiere was in Warsaw in June 1928, and the first British production was two months later, at Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural Malvern Festival.^[4] The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was Sir Edward Elgar, with whom Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard.^[165] He described The Apple Cart to Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude".^[166]

1930s

In 1920 Shaw had hailed Lenin as "the one really interesting statesman in Europe".^[168] Having turned down several chances to visit the Soviet Union, in 1931 he joined a party led by Nancy Astor, on a two-week trip.^[169] The carefully stage-managed visit culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him.^[170] At a dinner in Moscow's Trade Union Central Hall, given in honour of his 75th birthday, Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them".^[171] Seemingly blind to any manipulation by his erstwhile hosts, in March 1933 Shaw was a co-signatory to a letter in The Manchester Guardian protesting at the continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too fantastic, no slander is too stale ...for employment by the more reckless elements of the British press."^[167]

Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement; the party system, that "unparalleled engine for preventing anything being done",^[172] needed replacement. Thus, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler as "a very remarkable man, a very able man".^[172] While never endorsing the Nazis' Judophobia, he sometimes made light of it,^[173] and professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was "scrupulously polite and just to Hitler".^{[174][n 18]} However, he retained his principal admiration for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade.^[171] When in August 1939 Germany and the Soviets signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Shaw saw this as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb.^[177]

Shaw's first play of the decade was Too True to be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in Boston in February 1932. The reception was not enthusiastic. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, commenting that Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation". The correspondent of The New York Herald Tribune said that most of the play was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that although the audience enjoyed the play it was bewildered by it.^[178]

During the decade Shaw travelled further and more often than he had done before. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea.^[179] Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome on South Africa in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country.^[180] In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise.^[179] In March 1933 their ship, the Empress of Britain, docked at San Francisco harbour, at the start of Shaw's first visit to the US. He had earlier refused to visit the US, which he called "that awful country, that uncivilized place", "unfit to govern itself … illiberal, superstitious, crude, violent, anarchic and arbitrary".^[181] He visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he gave a lecture to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House.^[182] Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, Shaw was glad to leave the US when his ship sailed from New York harbour.^[183] New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he urged its people to be more confident and loosen their dependence on trade with Britain.^[184] He used the weeks at sea to complete two plays—The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and The Six of Calais—and begin work on a third, The Millionairess.^[185]

Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade he wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of Pygmalion and Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw's determination that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film was successful, except that he was powerless to prevent the conferral of two Academy Awards ("Oscars") for it; he described the award to him for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source.^{[186][n 19]} He became, and at 2016 remains, the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.^{[189][n 20]} In a 1993 study of the Oscars Anthony Holden observes that Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy".^[192]

Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished (1936), Geneva (1936) and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a satire of European dictators, attracted more notice, much of it unfavourable.^[193] In particular, Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was considered mild, almost sympathetic.^[175][194]

The third play, an historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London in May 1940.^[195] James Agate commented that the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences could take exception, and though it was long and lacking in dramatic action only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object.^[195] After their first runs none of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime.^[196]

Towards the end of the decade both the Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, and Shaw developed pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.^[197]right-w

Second World War and final years

Although Shaw's new works since Saint Joan had been received without great enthusiasm, the popularity of his earlier plays was a feature of the West End throughout the Second World War, with revivals starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat.^[198] In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndyke and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles.^[198] Two touring companies took his plays round the British provinces, taking in cities, towns and villages.^[199] The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on journalism, writing prolifically.^[199] A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara (1941) was less successful, artistically and commercially, than Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited.^[200]

Following the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism and lack of pride when, in a New Statesman article, he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference.^[201] Nevertheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated piece with Germany was impossible, he appeared in a short prologue to the American release of the Major Barbara film, urging the neutral US to join in the fight.^[202] The London blitz, beginning in 1940, led the Shaws, both now in their mid-eighties, to keep away from their London flat and live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and for respite they stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden.^[203] In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated and she died in September.^[203]

Shaw spent much of the war writing his final political treatise, Everybody's Political What's What, published in 1944. Holroyd describes this as "a rambling narrative ...that repeats ideas he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself".^[204] The book sold well—85,000 copies by the end of the year.^[205] After Hitler's suicide in May 1945, Shaw approved of the formal condolences offered by the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin.^[206] Shaw disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness, believing that "we are all potential criminals".^[207]

The author allowed Pascal a third venture into filmed Shaw with Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times its original budget, and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema".^[208] The film was not well received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film "a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille".^[209]

In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted two official public awards, becoming an honorary freeman of Dublin and the first honorary freeman of the metropolitan borough of St Pancras, London.^[4] In the same year a member of the British government informally asked Shaw if he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined on the grounds that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history.^{[210][n 21]} The year saw the publication, as The Crime of Imprisonment, of the long preface Shaw had written 20 years previously, to a British Labour Research Office study of prison conditions. It was widely praised; a reviewer in The American Journal of Public Health thought that "no student of our criminal system should call himself educated until he has grappled with Shaw's thesis".^[211]

Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were Buoyant Billions (1947) which was his final full-length work;^[212] Farfetched Fables (1948) a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution;^[213] a comic play for puppets, Shakes versus Shav (1949), a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults;^[214] and Why She Would Not (1950), which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday.^[215]

During his later years, Shaw enjoyed attending to the grounds at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred by falling while pruning a tree.^[216] He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.^[217][218]

Works

Plays

Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works.^[219] He wrote a further twelve plays in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly one-act pieces. Including eight earlier plays that he chose to omit from his published works the total is sixty-two.^{[n 22]}

Early works

Shaw's first three full-length plays dealt with social issues. He later grouped them together as "Plays Unpleasant".^[220] Widower's Houses concerns the landlords of slum properties, and introduces the first of Shaw's New Women—a recurring feature of later plays.^[221] The Philanderer develops the theme of the New Woman, draws on Ibsen, and has elements of Shaw's personal relationships, the character of Julia being based on Jenny Patterson.^[222] In a 2003 study Judith Evans describes Mrs Warren's Profession as "undoubtedly the most challenging" of the three Plays Unpleasant, taking Mrs Warren's profession—prostitute and, later, brothel-owner—as a metaphor for a prostituted society.^[223]

Shaw followed the first trilogy with a second, published as "Plays Pleasant".^[220] Arms and the Man conceals beneath a mock-Ruritanian comic romance a Fabian parable contrasting impractical idealism with pragmatic socialism.^[224] The central theme of Candida is a woman's choice between two men; the play contrasts the outlook and aspirations of a Christian Socialist and a poetic idealist.^[225] The third of the Pleasant group, You Never Can Tell, portrays social mobility, and the gap between generations, particularly in how they approach social relations in general and mating in particular.^[226]

The "Three Plays for Puritans"—comprising The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra and Captain Brassbound's Conversion—all centre on questions of empire and imperialism, a major topic of political discourse in the 1890s.^[227] The three are set, respectively, in 1770s America, Ancient Egypt, and 1890s Morocco.^[228] The Gadfly, an adaptation of a popular novel by Ethel Voynich, was unfinished and unperformed.^[229] The Man of Destiny is a short curtain raiser about Napoleon.^[230]

1900–09

Shaw's major plays of the first decade of the 20th century address individual social, political or ethical issues. Man and Superman stands apart from the others in both its subject and its treatment, giving Shaw's interpretation of creative evolution in a combination of drama and associated printed text.^[231] The Admirable Bashville, a blank verse dramatisation of Shaw's novel Cashel Byron's Profession, focuses on the imperial relationship between Britain and Africa.^[232] John Bull's Other Island, comically depicting the prevailing relationship between Britain and Ireland, was popular at the time but fell out of the general repertoire in later years.^[233] Major Barbara presents ethical questions in an unconventional way, confounding expectations that in the depiction of an armaments manufacturer on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other the moral high ground must invariably be held by the latter.^[234] The Doctor's Dilemma, a play about medical ethics and moral choices in allocating scarce treatment, was described by Shaw as a tragedy.^[235] With a reputation for presenting characters who did not resemble real flesh and blood,^[236] he was challenged by Archer to present an onstage death, and here did so, with a deathbed scene for the antihero.^[237][238]

Getting Married and Misalliance—the latter seen by Judith Evans as a companion piece to the former—are both in what Shaw called his "disquisitionary" vein, with the emphasis on discussion of ideas rather than on dramatic events or vivid characterisation.^[239] Shaw wrote seven short plays during the decade; they are all comedies, ranging from the deliberately absurd Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction to the satirical Press Cuttings.^[240]

1910–19

In the decade from 1910 to the aftermath of the First World War Shaw wrote four full-length plays, the third and fourth of which are among his most frequently staged works.^[241] Fanny's First Play continues his earlier examinations of middle-class British society from a Fabian viewpoint, with additional touches of melodrama and an epilogue in which theatre critics discuss the play.^[242] Androcles and the Lion, which Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice.^[243] Pygmalion is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, minor character.^{[244][n 23]} Shaw's only full-length play from the war years is Heartbreak House, which in his words depicts "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" drifting towards disaster.^[246] Shaw named Shakespeare (King Lear) and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on Congreve (The Way of the World) and Ibsen (The Master Builder).^[246][247]

The short plays range from genial historical drama in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Great Catherine to a study of polygamy in Overruled; three satirical works about the war (The Inca of Perusalem, O'Flaherty V.C. and Augustus Does His Bit); a piece that Shaw called "utter nonsense" (The Music Cure) and a brief sketch about a "Bolshevik empress" (Annajanska).^[248]

