George Bernard Shaw
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George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic,
polemic Polemic () is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called ''polemics'', which are seen in arguments on controversial topic ...
ist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ''
Man and Superman ''Man and Superman'' is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to a call for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. ''Man and Superman'' opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London o ...
'' (1902), ''
Pygmalion Pygmalion or Pigmalion may refer to: Mythology * Pygmalion (mythology), a sculptor who fell in love with his statue Stage * ''Pigmalion'' (opera), a 1745 opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau * ''Pygmalion'' (Rousseau), a 1762 melodrama by Jean-Jacques ...
'' (1913) and '' Saint Joan'' (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , caption = , awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature , presenter = Swedish Academy , holder = Annie Ernaux (2022) , location = Stockholm, Sweden , year = 1901 , ...
. Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the
gradualist Gradualism, from the Latin ''gradus'' ("step"), is a hypothesis, a theory or a tenet assuming that change comes about gradually or that variation is gradual in nature and happens over time as opposed to in large steps. Uniformitarianism, incrementa ...
Fabian Society The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The Fa ...
and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, '' Arms and the Man'' in 1894. Influenced by
Henrik Ibsen Henrik Johan Ibsen (; ; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playw ...
, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included ''
Major Barbara ''Major Barbara'' is a three-act English play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story concerns an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in ...
'', '' The Doctor's Dilemma'', and '' Caesar and Cleopatra''. Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted
eugenics Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior o ...
and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the
First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
as equally culpable, and although not a
republican Republican can refer to: Political ideology * An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law. ** Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or agains ...
, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of ''Pygmalion'' for which he received an
Academy Award The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...
. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s, he had largely renounced
Fabian Society The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The Fa ...
gradualism, and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left—he expressed admiration for both
Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...
and
Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
. In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946. Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to
Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word ''Shavian'' has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.


Life


Early years

Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in
Portobello Portobello, Porto Bello, Porto Belo, Portabello, or Portabella may refer to: Places Brazil * Porto Belo Ireland * Portobello, Dublin * Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin formerly ''Portobello Barracks'' New Zealand * Portobello, New Zealand, on Ot ...
, a lower-middle-class part of
Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...
. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (''née'' Gurly; 1830–1913). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (1853–1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855–1876). The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant
Protestant Ascendancy The ''Protestant Ascendancy'', known simply as the ''Ascendancy'', was the political, economic, and social domination of Ireland between the 17th century and the early 20th century by a minority of landowners, Protestant clergy, and members of th ...
in Ireland; George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly; in the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty". By the time of Shaw's birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among
Shavian The Shavian alphabet (; also known as the Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of English orthography, conventional spelling using the E ...
scholars on the likelihood of this. The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. In 1862, Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on
Dalkey Hill Dalkey Hill ( ; ga, Cnoc Dheilginse) is the northernmost of the two hills which form the southern boundary of Dublin Bay (the other being Killiney Hill). Dalkey Hill is 140 metres high and has views over the surrounding areas : Dublin to the ...
, overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature. Between 1865 and 1871, Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw". In June 1873, Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her. Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.


London

Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of
tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in ...
. He resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years. Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in
South Kensington South Kensington, nicknamed Little Paris, is a district just west of Central London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically it settled on part of the scattered Middlesex village of Brompton. Its name was supplanted with ...
, but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had not yet thought of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him,
ghost-writing A ghostwriter is hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are officially credited to another person as the author. Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often h ...
a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, ''The Hornet''. Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London. Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer. Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the
British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
Reading Room (the forerunner of the
British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a
blank-verse Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and P ...
satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, ''Immaturity'' (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80, and as in Dublin achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author. For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a
vegetarian Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slaughter. Vegetarianism m ...
. He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by
smallpox Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus) which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) c ...
. In rapid succession he wrote two more novels: ''The Irrational Knot'' (1880) and ''Love Among the Artists'' (1881), but neither found a publisher; each was serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine ''Our Corner''. In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know ... We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it". Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French, ''Un Petit Drame'', written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime. In the same year the critic
William Archer William or Bill Archer may refer to: * William Archer (British politician) (1677–1739), British politician * William S. Archer (1789–1855), U.S. Senator and Representative from Virginia * William Beatty Archer (1793–1870), Illinois politician ...
suggested a collaboration, with a plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw. The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of ''
Widowers' Houses ''Widowers' Houses'' (1892) was the first play by George Bernard Shaw to be staged. It premièred on 9 December 1892 at the Royalty Theatre, under the auspices of the Independent Theatre Society — a subscription club, formed to escape th ...
'' in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career.


