SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD (1856–1950), Irish-born playwright, novelist, and critic.

Bernard Shaw's fame and importance rest finally on two distinctions. First, he was by any external measure the most important British dramatist since William Shakespeare. His playwriting career began with Widowers' Houses (1892) and continued unchecked almost until his death; he wrote in all fifty plays, and by the 1930s he had become part of the established classical repertoire, his plays regularly revived (at the Old Vic, London's "home of Shakespeare," among other theaters) even as new ones continued to appear. In the early twenty-first century Shaw is the only English-speaking playwright other than Shakespeare to have a major theatrical organization (the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada) named after him and primarily dedicated to his work.

Second, his plays are unique in their yoking of high comedy to sociopolitical comment. The socialist polemics—expressed in his early batch of "Plays Unpleasant" like Widowers' Houses, which dealt with slum landlordism, and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), about prostitution—were what first attracted his contemporaries' attention, and led to him being tagged as a social realist. It was a mis-conception partly fueled by his work as a theater critic; from 1895 to 1898 he wrote brilliant reviews for Saturday Review, in which he attacked late-Victorian escapist drama (and elaborate Victorian staging of Shakespeare). Henrik Ibsen was his hero, but he praised Ibsen as a theatrical sociologist rather than as the skeptical dramatic poet he actually was. In his own dramatic practice, however, he wrote madcap intellectual farce whose concerns sometimes overlapped with those of Ibsen's prose dramas but whose style never did. Ibsen might be mistaken for a naturalist; Shaw, after his first couple of plays, never could. Much of his appeal, in both his dramatic and nondramatic writing, lies in the sheer wit and buoy-ancy of his prose. His rhythms challenge and delight audiences; "the ear" (as he himself said of Shakespeare) "is the key to him."

Like many of the major "English" dramatists (William Congreve, George Farquhar, Richard Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde) Shaw was Irish. He was born in Dublin, into a Protestant family, and lived there until 1876, when he moved to London. His Irishness remained part of his image; and "image" was an important part of his success. He was the first major English writer since Samuel Johnson to have talked and postured his way into lasting prominence. His brogue, his red hair, his teetotalism, his vegetarianism, his incredible energy, his literary combativeness (which concealed a less notorious personal kindness)—all contributed to a persona consciously created and known as "GBS." (Shaw was always "Bernard Shaw" on his title-pages and said that nothing enraged him more "than to be Georged in print," but he had no objection to the popular employment of all three of his initials.) He was a celebrity in literary London long before he was a financial success; indeed, he lived in poverty until the production of The Devil's Disciple in 1897. By his death, of course, he was, thanks to performing and publishing royalties plus the sales of his plays to the movies, one of the wealthiest writers in the world. (It is worth repeating his possibly acpocryphal remark to movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn: "The problem between us, Mr. Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.")

From the 1880s onward Shaw was a socialist, not a revolutionary (though he was much influenced by his reading of Karl Marx). He was a founder and leading light of the Fabian Society (a group promoting non-Marxist socialism by progressive legislation, not revolution); Vladimir Lenin famously called him "a good man fallen among Fabians." He believed in the perfectibility of human society and even of the human race; he believed in great men, whom he dramatized in his historical plays The Man of Destiny (about Napoleon, 1895) and especially Caesar and Cleopatra (1899), and in great women (Saint Joan, 1923), all of whom he imbued with his own qualities of humorous clear-sightedness and—the nearest thing to tragedy in his work—personal loneliness. Their contemporaries misunderstand them and eventually turn against them.

His key play is Man and Superman (1902), in which he uses the ceaselessly voluble armchair revolutionary John Tanner—something of a self-portrait—to preach his own brand of benevolent Nietzscheanism, and then brings him up against the true embodiment of his vaunted "Life Force," his enchanting ward Ann Whitefield whose sexual predatoriness he has been mocking without ever realizing that he himself is her "marked-down prey." When, at the end of four long acts, she ensnares him, the implication is that their union will contribute to the eventual advent of Shaw's longed-for Superman. Tanner is Shaw's mischievous updating of Don Juan Tenorio: mischievous because, as we learn from the long dream-sequence Don Juan in Hell, this is a legendary lover who has forsworn physical love and whose passions are now of the brain rather than the senses. But whatever its philosophical underpinnings, the play endures as a love-comedy, even a sex-comedy. It is a variation on an age-old comic theme: the bringing together, despite the misgivings of one or both, of two young people who are obviously made for one another. Shaw's most popular play, Pygmalion (1912), is a romance in spite of itself; though he fitted out its published version with a narrative sequel, claiming that its hero and heroine never got married, nobody has ever believed him. For the play to turn into My Fair Lady (1956), one of the best of romantic musical comedies, was not much of a stretch.

