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Shaw, George Bernard
Irish dramatist. He was also a critic and novelist, and an early member of the socialist Fabian Society, although he resigned in 1911. His plays combine comedy with political, philosophical, and polemic aspects, aiming to make an impact on his audience's social conscience as well as their emotions. They include Arms and the Man (1894), Devil's
Disciple (1897), Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913), and St Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw was born in Dublin, and went to London in 1876, where he became a brilliant debater and supporter of the Fabians, and worked äs a music and drama critic. He wrote five unsuccessful novels before his first play, Widowers' Houses, was privately produced in 1892. Attacking slum landlords, it allied him with the realistic, political, and polemical movement in the theatre, pointing to people's responsibility to improve themselves and their social environment. His first public production was Arms and the Man, a cynical view of war. In 1904 he unsuccessfully stood for London County Council as a Progressive. The volume Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) also included The Philanderer, Mrs Warren's Profession, dealing with prostitution and banned until 1902; and Arms and the Man. Three Plays for Puritans (1901) contained The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra(a companion piece to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra), and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, written for the actress Ellen Terry. Man and Superman expounds his ideas of evolution by following the character of Don Juan into hell for a debate with the devil. The ' anti-romantic' comedy Pygmalion, first performed in 1913, was written for the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell (and after Shaw's death converted to a musical as My Fair Lady). Later plays included Heartbreak House (1920), about the decline of Edwardian England; Back to Methuselah (1922), an ambitious cycle of plays offering a view of
history from man's beginnings to the distant future; and the historical St Joan (1923), which examines the nature of religious belief. Altogether Shaw wrote more than 50 plays and became a byword for wit. His theories were further explained in the voluminous prefaces to the plays, and in books such as The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism (1928). He was also an unsuccessful advocate of spelling reform and a prolific letter-writer. Shaw was born into a genteel-but-poor Protestant family, and received little formal education. His many attempts at writing novels during his first few years in London found no publishers, and he earned his living throughout the 1880s and 1890s by writing reviews, pamphlets, and music and art criticism for several newspapers. His lively drama reviews from this period, which he submitted to The Saturday Review 1895-98, were subsequently reprinted as Our Theatre in the Nineties (197Z). It was at this time that he began to champion Henrik Ibsen, whose work he regarded as having just the right balance of didacticism and art. Together with Shakespeare, Shaw saw Ibsen as the model for a new kind of drama that would have contemporary life and problems as its subject-matter. Accordingly, in his own plays, Shaw combined treatment of social issues with a comic technique that relied on brilliantly witty serio-comic dialogue and playfully ironic Inversion of audience expectations about character and Situation. As a result, he put himself in the vanguard of the intellectually serious and progressive English theatre, yet also became a successful popular playwright. His later works, in which his political commitment remained undimmed, include Too True to be Good (1932), On the Rocks 1933, The Six of Calais, 1934, The Millionairess, Buoyant Billions, 1948, and Far-Fetched Fables, 1950. In hi~ personal life, Shaw was as unconventional and passionate as in his creative work. He was a dedicated vegetarian, and viewed much orthodox medical treatment with grave suspicion. In 1898, when he was almost 42 years old, he married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irishwoman. Throughout his life, he steadfastly refused all honours except the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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