1920–50

St Joan (1923) was an enormous success both for Shaw and for Sybil Thorndike, for whom he wrote the title role and who created the part in Britain.^[249] In the view of the commentator Nicholas Grene, Shaw's Joan, a "no-nonsense mystic, Protestant and nationalist before her time" is among the 20th century's classic leading female roles.^[245] The Apple Cart (1929), was Shaw's last popular success.^[250] He gave both that play and its successor, Too True to Be Good, the subtitle "A political extravaganza", although the two works differ greatly in their themes; the first presents the politics of a nation (with a brief royal love-scene as an interlude) and the second, in Judith Evans's words, "is concerned with the social mores of the individual, and is nebulous."^[251] Shaw's plays of the 1930s were written in the shadow of worsening national and international political events. Once again, with On the Rocks (1933) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, a political comedy with a clear plot was followed by an introspective drama. The first play portrays a British prime minister considering, but finally rejecting, the establishment of a dictatorship; the second is concerned with polygamy and eugenics and ends with the Day of Judgement.^[252]

The Millionairess (1934) is a farcical depiction of the concerns of a successful businesswoman. Geneva (1936) lampoons the feebleness of the League of Nations compared with the dictators of Europe. In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), described by Weintraub as a warm, discursive high comedy, also depicts authoritarianism, but less satirically than Geneva.^[7] As in earlier decades, the shorter plays were generally comedies, some historical and others addressing various political and social preoccupations of the author. Ervine writes of Shaw's later work that although it was still "astonishingly vigorous and vivacious" it showed unmistakable signs of his age. "The best of his work in this period, however, was full of wisdom and the beauty of mind often displayed by old men who keep their wits about them."^[4]

Criticism

Music

Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages.^[253] It covers the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950, but the core of the collection dates from his six years as music critic of The Star and The World in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In his view music criticism should be interesting to everyone rather than just the musical élite, and he wrote for the non-specialist, avoiding technical jargon—"Mesopotamian words like 'the dominant of D major'".^{[n 24]} He was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of Brahms and those British composers such as Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian.^[61][255] He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of Handel oratorios with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists".^[256] He railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.^[257]

Drama

In Shaw's view the London theatres of the 1890s presented too many revivals of old plays and not enough new work. He campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, stereotypes and worn-out conventions".^[258] As a music critic he had frequently been able to concentrate on new works as much as on their performance, but in the theatre he was often obliged to fall back on discussing how various performers tackled well-known plays. In a study of Shaw's work as a theatre critic, E. J. West writes that Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique". Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for The Saturday Review, in which he analysed more than 212 productions.^[259] He championed Ibsen's plays when many theatregoers regarded them as outrageous, and his 1891 book Quintessence of Ibsenism remained a classic throughout the 20th century and beyond.^[260] Of contemporary dramatists writing for the West End stage he rated Oscar Wilde above the rest: "… our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre".^[261] Shaw's collected criticisms were published as Our Theatres in the Nineties in 1932.^[262]

Shaw maintained a provocative and frequently self-contradictory attitude to Shakespeare (whose name he insisted on spelling "Shakespear").^[263] Many found him difficult to take seriously on the subject;^[264] Duff Cooper observed that by attacking Shakespeare, "it is Shaw who appears a ridiculous pigmy shaking his fist at a mountain."^[265] Shaw was, nevertheless, a knowledgeable Shakespearian, and in an article in which he wrote, "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his," he also said, "But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more".^[266] Shaw had two regular targets for his more extreme comments about Shakespeare: undiscriminating "Bardolaters", and actors and directors who presented insensitively cut texts in over-elaborate productions.^{[267][n 25]} He was continually drawn back to Shakespeare, and wrote three plays that directly relate to him: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Cymbeline Refinished and Shakes versus Shav.^[271] In a 2001 analysis of Shaw's Shakespearian criticisms, Robert Pierce concludes that Shaw, who was no academic, saw Shakespeare's plays, like all theatre, from an author's practical point of view: "Shaw helps us to get away from the Romantics' picture of Shakespeare as a titanic genius, one whose art cannot be analyzed or connected with the mundane considerations of theatrical conditions and profit and loss, or with a specific staging and cast of actors."^[272]

Political and social writings

Shaw's political and social commentaries were published variously in Fabian tracts, in essays, in two full-length books, in innumerable newspaper and journal articles and in prefaces to his plays. The majority of Shaw's Fabian tracts were published anonymously, representing the voice of the society rather than of Shaw, although the society's secretary Edward Pease later confirmed Shaw's authorship.^[42] According to Holroyd, the business of the early Fabians, mainly under the influence of Shaw, was to "alter history by rewriting it".^[273] Shaw's talent as a pamphleteer was put to immediate use in the production of the society's manifesto—after which, says Holroyd, he was never again so succinct.^[273]

After the turn of the 20th century, Shaw increasingly propagated his ideas through the medium of his plays. An early critic, writing in 1904, observed that Shaw's dramas provided "a pleasant means" of proselytising his socialism, adding that "Mr Shaw's views are to be sought especially in the prefaces to his plays".^[274] After his semi-detachment from the Fabian movement in 1911, Shaw's writings were more personal and often provocative; his response to the furore following the issue of Common Sense About the War in 1914, was to prepare a sequel, More Common Sense About the War. In this, he denounced the pacifist line espoused by MacDonald and many socialist leaders, and proclaimed his readiness to shoot all pacifists rather than cede them power and influence.^[275] On the advice of Beatrice Webb, this pamphlet remained unpublished.^[276]

