Last reviewed: June 2017
Playwright
July 26, 1856
Dublin, Ireland
November 2, 1950
Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England
One of the greatest British dramatists, perhaps the greatest dramatist of his generation, George Bernard Shaw revitalized the moribund English stage with a body of work that continues to entertain and challenge audiences around the world. Born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856, to a family in financial decline, he was raised in a household that might have come from one of his plays. His father, George Carr Shaw, was a good-natured drunkard somewhat in the manner of Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion, while his mother, the former Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, was a strong-willed woman who, in 1874, abandoned her family to go to London with her voice teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, to pursue a musical career. Largely self-taught, Shaw left school early. From 1874 to 1876, he worked as an office boy, cashier, and rent collector for Charles Townsend, a Dublin real estate agent. There, as well as at home, he saw the evil effects of poverty and social injustice that he would repeatedly attack in his plays.
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In 1876, Shaw joined his mother in London. After a brief stint with the Edison Telegraph Company (1879–80), he devoted himself entirely to literature, writing five mediocre novels (he once observed that anyone who would read An Unsocial Socialist would read anything). A lecture by Henry George in 1882 converted Shaw to socialism; two years later, he helped Beatrice and Sidney Webb found the Fabian Society, an organization of bourgeois socialists who favored gradual reform. Shaw’s “desperate days,” as he called this period, ended when William Archer asked him to become a music critic for the Star. Under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, he wrote readable, astute analyses of performances, always advocating innovation and excellence. These qualities also characterize his art and music criticism for the World and his theater criticism for the Saturday Review. George Bernard Shaw
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His 1890 lecture to the Fabian Society on Henrik Ibsen led to his book The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The Independent Theatre Company then asked Shaw for a play of his own. He revised Widowers’ Houses, an attack on slumlords, which he had begun in 1885 with Archer. By 1901, he had written nine more plays, the best of them mingling wit with social criticism. His first major success, The Devil’s Disciple, came not in London but in New York. Not until Harley Granville-Barker produced eleven of his plays at the Royal Court Theatre, largely funded by Shaw himself (he had married the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne Townsend in 1898), did his reputation become secure. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, largely for his brilliant Saint Joan, he continued to write until his death at age ninety-four.
Like Ibsen, and like many English playwrights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Shaw wanted to use the stage as a pulpit to reform society by forcing audiences to see the disparity between reality and conventional wisdom. In Major Barbara, it is the munitions factory owner, Andrew Undershaft, not the Salvation Army, who helps the poor. Pygmalion points to the folly of class distinctions, as accent—not character or merit—determines one’s station. Joan of Arc is canonized, but if she returned to earth she would once again be executed for her refusal to accept any authority beyond personal revelation.
Shaw was less concerned with specific political or social reforms, though he did want these, than with the evolution of humankind from its present state of weak imperfection to a condition approaching the divine. Like the serpent in Back to Methuselah, Shaw did not examine present conditions and ask why things were that way; rather, he imagined a different future and asked why things could not be so ordered. He believed in an irresistible “life force” that would lead to a better world if only people linked their wills to its power. Significantly, Shaw’s women characters are more aware of this evolutionary force, more in harmony with it, than his men characters; Major Barbara, Candida, and, most clearly, Saint Joan come immediately to mind.
Rejecting the notion of his contemporary Oscar Wilde that art should exist solely for its own sake, Shaw sometimes went to the opposite extreme of writing tracts rather than plays. The early dramas are especially didactic. Act 3 of Man and Superman is little more than a Platonic discourse on the life force. However, Shaw realized that to educate he first had to entertain, and his best comedies both delight and instruct. Major Barbara’s wit rivals that of Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest (pr. 1895); the exposure of the hypocrisy of organizations dedicated to doing good is at once pointed and funny. John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw’s exploration of the Irish question (the issue of Irish self-determination), made King Edward VII laugh so hard that he broke his chair. Pygmalion is highly enjoyable, but audiences cannot miss the implied criticism of England’s class system. Always a gadfly, often a butterfly, Shaw created among his fifty plays at least a dozen that will remain staples of the dramatic repertoire, inviting spectators to laugh at the same time that they compel them to think.