Shaw's own sex life was curious. Though extremely susceptible to women, he kept his virginity until 1885, when—on his twenty-ninth birthday—he succumbed to a temperamental Irish widow, Mrs. Julia (Jenny) Patterson. Other affairs followed, but his marriage—to another Irishwoman, Charlotte Payne-Townshend—was, though apparently very happy, platonic. (The marriage lasted from 1898 until Char-lotte's death in 1943.) In his plays sexlessness, even when the subject is love, becomes a matter not just of nineteenth-century reticence but of principle. In Backto Methuselah (1920) he looks forward to an ideal future in which the body has been superseded by "pure thought."

This has not been, in literary and critical circles, a popular idea, despite Shaw's popularity in the theater (where intellectual passion counts for more than is sometimes acknowledged, and where sexuality can be, by adroit actors and directors, smuggled in). His politics cannot be pigeon-holed as left or right, militant or pacifist. In Major Barbara (1905) he gives an armaments manufacturer the best arguments, but he was vilified for opposing World War I. He said that the nearest thing he had to a religion was a belief in "Creative Evolution," but his enthusiasm for "strong men" led in the 1930s to a disquieting enthusiasm for dictators. He condemned Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism, but in terms that suggested that it was no more than an aberration. He could not, apparently, conceive of the real depths of human hatred and human evil; the men who condemn his Saint Joan may be misguided but they are acting from, in their own minds, the purest motives, and Shaw lets them state their own case in the purest form.

Though he claimed in the play's preface that Saint Joan was the noblest kind of tragedy—one without villains—he lacked the tragic vision (the closest he came to it, and that fleetingly, was in the abrupt mock-apocalyptic climax to Heartbreak House, 1917), and this has caused him to be underrated in a culture that considers comedy an inferior form. Most infuriating of all, even to some of his greatest admirers, is the sense he conveys—in plays, prefaces, and in politico-economic works from The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1927) to Everybody's Political What's What (1944)—that he has all the answers, and that all society's problems would be solved if people would only listen to him. The pervading sweet reasonableness, laced with paradox, can be oppressive (though it has also gained him many disciples). He himself seems sometimes to have tired of it, as is suggested by the uncharacterstically despairing epilogue to Too True to Be Good (1931) in which a burglar turned preacher confesses that he must go on talking even if no one is listening.

Linked to this is an often-leveled charge that he parodied more humorously in Fanny's First Play (1911) that all his characters are figures "set up to spout Shaw." This, though, is only true if we concede that he must have been myriad-minded; his figures may all speak in the same style (so do those of many other playwrights) but their opinions vary wildly—and he can make each of them sound perfectly convincing. This is one reason why actors have little difficulty in animating them. Shaw's themes, even those of his earliest plays, still ring bells; questions of war and peace, riches and poverty, how and what to believe, have not died out yet. And the entertainment value remains constant.

See alsoFabians; Great Britain; Ibsen, Henrik; Marx, Karl; Socialism.

bibliography

Primary Works

Shaw, Bernard. What I Really Wrote about the War. London, 1930.

——. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London, 1932.

——. Everybody's Political What's What. London, 1944.

——. Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. 4 vols. London, 1965–1988.

——. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces. 7 vols. London, 1970–1974.

——. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1982.

——. Major Critical Essays (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Perfect Wagnerite, The Sanity of Art). Harmonds-worth, U.K., 1986.

Secondary Sources

Bentley, Eric. Bernard Shaw. London, 1950.

Evans, Judith. The Politics and Plays of Bernard Shaw. Jefferson, N.C., and London, 2003.

Gahan, Peter. Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw. Gainesville, Fla., 2004.

Gibbs, A. M. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition. New York, 1998.

Mander, Raymond, and Joe Mitchenson. Theatrical Companion to Shaw: A Pictorial Record of the First Performances of the Plays of George Bernard Shaw. London, 1954.

Morgan, Margery M. The Shavian Playground: An Exploration of the Art of George Bernard Shaw. London, 1972.

Robert Cushman