SHAW, George Bernard

SHAW, George Bernard [1856–1950]. Irish dramatist and critic. Born in DUBLIN. Educated at Wesley Connexional School. He moved to London in 1876, where he wrote five novels that had little success, was a music, art, and drama critic, and an early member of the Fabian Society. He found the contemporary English theatre trivial and remote from serious issues, and admired the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen's treatment of social problems; his first play, Widowers' Houses (1893), was an indictment of the profits made by slum landlords. Shaw began a long career as a playwright, controversial about specific issues and challenging the basic assumptions of his contemporaries, which sometimes brought conflict with theatrical censorship. Although polemical, his plays established him as the leading dramatist of his time by their humour, lively dialogue, and strong characterization. Shaw believed that, in order to survive, the human race must become more rational and better organized. He developed a philosophy of Creative Evolution, requiring cooperation with the Life Force, and against the mechanistic theory of Darwin he urged the power of human choice. His ideas on this subject appear in Man and Superman (1903), which emphasizes his belief in the creative strength of women, and Back to Methuselah (1921). Other plays are Caesar and Cleopatra (1898, the film 1945), The Devil's Disciple (1905), Major Barbara (1905, the film 1941), Pygmalion (1913, the film 1938), Heartbreak House (1919), Saint Joan (1923, the film 1956), and The Apple Cart (1929).

Shaw and language

In Pygmalion, the phonetician Henry Higgins teaches a COCKNEY girl to speak with an upper-class accent and adopt some social graces, then introduces her to smart society. Despite dramatic exaggeration, the play makes the point that in the stratified society of England powerful judgements of worth and suitability attached to accent and usage. Shaw's knowledge of phonetics and views on literacy led him to demand a rational system of spelling which would follow the sounds of English and reduce time wasted by traditional orthography. Having campaigned for SPELLING REFORM, he left a bequest for the establishment of a suitable new alphabet reflecting ‘pronunciation to resemble that recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes described as Northern English’. A system was devised into which the play Androcles and the Lion (1912) was transcribed (published in 1962), but the project has had no further success.

Innovations

In his own work, Shaw adopted three innovations: (1) Some simplified spellings of the North American type, such as cigaret, program, vigor. (2) Omission of the APOSTROPHE in contractions, as in didnt. (3) Spacing between letters for emphasis (m u s t). He complained that dialect speech could not be shown in writing without a phonetic system, but none the less used non-standard spelling for the purpose, as in: ‘Aw knaow. Me an maw few shillins is not good enaff for you. Youre an earl's grandorter, you are. Nathink less than a anderd pahnd for you’ (from Major Barbara) [maw my, grandorter grand-daughter, nathink nothing, anderd pahnd hundred pounds]. Shaw was impatient of insistence on formal grammar and believed that a form of Pidgin English could become a world medium of communication.