Political awakening: Marxism, socialism, Fabian Society

On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist
Henry George Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the eco ...
. Shaw then read George's book ''
Progress and Poverty ''Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy'' is an 1879 book by social theorist and economist Henry George. It is a treatise on the questions of why pover ...
'', which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the
Social Democratic Federation The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was established as Britain's first organised socialist political party by H. M. Hyndman, and had its first meeting on 7 June 1881. Those joining the SDF included William Morris, George Lansbury, James Con ...
(SDF), where he discovered the writings of
Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading ''
Das Kapital ''Das Kapital'', also known as ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' or sometimes simply ''Capital'' (german: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, link=no, ; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in materialist phi ...
''. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder,
H. M. Hyndman Henry Mayers Hyndman (; 7 March 1842 – 20 November 1921) was an English writer, politician and socialist. Originally a conservative, he was converted to socialism by Karl Marx's '' Communist Manifesto'' and launched Britain's first left-wing ...
, whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join it—he preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals. After reading a tract, ''Why Are The Many Poor?'', issued by the recently formed
Fabian Society The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The Fa ...
, Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also
Annie Besant Annie Besant ( Wood; 1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights activist, educationist, writer, orator, political party member and philanthropist. Regarded as a champion of human f ...
, a fine orator. From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the
British Economic Association The Royal Economic Society (RES) is a professional association that promotes the study of economic science in academia, government service, banking, industry, and public affairs. Originally established in 1890 as the British Economic Association, ...
; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education". This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism. When in 1886–87 the Fabians debated whether to embrace
anarchism Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessa ...
, as advocated by
Charlotte Wilson Charlotte Mary Wilson (6 May 1854, Kemerton, Worcestershire – 28 April 1944, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York) was an English Fabian and anarchist who co-founded '' Freedom'' newspaper in 1886 with Peter Kropotkin, and edited, published, ...
, Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in
Trafalgar Square Trafalgar Square ( ) is a public square in the City of Westminster, Central London, laid out in the early 19th century around the area formerly known as Charing Cross. At its centre is a high column bearing a statue of Admiral Nelson commemo ...
addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on 13 November 1887 ( "Bloody Sunday"), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties. Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of ''Fabian Essays in Socialism'', edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, ''What Socialism Is'', a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".


Novelist and critic

The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic. He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons. The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: ''Cashel Byron's Profession'' written in 1882–83, and ''An Unsocial Socialist'', begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in ''To-Day'' magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. ''Cashel Byron'' appeared in magazine and book form in 1886. In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of ''
The World In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...
'' in 1886 he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were
William Morris William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He ...
and
John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and politi ...
, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of
art for art's sake Art for art's sake—the usual English rendering of ''l'art pour l'art'' (), a French slogan from the latter part of the 19th century—is a phrase that expresses the philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only 'true' art, is divorce ...
, and insisted that all great art must be
didactic Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature, art, and design. In art, design, architecture, and landscape, didacticism is an emerging conceptual approach that is driven by the urgent need to ...
. Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known. After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of ''
The Star ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...
'' in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto. In May 1890 he moved back to ''The World'', where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the ''
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...
'', Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability." Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950. From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for '' The Saturday Review'', edited by his friend
Frank Harris Frank Harris (14 February 1855 – 26 August 1931) was an Irish-American editor, novelist, short story writer, journalist and publisher, who was friendly with many well-known figures of his day. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to the United State ...
. As at ''The World'', he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".