The Intelligent Woman's Guide, Shaw's main political treatise of the 1920s, attracted both admiration and criticism. MacDonald considered it the world's most important book since the Bible,^[277] while Harold Laski thought its arguments outdated and lacking in concern for individual freedoms.^{[278][n 26]} By this time, Shaw had largely abandoned his belief in Fabian gradualism as an effect means of changing society; his growing fascination with dictatorial methods was evident in many of his subsequent writings. A New York Times report dated 10 December 1933 quoted a recent Fabian Society lecture in which Shaw had heaped praise on Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin: "[T]hey are trying to get something done, [and] that they are adopting methods by which it is possible to get something done".^[279] As late as the Second World War, in Everybody's Political What's What, Shaw blames the Allies' "abuse" of their 1918 victory for the rise of Hitler, and hopes that, after defeat, the Führer will escape justice "to enjoy a comfortable retirement in Ireland or some other neutral country".^[280] These sentiments, according to the Irish philosopher-poet Thomas Duddy, "rendered much of the Shavian outlook passé and contemptible".^[281]

"Creative evolution", Shaw's version of the new science of eugenics, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. He introduced his theories in The Revolutionist's Handbook (1903), an appendix to Man and Superman, and developed them further in Back to Methuselah in the 1920s. A 1946 Life magazine article observed that Shaw had "always tended to look at people more as a biologist than as an artist".^[282] By 1933, in the preface to On the Rocks, he was writing that "if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it";^[283] critical opinion is divided on whether this was intended as irony.^{[171][n 27]} In an article in the American magazine Liberty, in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: "There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated".^[282] Many commentators assumed that such comments were intended as a joke, although in the worst possible taste.^[285] Otherwise, Life magazine concluded, "this silliness can be classed with his more innocent bad guesses".^[282]

Fiction

Shaw's fiction-writing was largely confined to the five unsuccessful novels written in the period 1879–1885 . Immaturity (1879) is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England, Shaw's "own David Copperfield" according to Weintraub.^[7] The Irrational Knot (1880) is a critique of conventional marriage, in which Weintraub finds the characterisations lifeless, "hardly more than animated theories".^[7] Shaw was pleased with his third novel, Love Among the Artists (1881), feeling that it marked a crisis in his development as a thinker, although he had no more success with it than with its predecessors.^[286] Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is, says Weintraub, an indictment of society which anticipates Shaw's first full-length play, Mrs Warren's Profession.^[7] Shaw later explained that he had intended An Unsocial Socialist as the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism. Gareth Griffith, in a study of Shaw's political thought, sees the novel as an interesting record of conditions, both in society at large and in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s.^[287]

Shaw's only subsequent fiction of any substance was his 1932 novella The Adventures of the Black Girl In Her Search for God, written during a visit to South Africa in 1932. The eponymous girl, intelligent, inquisitive, and converted to Christianity by insubstantial missionary teaching, sets out to find God, on a journey that after many adventures and encounters, leads her to a secular conclusion.^[288] The story, on publication, offended some Christians and was banned in Ireland by the Board of Censors.^[289]

Letters and diaries

Shaw was a prolific correspondent throughout his life. Between 1966 and 1988 Dan H. Laurence edited Shaw's letters. ^[290] He commented that unedited they would have required many more than the twenty volumes that Shaw once estimated they would take up; ^[291] Shaw wrote more than a quarter of a million letters, of which about ten per cent have survived; 2,653 letters are printed in Laurence's four volumes.^[292] Among Shaw's many regular correspondents were his childhood friend Edward McNulty; his theatrical colleagues (and amitiés amoureuses) Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry; writers including Lord Alfred Douglas, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton; the boxer Gene Tunney; the nun Laurentia McLachlan; and the art expert Sydney Cockerell.^[293] Individual volumes have been published of the correspondence with Terry (issued 1931), Tunney (1951), Campbell (1952), Douglas (1982) and Wells (1995), and in 2007 a volume consisting entirely of Shaw's letters to The Times was published.^[294]

Shaw's diaries for 1885-97, edited by Weintraub, were published in two volumes, with a total of 1,241 pages, in 1986. Reviewing them Fred Crawford wrote, "Although the primary interest for Shavians is the material that supplements what we already know about Shaw's life and work, the diaries are also valuable as a historical and sociological document of English life at the end of the Victorian age."^[295] After 1897 pressure of other writing led Shaw to give up keeping a diary.^[296]

