Shaw, George Bernard

b. 1856; d. 1950

Anglo-Irish playwright, born in Dublin of a genteel but poor Protestant family. He had little formal education, but when he went to London in 1876 he studied voraciously. By 1883 he had written several novels, none of which was published. He became a socialist and in 1884 joined the newly-created Fabian Society, which included the Webbs and H G Wells. He was an effective orator and remained a passionate socialist reformer throughout his life, acting as a borough councillor for St Pancras, London, as well as writing such popular propaganda as The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, 1928.

He wrote reviews, pamphlets and music and art criticism for a number of papers during the 1880s and 1890s. More significant, however, was his drama criticism for The Saturday Review, which he wrote between 1895 and 1898 (reprinted subsequently at Out Theatre in the Nineties, 1932). It was at this time that he began to champion Henrik Ibsen, whose work he saw as combining outright didacticism and art (see The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891), enlarged edition 1913). Shaw took Shakespeare as the model - with Ibsen - for a new drama which would be in vital contact with contemporary life and problems, though with characteristically perverse exaggeration, he claimed his own superiority over Shakespeare.

During the 1890s Shaw began to supply the public with the didactic 'problem' plays he believed were needed. Widowers' Houses, which attacked slum landlords, reached the stage in 1892, and was followed by the popular success Arms and the Man, 1894, a satire on romantic attitudes towards war. Mrs Warren's Profession was written in 1893 but was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and not produced (and then only privately) till 1902. Here, Shaw examined the social nature and implications of prostitution, without any of the romantic melodrama of previous 'women with a past' plays. The Philanderer, an Ibsenite play about the 'new woman', was written in 1893. Other works of this early period are Candida, 1895, The Devil's Disciple, 1897, Caesar and Cleopatra, 1898, John Bull's Other Island, 1904, Man and Superman, 1905, Major Barbara, 1905, and The Doctor's Dilemma, 1906. These are vehicles for Shaw's criticisms of, and feelings about, such various subjects as religion, the ethics of the medical profession, Anglo-Irish relations, puritanism and sex. Man and Superman, perhaps the most impressive of them, presents the first full working-out of Shaw's idea of the Life Force - 'the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself' - in terms of the battle of the sexes.

The serious implications of the issues Shaw treated, and the evangelical attitude he adopted towards them, do not, however, detract from the entertainment value of these plays. For Shaw developed a comic technique which relied on brilliantly witty serio-comic dialogue and playfully ironic inversion of audience expectations about character and situations to sugar the pill of his didacticism. He was skilful also in exploiting popular tastes for his own ends, as in The Devil's Disciple, where the conventions of melodrama are used in a sardonic and vigorous manner. Moreover, Shaw continued to invite implicit comparison with Shakespeare, most notably in Caesar and Cleopatra, which, in spite of its comic contrasts with the tragedy, succeeds in communicating some of the same thoughtful expansiveness characteristic of Shakespeare's best work. As a result, Shaw contrived to be at once a leader of the intellectually serious and progressive English theatre and a successful popular playwright.

The years before the First World War produced a number of lightweight but popular comedies, including Misalliance, 1910, Androcles and the Lion, 1912, and Pygmalion, 1913, a great commercial success at the time which has since been many times revived, and was, under the title My Fair Lady, turned into a long-running musical and film. Heartbreak House, written during the war, combines lyricism and farce in depicting the decline of Edwardian England, and is regarded by some critics as his finest play. It was followed in 1921 by Back to Methuselah, an ambitious cycle of plays in which Shaw offers his view of history from Adam to the distant future. In St Joan, 1923, the chronicle-history which is - with Pygmalion - his best-known and most revived play, Shaw again examined the implications of religious belief. The play mainly explores the contrast between the version of Christianity practised by Joan - the 'outsider' motivated by the 'Life Force' - and that upheld by the established Church.

Although by now in his seventies, Shaw's creative energy remained unflagging, and with The Apple Cart, 1929, he began to write a number of 'political extravaganzas' including Too True to be Good, 1932, On the Rocks, 1933, The Six of Calais, 1934, The Millionairess, 1936, Geneva, 1938, and 'In Good King Charles's Golden Days', 1939. In these plays Shaw presented his views on the need for morality in both domestic and international politics in the context of topical European developments and personalities. The post-war Buoyant Billions, 1948, and Far-fetched Fables, 1950, do not come up to the standard of his mature plays.

The basis of Shaw's achievement is the combination of an adventurous and lucid intellect with a remarkable flair for theatrical comedy. These qualities, which helped several later or contemporary dramatists to find a comic form for treatment of serious issues, are evident also in the numerous prefaces with which Shaw introduced his plays to the reading public. These not only explain the ideas presented in his work, but often also develop arguments not immediately connected with specific plays, either in relation to minor subjects which interested him at the time, or the major concerns of the intellectual disciplines. They are often as long, or longer, than the actual plays, and frequently as, or more entertaining. Had Shaw never written a word for the stage, his reputation as a polemical essayist would have been assured on the basis of his prefaces, reviews, and propaganda works.

Shaw was as unorthodox and as vigorous in her personal life as he was in his creative work. He was a dedicated vegetarian, and regarded much orthodox medical treatment with grave suspicion. He married in 1898 Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irish lady, when he was almost 42. From 1906 he lived at Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, where he died on 2 November 1950. He had refused all honours except the Nobel Prize for literature, which he was awarded in 1925. His Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, contains important biographical information.

© JM Dent/Historybookshop.com