Shaw, George Bernard

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), Irish dramatist, critic, and social reformer, born in Dublin. His mother, a singer and teacher of singing, early imbued him with a knowledge and love of music which qualified him, after migrating to London in 1876, to become music critic of the Star (under the pseudonym of Corno di Bassetto) from 1888 to 1890 and of the World from 1890 to 1894. Admirable though his music articles were, their quality was undoubtedly surpassed by that of the dramatic criticism he contributed to the Saturday Review—where his successor was Max Beerbohm—between Jan. 1895 and Dec. 1898. His interest in social and political reform had led him in 1884 to join the Fabian Society, on whose behalf he soon became a fluent and effective speaker. Though he had no particular love for the theatre of his own time, he was not slow to recognize its value as a platform. This, and his admiration for the ‘new drama’ of Ibsen, which in translations by Shaw's friend William Archer was becoming known in London, led him to the writing of plays. The production in 1892, under the auspices of Grein's Independent Theatre Club, of Widowers' Houses (begun in 1885) inaugurated his long career as the foremost dramatist of his day. This was a private production for Club members, as were the productions in 1902 and 1905 of Mrs Warren's Profession, about prostitution, and The Philanderer (both written in 1893). The first of Shaw's plays to be presented publicly was Arms and the Man, a satire on militarism, produced at the Avenue (later Playhouse) Theatre in 1894 as part of a repertory season run by Florence Farr, who had played in the first production of Widowers' Houses. The others ran into trouble with the censor and, taken in conjunction with Shaw's lectures and writings on behalf of the Fabians, caused him to be regarded in many quarters as a subversive influence. Deliberately disregarding the current conventions of the well-made play, he set out to appeal to the intellect and not the emotions of his audiences, and introduced on stage subjects such as slum landlordism, prostitution, war, religion, family quarrels, health, economics, and the position of women. Thought, not action, was the mainspring of the Shavian play; but, as audiences were eventually to realize, it was thought seasoned by wit and enlivened by eloquence. The popularity of Shaw's plays dates from the seasons of 1904–7 at the Royal Court Theatre, run by Granville-Barker and J. E. Vedrenne, when 10 were performed in repertory—Candida, John Bull's Other Island, How He Lied to Her Husband, You Never Can Tell (first publicly produced at the Strand in 1900), Man and Superman (without Act 3, produced separately in 1907 as Don Juan in Hell), Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, about medical ethics, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, with Ellen Terry, The Philanderer, and the one-act The Man of Destiny. When Vedrenne and Barker moved to the Savoy Theatre at the end of 1907, they produced there The Devil's Disciple, first seen in New York with Richard Mansfield as early as 1897, and Caesar and Cleopatra, first performed in 1906 in German in Berlin under Max Reinhardt and, in English, in New York the same year.

The chronology of Shaw's plays is complicated by the fact that many of them had copyright, private, amateur, or foreign professional productions before being seen in London. His most important works after Misalliance (1910) are Fanny's First Play (1911; NY, 1912); Androcles and the Lion (1913; NY, 1915); Pygmalion, first seen in Vienna in 1913, in which Mrs Patrick Campbell played Eliza Doolittle in 1914 in both London and New York; and Heartbreak House (NY, 1920; London, 1921), a ‘fantasia’ in the Russian (i.e., Chekhovian) manner first produced by the Theatre Guild, as was the ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ Back to Methuselah (1922; London, 1924). Saint Joan (NY, 1923), Shaw's finest play in the opinion of most critics, was seen in London in 1924 with Sybil Thorndike as an unforgettable Joan, and The Apple Cart (1929) was brought to London from the Malvern Festival, as were Too True to be Good (1932), Geneva (1938), and Shaw's last memorable full-length play In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). Subtitled by Shaw ‘a true history that never happened’, this brings together Charles II, Isaac Newton, and other historical characters.

It would be impossible to list all the revivals and translations of Shaw's major plays. Pygmalion, Major Barbara, and Saint Joan are the most popular, followed by Candida, Man and Superman, Arms and the Man, The Doctor's Dilemma, and You Never Can Tell. Many of the first productions, particularly of the earlier plays, were directed by Shaw himself, who earned the respect and admiration of his actors and might have been a successful actor himself. He also supervised the printing of his plays with meticulous attention to layout and typography, his detailed stage directions forming a running commentary which helps the reader to visualize the scene; his prefaces to the published plays enlarge on their arguments.