Miscellaneous and autobiographical

Through his journalism, pamphlets and occasional longer works, Shaw wrote on many subjects. His range of interest and enquiry included vivisection, vegetarianism, religion, language, photography and cinema, on all of which he wrote and spoke copiously. Collections of his writings on these and other subjects were published, mainly after his death, together with volumes of selected aphorisms, "wit and wisdom" and general journalism.^[297]

Despite the large number of books written about him (Holroyd counts 80 by 1939)^[298] Shaw's autobiographical output, apart from his diaries, was relatively slight. He gave interviews to newspapers—"GBS Confesses", to The Daily Mail in 1904 is an example^[299]—and provided sketches to would-be biographers whose work was rejected by Shaw and never published.^[300] In 1939 Shaw drew on these materials to produce Shaw Gives Himself Away, a miscellany which, a year before his death, he revised and republished as Sixteen Self Sketches (there were seventeen). He made it clear to his publishers that this slim book was in no sense a full autobiography.^[301]

Views

English language

Shaw consistently refused to follow normal English forms of spelling and punctuation. He favoured some archaic spellings such as "shew" for "show"; he dropped the "u" in words like "honour" and "favour"; he rejected the use of italics for titles or for emphasis within a text, using spacing between letters for the latter, rendering "very" as "v e r y"; and he refused to allow the apostrophe in contractions such as "won't" or "that's", although he was obliged to use it for "I'll", "it's" and "he'll" to avoid ambiguity.^[302] In his last will and testament, written months before his death Shaw, pursued his battle against English spelling. After some specified legacies his remaining assets were to form a trust to pay for fundamental reform of the English alphabet into a phonetic one of forty letters.^[7] Though Shaw's intentions were clear, his drafting was flawed, and the courts ruled that only £8,300, a small percentage of his estate, could be used for spelling reform; the bulk of his considerable fortune went to the residuary legatees, the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the National Gallery of Ireland. Most of the £8,300 went on a specially commissioned phonetic edition of Androcles and the Lion published in 1962 to a largely indifferent reception.^[303]

Name

Shaw strove throughout his adult life to be referred to as "Bernard Shaw" rather than "George Bernard Shaw".^[17] In a 1964 article in The Shaw Review Arthur Nothorcot set out Shaw's attempts to be addressed as he preferred: "Shaw hated the name 'George' and attempted with increasing assiduity to eliminate it from both public and private use", but he complicated matters by continuing to use his full initials—G.B.S.—as a by-line, and by often signing himself "G. Bernard Shaw" rather than simply "Bernard Shaw".^[304] He left instructions in his will that his executor (the Public Trustee) was to license publication of his works only under the name Bernard Shaw.^[7] Shaw scholars including Ervine, Judith Evans, Holroyd, Laurence and Weintraub, and many publishers have respected Shaw's preference, although the Cambridge University Press was an exception with its 1988 Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw.^[305]

Racial equality

Shaw caused some consternation by his espousal of racial equality, and was criticised for advocating marriage between people of different races. In Africa he called for white and black citizens to interbreed; in Europe he derided Nazi beliefs in a master race and called anti-Semitism "the hatred of the lazy, ignorant fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business".^[306] In The Jewish Chronicle he wrote in 1932, "In every country you can find rabid people who have a phobia against Jews, Jesuits, Armenians, Negroes, Freemasons, Irishmen, or simply foreigners as such. Political parties are not above exploiting these fears and jealousies."^[307]

Religion

In his will, Shaw stated that his "religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution."^[308] He requested that no one should imply that he accepted the beliefs of any specific religious organization, and that no memorial to him should "take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice."^[308]

Transport

Thoughout his life Shaw was keenly interested in various methods of transport. From an enthusiasm for bicycling as a young man he extended his scope as he grew older. Laurence observed in 1992 that there was a need for a published study of Shaw's interest in "bicycling, motorbikes, automobiles, and planes, climaxing in his joining the Interplanetary Society in his nineties."^[309] Shaw published articles on travel, took photographs of his journeys, and privately submitted notes to the Royal Automobile Club.^[309]

Vaccination

In 1903 Shaw joined in a controversy about vaccination against smallpox. He called vaccination "a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft";^[310] in his view immunisation campaigns were a cheap and inadequate substitute for a decent programme of housing for the poor, which would, he declared, be the means of eradicating smallpox and other infectious diseases.^[311] He regarded the medical profession's involvement in such campaigns as evidence of a conspiracy to exploit the credulous laity.^[312]

Legacy

Theatre

The Shaw Festival, an annual theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, began in 1962 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; it has grown into an annual festival with more than 800 performances a year, dedicated to the works of Shaw and his contemporaries. In Grene's view the festival's productions are considerably more imaginative and innovative than typical West End revivals of Shaw's plays. He instances Misalliance (1990) and The Doctor's Dilemma (2000), both directed by Christopher Newton, and John Bull's Other Island (1998) in a production by Jim Mezon.^[245]

The Shaw Theatre, Euston Road, London, opened in 1971, was named in Shaw's honour.^[313]

