Shaw, (George) Bernard

Shaw, (George) Bernard (1856–1950), born in Dublin, came to London in 1876. After an unsuccessful career as a novelist, he wrote music, art, and book criticism for several periodicals including the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–8) and the Star (1888–90, as ‘Corno di Bassetto’). His music criticism has been collected as Shaw's Music (3 vols, 1981; ed. Dan H. Laurence) and his theatre criticism in four volumes as The Drama Observed (1993, ed. B. Dukore). As drama critic for the Saturday Review (1895–8) he produced a series of remarkable and controversial weekly articles (published as Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols, 1932), voicing his impatience with the artificiality of the London theatre and pleading for the performance of plays dealing with contemporary social and moral problems. During these years he joined several literary and political societies, notably the Fabian Society; he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in socialism (1889) and wrote many tracts setting down his socialist and collectivist principles. He was a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights, and an advocate of equality of income, the abolition of private property, and a radical change in the voting system. He also campaigned for the simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of the English alphabet. He was well known as a journalist and public speaker when his first play, Widowers' Houses (pub. 1893), was produced in 1892. There followed Arms and the Man (1894, pub. 1898: later turned into a musical called The Chocolate Soldier), The Devil's Disciple (perf. NY 1897, pub. 1901), You Never Can Tell (1899, pub. 1898), Caesar and Cleopatra (pub. 1901, perf. Berlin 1906), Mrs Warren's Profession (pub. 1898, perf. 1902), and John Bull's Other Island (1904, pub. NY 1907), a play which, thanks to its characteristic ‘Shavian’ wit, brought his first popular success in London.

Shaw wrote over 50 plays, including Man and Superman (pub. 1903, perf. 1905), Major Barbara (1905, pub. 1907), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906, pub. Berlin 1908), Getting Married (1908, pub. Berlin 1910), Androcles and the Lion (pub. Berlin 1913, perf. Hamburg 1913), Pygmalion (perf. Vienna 1913, pub. Berlin 1913, later turned into a popular musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (pub. 1919, perf. 1920, both NY), Back to Methuselah (perf. and pub. NY 1921), Saint Joan (perf. NY 1923, pub. 1924), The Apple Cart (perf. Warsaw 1929, pub. Berlin 1929), and Too True to be Good (perf. Boston 1932, pub. Berlin 1932).

These plays were published with lengthy prefaces in which Shaw clearly expresses his views as a non-romantic and a champion of the thinking man. The dramatic conflict in his plays is the conflict of thought and belief, not that of neurosis or physical passion. Discussion is the basis of the plays, and his great wit and intelligence won audiences over to the idea that mental and moral passion could produce absorbing dramatic material. He believed that war, disease, and the present brevity of our lifespan frustrate the ‘Life Force’ (see under Man and Superman) and that functional adaptation, a current of creative evolution activated by the power of human will, was essential to any real progress, and indeed to the survival of the species. Shaw's unorthodox views, his humour, and his love of paradox have become an institution. Amongst his other works should be mentioned The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891, revised and expanded 1913), which reveals his debt to Ibsen as a playwright and presents an argument for Fabian Socialism; The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); Common Sense About the War (1914); The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928); and Everybody's Political What's What (1944). Shaw's correspondence with the actresses Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell and other letters have been published in volumes.

In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend and they lived together until her death in 1943. He was a strict vegetarian and never drank spirits, coffee, or tea. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.