Playwright and politician: 1890s

After using the plot of the aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer to complete ''Widowers' Houses'' (it was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; '' The Philanderer'', written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, ''
Mrs Warren's Profession ''Mrs. Warren's Profession'' is a play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893, and first performed in London in 1902. The play is about a former prostitute, now a madam ( brothel proprietor), who attempts to come to terms with her disapproving ...
'' (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage. Shaw's first play to bring him financial success was '' Arms and the Man'' (1894), a mock-
Ruritania Ruritania is a fictional country, originally located in central Europe as a setting for novels by Anthony Hope, such as ''The Prisoner of Zenda'' (1894). Nowadays the term connotes a quaint minor European country, or is used as a placeholder name f ...
n comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of mediocrity, sneering at heroism and patriotism, heartless cleverness, and copying W.S.Gilbert's style. The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matinée performances to meet the demand. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. It earned him £341 in royalties in its first year, a sufficient sum to enable him to give up his salaried post as a music critic. Among the cast of the London production was
Florence Farr Florence Beatrice Emery (''née'' Farr; 7 July 1860 – 29 April 1917) was a British West End leading actress, composer and director. She was also a women's rights activist, journalist, educator, singer, novelist, and leader of the occult ...
, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson. The success of ''Arms and the Man'' was not immediately replicated. '' Candida'', which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in
South Shields South Shields () is a coastal town in South Tyneside, Tyne and Wear, England. It is on the south bank of the mouth of the River Tyne. Historically, it was known in Roman times as Arbeia, and as Caer Urfa by Early Middle Ages. According to the 20 ...
in 1895; in 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called ''
The Man of Destiny ''The Man of Destiny'' is an 1897 play by George Bernard Shaw, set in Italy during the early career of Napoleon. It was published as a part of ''Plays Pleasant'', which also included '' Arms and the Man'', '' Candida'' and '' You Never Can Tell. ...
'' had a single staging at
Croydon Croydon is a large town in south London, England, south of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Croydon, a local government district of Greater London. It is one of the largest commercial districts in Greater London, with an extensi ...
. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when
Richard Mansfield Richard Mansfield (24 May 1857 – 30 August 1907) was an English actor-manager best known for his performances in Shakespeare plays, Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and the play '' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde''. Life and career Mansfield was born ...
's production of the historical melodrama '' The Devil's Disciple'' earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties. In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the
Independent Labour Party The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates ...
. He was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics. He persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing
indirect taxation An indirect tax (such as sales tax, per unit tax, value added tax (VAT), or goods and services tax (GST), excise, consumption tax, tariff) is a tax that is levied upon goods and services before they reach the customer who ultimately pays the ...
, and taxing unearned income "to extinction". Back in London, Shaw produced what
Margaret Cole Dame Margaret Isabel Cole (née Postgate; 6 May 1893 – 7 May 1980) was an English socialist politician, writer and poet. She wrote several detective stories jointly with her husband, G. D. H. Cole. She went on to hold important posts in Lon ...
, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892. ''To Your Tents, O Israel!'' excoriated the government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on
Irish Home Rule The Irish Home Rule movement was a movement that campaigned for self-government (or "home rule") for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1870 to the e ...
, a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism. In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt Hutchinson—Holroyd mentions £10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the
London School of Economics and Political Science , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 millio ...
(LSE) opened in the summer of 1895. By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. In 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" ( parish councillor) in London's St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously; when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the
Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras St Pancras was a civil parish and metropolitan borough in London, England. It was an ancient parish in the county of Middlesex, governed by an administrative vestry. The parish was included in the area of responsibility of the Metropolitan Boa ...
, he was elected to the newly formed borough council. In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the
register office A register office or The General Register Office, much more commonly but erroneously registry office (except in official use), is a British government office where births, deaths, marriages, civil partnership, stillbirths and adoptions in England ...
in
Covent Garden Covent Garden is a district in London, on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit-and-vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist si ...
. The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In the view of the biographer and critic St John Ervine, "their life together was entirely felicitous". There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. In the early weeks of the marriage Shaw was much occupied writing his Marxist analysis of
Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
's ''Ring'' cycle, published as '' The Perfect Wagnerite'' late in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in
Ayot St Lawrence Ayot St Lawrence is a small English village and civil parish in Hertfordshire, west of Welwyn. There are several other ''Ayots'' in the area, including Ayot Green and Ayot St Peter, where the census population of Ayot St Lawrence was included ...
, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "
Shaw's Corner Shaw's Corner was the primary residence of the renowned Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw; it is now a National Trust property open to the public as a writer's house museum. Inside the house, the rooms remain much as Shaw left them, and the ga ...
", and lived there for the rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the Adelphi and later at
Whitehall Court Whitehall Court in the City of Westminster, England, is one contiguous building but consists of two separate constructions. The south end was designed by Thomas Archer and A. Green and constructed as a block of luxury residential apartments in ...
.