Music

In addition to his collected criticism, Shaw has left a varied musical legacy, not all of it of his choosing. Despite his dislike of having his work adapted for the musical theatre ("my plays set themselves to a verbal music of their own")^[314] two of his plays were turned into musical comedies: Arms and the Man was the basis of The Chocolate Soldier in 1908 with music by Oscar Straus, and Pygmalion was adapted in 1956 as My Fair Lady with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.^[61] Composers who have written the scores for film versions of Shaw plays include Arthur Honegger for Pygmalion (1938); William Walton for Major Barbara (1941); Georges Auric for Caesar and Cleopatra (1945); and Richard Rodney Bennett for The Devil's Disciple (1959).^[61] Despite his deep regard for Elgar, Shaw turned down the composer's request for an opera libretto, but played a major part in persuading the BBC to commission Elgar's Third Symphony, and was the dedicatee of The Severn Suite (1930).^[61][315]

Cinema

Other than Pascal's Pygmalion, Arms and the Man and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw films made or attempted during the author's lifetime included British adaptations of How He Lied to Her Husband (1931),^[316] and Arms and the Man (1932),^[317] as well as a Hollywood version of The Devil's Disciple, the ineptitude of which caused Shaw to abort it in 1935.^[318] German and Dutch films of Pygmalion were released in 1936 and 1937; an attempt to film Saint Joan was thwarted by the objections of the Roman Catholic church and the consequent withholding of American finance.^[318]

Shaw plays adapted for film after the author's death include Saint Joan (1957), directed by Otto Preminger, with a text rewritten by Graham Greene;^[319] The Doctor's Dilemma (1958) and The Millionairess (1960), both directed by Anthony Asquith;^[320][321] The Devil's Disciple (1959) directed by Guy Hamilton and Alexander Mackendrick;^[322] and Great Catherine (1967), directed by Gordon Flemyng.^[323]

Photography

Shaw took up photography in 1898 and was an active amateur photographer until his death, amassing about 10,000 prints and more than 10,000 negatives.^[324] The photographs document Shaw's friends, travels, politics, plays, films and home life.^[324][325] Shaw's photographic collection is archived at the London School of Economics; an exhibition of Shaw's photography,"Man & Cameraman", opened in 2011 at the Fox Talbot Museum in conjunction with an online exhibition presented by the LSE.^[324]

Reputation

Views on Shaw's importance have varied widely. In the 1940s the author Harold Nicolson advised the National Trust not to accept the bequest of Shaw's Corner, predicting that Shaw would be totally forgotten within fifty years.^[326] In the British newspaper The Guardian in 1977, the playwright John Osborne castigated the paper's theatre critic Michael Billington for referring to Shaw as "the greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare"; Osborne responded that Shaw "is the most fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid critic or fool a dull public … posturing wind and rubbish."^[327] In 1994 Laurence quoted the writers Marvin Mudrick and Martin Seymour-Smith as saying that Shaw's plays are "psychologically empty, lacking depth, impervious to poetry, exercising little permanent influence."^[326] In 2001 Stanley Kauffman, Mudrick's contemporary in American academia, said of Shaw, "I think he is a titan. I think that there can be very little question that he's the second greatest playwright in the English language. He is also the greatest comic dramatist after Molière."^[328] In the 2015 edition of The Oxford Companion to British History, Shaw is rated as "the most significant playwright of the 20th-century English-speaking world."^[329]

In its obituary tribute to Shaw, The Times Literary Supplement concluded:

He was no originator of ideas. He was an insatiable adopter and adapter, an incomparable prestidigitator with the thoughts of the forerunners. Nietzsche, Samuel Butler (Erewhon), Marx, Shelley, Blake, Dickens, William Morris, Ruskin, Beethoven and Wagner all had their applications and misapplications. By bending to their service all the faculties of a powerful mind, by inextinguishable wit, and by every artifice of argument, he carried their thoughts as far as they would reach—so far beyond their sources that they came to us with the vitality of the newly created.^[330]

In a 2003 article on Shaw for the Oxford University Press, Grene sums up:

Shaw, arguably the most important English-language playwright after Shakespeare, produced an immense oeuvre, of which at least half a dozen plays remain part of the world repertoire. ... Academically unfashionable, of limited influence even in areas such as Irish drama and British political theatre where influence might be expected, Shaw's unique and unmistakable plays keep escaping from the safely dated category of period piece to which they have often been consigned.^[245]

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

Books

Shaw's writings

Journals and newspapers

Online

External links

Library resources about George Bernard Shaw

Resources in your library Resources in other libraries

Wikimedia Commons has media related to George Bernard Shaw.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: George Bernard Shaw

Wikisource has original works written by or about: George Bernard Shaw

• Works by Bernard Shaw at Project Gutenberg

• Works by or about George Bernard Shaw at Internet Archive

• Works by George Bernard Shaw at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

• Works by George Bernard Shaw at Open Library

• George Bernard Shaw at IBDb.com

• George Bernard Shaw at the Internet Movie Database

• Bernard Shaw photographs held at LSE Library

• 1927 film made in Phonofilm at SilentEra

• 1928 film made in Movietone at SilentEra

• International Shaw Society, includes a chronology of Shaw's works

• The Shaw Society, UK, established in 1941

• The Bernard Shaw Society, New York

• Shaw Chicago Theater A theatre dedicated to the works of Shaw & his contemporaries.