Stage success: 1900–1914

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and
Harley Granville-Barker Harley Granville-Barker (25 November 1877 – 31 August 1946) was an English actor, director, playwright, manager, critic, and theorist. After early success as an actor in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, he increasingly turned to directi ...
established a company at the
Royal Court Theatre The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a non-commercial West End theatre in Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, Englan ...
in
Sloane Square Sloane Square is a small hard-landscaped square on the boundaries of the central London districts of Belgravia and Chelsea, located southwest of Charing Cross, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The area forms a boundary betwe ...
,
Chelsea Chelsea or Chelsey may refer to: Places Australia * Chelsea, Victoria Canada * Chelsea, Nova Scotia * Chelsea, Quebec United Kingdom * Chelsea, London, an area of London, bounded to the south by the River Thames ** Chelsea (UK Parliament consti ...
to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, ''
John Bull's Other Island ''John Bull's Other Island'' is a comedy about Ireland, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1904. Shaw himself was born in Dublin, yet this is one of only two plays of his where he thematically returned to his homeland, the other being ''O'Flaherty ...
'', a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by
Edward VII Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910. The second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria an ...
, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's
Abbey Theatre The Abbey Theatre ( ga, Amharclann na Mainistreach), also known as the National Theatre of Ireland ( ga, Amharclann Náisiúnta na hÉireann), in Dublin, Ireland, is one of the country's leading cultural institutions. First opening to the p ...
, for fear of the affront it might provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that
William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and
Lady Gregory Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (''née'' Persse; 15 March 1852 – 22 May 1932) was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, ...
tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after
J. M. Synge Edmund John Millington Synge (; 16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play ''The Playboy of the Western World'' was poorly r ...
's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in the
Irish Literary Revival The Irish Literary Revival (also called the Irish Literary Renaissance, nicknamed the Celtic Twilight) was a flowering of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century. It includes works of poetry, music, art, and literature. O ...
, including George Russell and
James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
, and was a close friend of
Seán O'Casey Seán O'Casey ( ga, Seán Ó Cathasaigh ; born John Casey; 30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. ...
, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading ''John Bull's Other Island''. ''
Man and Superman ''Man and Superman'' is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to a call for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. ''Man and Superman'' opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London o ...
'', completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in
Robert Loraine Robert Bilcliffe Loraine (14 January 1876 – 23 December 1935) was a successful London and Broadway British stage actor, actor-manager, and soldier who later enjoyed a side career as a pioneer aviator. Born in New Brighton, his father was Henr ...
's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were ''
Major Barbara ''Major Barbara'' is a three-act English play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story concerns an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in ...
'' (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the
Salvation Army Salvation (from Latin: ''salvatio'', from ''salva'', 'safe, saved') is the state of being saved or protected from harm or a dire situation. In religion and theology, ''salvation'' generally refers to the deliverance of the soul from sin and its c ...
; '' The Doctor's Dilemma'' (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and '' Caesar and Cleopatra'', Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's '' Antony and Cleopatra'', seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year. Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer
Stanley Weintraub Stanley Weintraub (April 17, 1929 – July 28, 2019) was an American historian and biographer and an expert on George Bernard Shaw. Early life Weintraub was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 17, 1929. He was the eldest child of Benja ...
as "discussion drama" and "serious
farce Farce is a comedy that seeks to entertain an audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable. Farce is also characterized by heavy use of physical humor; the use of deliberate absurdity o ...
". These plays included ''
Getting Married ''Getting Married'' is a play by George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influenc ...
'' (premiered 1908), ''
The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet ''The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama'' is a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw, first produced in 1909. Shaw describes the play as a religious tract in dramatic form.Violet M. Broad & C. Lewis Broad ''Dictionary to th ...
'' (1909), ''
Misalliance ''Misalliance'' is a play written in 1909–1910 by George Bernard Shaw. The play takes place entirely on a single Saturday afternoon in the conservatory of a large country house in Hindhead, Surrey in Edwardian era England. It is a continuation ...
'' (1910), and '' Fanny's First Play'' (1911). ''Blanco Posnet'' was banned on religious grounds by the
Lord Chamberlain The Lord Chamberlain of the Household is the most senior officer of the Royal Household of the United Kingdom, supervising the departments which support and provide advice to the Sovereign of the United Kingdom while also acting as the main cha ...
(the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. ''Fanny's First Play'', a comedy about
suffragette A suffragette was a member of an activist women's organisation in the early 20th century who, under the banner "Votes for Women", fought for the right to vote in public elections in the United Kingdom. The term refers in particular to members ...
s, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances. '' Androcles and the Lion'' (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than ''Blanco Posnet'', ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, ''
Pygmalion Pygmalion or Pigmalion may refer to: Mythology * Pygmalion (mythology), a sculptor who fell in love with his statue Stage * ''Pigmalion'' (opera), a 1745 opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau * ''Pygmalion'' (Rousseau), a 1762 melodrama by Jean-Jacques ...
'', written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a play—that it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful. ... Hence arose an urgent demand on the part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first." The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and
Mrs Patrick Campbell Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner (9 February 1865 – 9 April 1940), better known by her stage name Mrs Patrick Campbell or Mrs Pat, was an English stage actress, best known for appearing in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Barrie. She also toured th ...
as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a
cockney Cockney is an accent and dialect of English, mainly spoken in London and its environs, particularly by working-class and lower middle-class Londoners. The term "Cockney" has traditionally been used to describe a person from the East End, or ...
flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended. The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured with the piece in the US.