• Shaw Festival Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada theatre that specializes in plays by Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries and plays about his era (1856–1950)

• The Nobel Prize Biography on Shaw, From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, (1969).

• Dan H. Laurence/Shaw Collection in the University of Guelph Library, Archival and Special Collections, holds more than 3,000 items related to his writings and career

• Michael Holroyd (19 July 2006). "Send for Shaw, not Shakespeare". London: The Times Literary Supplement. 

• Sunder Katwala (26 July 2006). "Artist of the impossible". London: Guardian Comment. 

• Cashel Byron's Profession and the Anti-Romance Novels of George Bernard Shaw

• George Bernard Shaw's collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin

• Audio recordings of keynote lectures at the GB Shaw: Back in Town Conference, Dublin 2012.

• George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Anton Lang	Cover of Time Magazine 24 December 1923	Succeeded by Anthony Fokker

Plays by George Bernard Shaw Passion Play Un Petit Drame Widowers' Houses (1892) The Philanderer (1893) Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) Arms and the Man (1894) Candida (1894) The Man of Destiny (1895) You Never Can Tell (1897) The Gadfly Three Plays for Puritans The Devil's Disciple (1897) Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899) The Admirable Bashville (1901) Man and Superman (1902–03) John Bull's Other Island (1904) How He Lied to Her Husband (1904) Major Barbara (1905) Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) The Interlude at the Playhouse Getting Married (1908) The Glimpse of Reality (1909) The Fascinating Foundling (1909) The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909) Press Cuttings (1909) Misalliance (1910) The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910) Fanny's First Play (1911) Overruled (1912) Androcles and the Lion (1912) Beauty's Duty Pygmalion (1912–13) Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores (1913) The Music Cure The Inca of Perusalem (1915) O'Flaherty V.C. (1915) Augustus Does His Bit (1916) Macbeth Skit Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress (1917) Heartbreak House (1919) Back to Methuselah (1921) A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklyn Barnabas Jitta's Atonement Saint Joan (1923) The Apple Cart (1929) Too True to Be Good (1931) How These Doctors Love One Another! A Village Wooing On the Rocks (1933) The Six of Calais (1934) The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) The Millionairess (1936) Arthur and the Acetone Cymbeline Refinished Geneva (1938) In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939) The British Party System Buoyant Billions (1947) Farfetched Fables (1948) Shakes versus Shav (1949) Why She Would Not (1950)

Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1901–1925 1901 Sully Prudhomme 1902 Theodor Mommsen 1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904 Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906 Giosuè Carducci 1907 Rudyard Kipling 1908 Rudolf Eucken 1909 Selma Lagerlöf 1910 Paul Heyse 1911 Maurice Maeterlinck 1912 Gerhart Hauptmann 1913 Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915 Romain Rolland 1916 Verner von Heidenstam 1917 Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919 Carl Spitteler 1920 Knut Hamsun 1921 Anatole France 1922 Jacinto Benavente 1923 W. B. Yeats 1924 Władysław Reymont 1925 George Bernard Shaw 1926–1950 1926 Grazia Deledda 1927 Henri Bergson 1928 Sigrid Undset 1929 Thomas Mann 1930 Sinclair Lewis 1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt 1932 John Galsworthy 1933 Ivan Bunin 1934 Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936 Eugene O'Neill 1937 Roger Martin du Gard 1938 Pearl S. Buck 1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 Johannes V. Jensen 1945 Gabriela Mistral 1946 Hermann Hesse 1947 André Gide 1948 T. S. Eliot 1949 William Faulkner 1950 Bertrand Russell 1951–1975 1951 Pär Lagerkvist 1952 François Mauriac 1953 Winston Churchill 1954 Ernest Hemingway 1955 Halldór Laxness 1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957 Albert Camus 1958 Boris Pasternak 1959 Salvatore Quasimodo 1960 Saint-John Perse 1961 Ivo Andrić 1962 John Steinbeck 1963 Giorgos Seferis 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965 Mikhail Sholokhov 1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968 Yasunari Kawabata 1969 Samuel Beckett 1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971 Pablo Neruda 1972 Heinrich Böll 1973 Patrick White 1974 Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975 Eugenio Montale 1976–2000 1976 Saul Bellow 1977 Vicente Aleixandre 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979 Odysseas Elytis 1980 Czesław Miłosz 1981 Elias Canetti 1982 Gabriel García Márquez 1983 William Golding 1984 Jaroslav Seifert 1985 Claude Simon 1986 Wole Soyinka 1987 Joseph Brodsky 1988 Naguib Mahfouz 1989 Camilo José Cela 1990 Octavio Paz 1991 Nadine Gordimer 1992 Derek Walcott 1993 Toni Morrison 1994 Kenzaburō Ōe 1995 Seamus Heaney 1996 Wisława Szymborska 1997 Dario Fo 1998 José Saramago 1999 Günter Grass 2000 Gao Xingjian 2001–present 2001 V. S. Naipaul 2002 Imre Kertész 2003 J. M. Coetzee 2004 Elfriede Jelinek 2005 Harold Pinter 2006 Orhan Pamuk 2007 Doris Lessing 2008 J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009 Herta Müller 2010 Mario Vargas Llosa 2011 Tomas Tranströmer 2012 Mo Yan 2013 Alice Munro 2014 Patrick Modiano 2015 Svetlana Alexievich

The London School of Economics and Political Science Campus and collections Aldwych Berrylands Bloomsbury British Library of Political and Economic Science Charles Booth Archive The Women's Library Church of Christ the King Clare Market Covent Garden Hall–Carpenter Archives Kingsway Lincoln's Inn Lincoln's Inn Fields Old Curiosity Shop Peacock Theatre St Clement Danes Research centres Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy Centre for the Economics of Education Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science Crisis States Research Centre Grantham Research Institute International Bibliography of the Social Sciences International Growth Centre LSE Cities LSE IDEAS POLIS Department of Social Policy STICERD TRIUM EMBA Student life Athletics Union The Beaver Clare Market Review LooSE TV LSE Students' Union Pulse! Radio RAG Week Union General Meeting Student Central History Economic Contribution Fabian Society Fabian Window LSE Libya links Rivalry with KCL and UCL The Third Way People Governance HRH The Princess Royal (Chancellor) Craig Calhoun (Director) Lord Myners (Chairman) Chris Grayling (Visitor) List of Directors Other Sidney Webb Beatrice Webb George Bernard Shaw Graham Wallas H. G. Wells List of London School of Economics people List of Nobel Laureates Montague Burton Professor of International Relations Affiliates Association of Commonwealth Universities CEMS European University Association G5 The General Course Golden triangle Russell Group Universities UK University of London Category Commons

Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay 1928–1940 Benjamin Glazer (1928) Hanns Kräly (1929) Joseph W. Farnham, Martin Flavin, Frances Marion, and Lennox Robinson (1930) Howard Estabrook (1931) Edwin J. Burke (1932) Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason (1933) Robert Riskin (1934) Dudley Nichols (1935) Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney (1936) Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg, and Norman Reilly Raine (1937) Ian Dalrymple, Cecil Arthur Lewis, W.P. Lipscomb, and George Bernard Shaw (1938) Sidney Howard (1939) Donald Ogden Stewart (1940) 1941–1960 Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller (1941) George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West, and Arthur Wimperis (1942) Philip G. Epstein, Julius J. Epstein, and Howard Koch (1943) Frank Butler, and Frank Cavett (1944) Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (1945) Robert Sherwood (1946) George Seaton (1947) John Huston (1948) Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1949) Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1950) Harry Brown and Michael Wilson (1951) Charles Schnee (1952) Daniel Taradash (1953) George Seaton (1954) Paddy Chayefsky (1955) John Farrow, S. J. Perelman, and James Poe (1956) Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (1957) Alan Jay Lerner (1958) Neil Paterson (1959) Richard Brooks (1960) 1961–1980 Abby Mann (1961) Horton Foote (1962) John Osborne (1963) Edward Anhalt (1964) Robert Bolt (1965) Robert Bolt (1966) Stirling Silliphant (1967) James Goldman (1968) Waldo Salt (1969) Ring Lardner, Jr. (1970) Ernest Tidyman (1971) Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo (1972) William Peter Blatty (1973) Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo (1974) Bo Goldman and Laurence Hauben (1975) William Goldman (1976) Alvin Sargent (1977) Oliver Stone (1978) Robert Benton (1979) Alvin Sargent (1980) 1981–2000 Ernest Thompson (1981) Costa Gavras and Donald E. Stewart (1982) James L. Brooks (1983) Peter Shaffer (1984) Kurt Luedtke (1985) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1986) Bernardo Bertolucci and Mark Peploe (1987) Christopher Hampton (1988) Alfred Uhry (1989) Michael Blake (1990) Ted Tally (1991) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1992) Steven Zaillian (1993) Eric Roth (1994) Emma Thompson (1995) Billy Bob Thornton (1996) Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland (1997) Bill Condon (1998) John Irving (1999) Stephen Gaghan (2000) 2001–present Akiva Goldsman (2001) Ronald Harwood (2002) Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh (2003) Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (2004) Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (2005) William Monahan (2006) Joel and Ethan Coen (2007) Simon Beaufoy (2008) Geoffrey S. Fletcher (2009) Aaron Sorkin (2010) Alexander Payne, Jim Rash, and Nat Faxon (2011) Chris Terrio (2012) John Ridley (2013) Graham Moore (2014)

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