Fabian years: 1900–1913

In 1899, when the
Boer War The Second Boer War ( af, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, , 11 October 189931 May 1902), also known as the Boer War, the Anglo–Boer War, or the South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics (the Sou ...
began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like
Home Rule Home rule is government of a colony, dependent country, or region by its own citizens. It is thus the power of a part (administrative division) of a state or an external dependent country to exercise such of the state's powers of governance wit ...
, to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from the society when it followed Shaw. In the Fabians' war manifesto, ''Fabianism and the Empire'' (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it". As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics. Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the Labour Representation Committee—precursor of the modern Labour Party. By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished". Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in the
London County Council London County Council (LCC) was the principal local government body for the County of London throughout its existence from 1889 to 1965, and the first London-wide general municipal authority to be directly elected. It covered the area today kno ...
elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as " akingabsolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics. Nationally, the 1906 general election produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister,
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman ( né Campbell; 7 September 183622 April 1908) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. He served as the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1905 to 1908 and leader of the Liberal Party from 1899 to 19 ...
, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body". In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer
H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''
is ideas In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject (grammar), subject of a sentence (linguistics), sentence to a subject complement, such as the word '' ...
across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity". In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself". Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later wondered whether the Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it". Although less active—he blamed his advancing years—Shaw remained a Fabian. In 1912 Shaw invested £1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called ''
The New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members ...
'', which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously. He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor,
Clifford Sharp Clifford Dyce Sharp (1883–1935) was a British journalist. He was the first editor of the ''New Statesman'' magazine from its foundation in 1913 until 1928; a left-wing magazine founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other members of the socia ...
, who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions—"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw.


First World War

After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract ''Common Sense About the War'', which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that " s appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present." Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by the British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by Field Marshal Haig to visit the Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism". Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war. ''
The Inca of Perusalem ''The Inca of Perusalem, An Almost Historical Comedietta'' (1915) is a comic one-act play written during World War I by George Bernard Shaw. The plot appears at first to be a fairy-tale like story about a fantastical "Inca", but it eventually bec ...
'', written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 at the
Birmingham Repertory Theatre Birmingham Repertory Theatre, commonly called Birmingham Rep or just The Rep, is a producing theatre based on Centenary Square in Birmingham, England. Founded by Barry Jackson, it is the longest-established of Britain's building-based theatre ...
. ''
O'Flaherty V.C. ''O'Flaherty V.C., A Recruiting Pamphlet'' (1915) is a comic one-act play written during World War I by George Bernard Shaw. The plot is about an Irish soldier in the British army returning home after winning the Victoria Cross. The play was writt ...
'', satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a
Royal Flying Corps "Through Adversity to the Stars" , colors = , colours_label = , march = , mascot = , anniversaries = , decorations ...
base in Belgium in 1917. ''
Augustus Does His Bit ''Augustus Does His Bit: A True-to-Life Farce'' (1916) is a comic one-act play by George Bernard Shaw about a dim-witted aristocrat who is outwitted by a female spy during World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often ab ...
'', a genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917.


Ireland

Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the
British Empire The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts esta ...
(which he thought should become the British Commonwealth). In April 1916 he wrote scathingly in ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' about militant Irish nationalism: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these fellow-patriots of mine leave the Bourbons nowhere." Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential. The Dublin
Easter Rising The Easter Rising ( ga, Éirí Amach na Cásca), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the a ...
later that month took him by surprise. After its suppression by British forces, he expressed horror at the
summary execution A summary execution is an execution in which a person is accused of a crime and immediately killed without the benefit of a full and fair trial. Executions as the result of summary justice (such as a drumhead court-martial) are sometimes include ...
of the rebel leaders, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish union. In ''How to Settle the Irish Question'' (1917), he envisaged a federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. Holroyd records that by this time the separatist party
Sinn Féin Sinn Féin ( , ; en, " eOurselves") is an Irish republican and democratic socialist political party active throughout both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The original Sinn Féin organisation was founded in 1905 by Arthur Gri ...
was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were forgotten. In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland, and joined his fellow-writers
Hilaire Belloc Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (, ; 27 July 187016 July 1953) was a Franco-English writer and historian of the early twentieth century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. H ...
and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions. The
Anglo-Irish Treaty The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty ( ga , An Conradh Angla-Éireannach), commonly known in Ireland as The Treaty and officially the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty Between Great Britain and Ireland, was an agreement between the government of the ...
of December 1921 led to the
partition of Ireland The partition of Ireland ( ga, críochdheighilt na hÉireann) was the process by which the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland divided Ireland into two self-governing polities: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. I ...
between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw. In 1922
civil war A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies ...
broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the
Irish Free State The Irish Free State ( ga, Saorstát Éireann, , ; 6 December 192229 December 1937) was a state established in December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The treaty ended the three-year Irish War of Independence between ...
. Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met
Michael Collins Michael Collins or Mike Collins most commonly refers to: * Michael Collins (Irish leader) (1890–1922), Irish revolutionary leader, soldier, and politician * Michael Collins (astronaut) (1930–2021), American astronaut, member of Apollo 11 and Ge ...
, then head of the Free State's
Provisional Government A provisional government, also called an interim government, an emergency government, or a transitional government, is an emergency governmental authority set up to manage a political transition generally in the cases of a newly formed state or f ...
. Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, the Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces. In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death". Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.


1920s

Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was ''
Heartbreak House ''Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes'' is a play written by George Bernard Shaw, first published in 1919 and first played at the Garrick Theatre in November 1920. According to A. C. Ward, the work argues that "cul ...
'', written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on
Broadway Broadway may refer to: Theatre * Broadway Theatre (disambiguation) * Broadway theatre, theatrical productions in professional theatres near Broadway, Manhattan, New York City, U.S. ** Broadway (Manhattan), the street **Broadway Theatre (53rd Stree ...
in November, and was coolly received; according to ''The Times'': "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it". After the London premiere in October 1921 ''The Times'' concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection". Ervine in ''The Observer'' thought the play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword. Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was ''
Back to Methuselah ''Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch)'' by George Bernard Shaw consists of a preface (''The Infidel Half Century'') and a series of five plays: ''In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden)'', ''The Gospel of the Brothers Bar ...
'', written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'". This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD. Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention. The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays. This mood was short-lived. In 1920
Joan of Arc Joan of Arc (french: link=yes, Jeanne d'Arc, translit= an daʁk} ; 1412 – 30 May 1431) is a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the coronati ...
was proclaimed a
saint In religious belief, a saint is a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of Q-D-Š, holiness, likeness, or closeness to God. However, the use of the term ''saint'' depends on the context and Christian denomination, denominat ...
by
Pope Benedict XV Pope Benedict XV (Latin: ''Benedictus XV''; it, Benedetto XV), born Giacomo Paolo Giovanni Battista della Chiesa, name=, group= (; 21 November 185422 January 1922), was head of the Catholic Church from 1914 until his death in January 1922. His ...
; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the
canonisation Canonization is the declaration of a deceased person as an officially recognized saint, specifically, the official act of a Christian communion declaring a person worthy of public veneration and entering their name in the canon catalogue of s ...
prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote '' Saint Joan'' in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan". The citation for the
literature prize A literary award or literary prize is an award presented in recognition of a particularly lauded literary piece or body of work. It is normally presented to an author. Organizations Most literary awards come with a corresponding award ceremony. Ma ...
for 1925 praised his work as "... marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs". After ''Saint Joan'', it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled ''The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism''. The book was published in 1928 and sold well. At the end of the decade Shaw produced his final Fabian tract, a commentary on the
League of Nations The League of Nations (french: link=no, Société des Nations ) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ...
. He described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World". Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", ''
The Apple Cart ''The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza'' is a 1928 play by George Bernard Shaw. It is a satirical comedy about several political philosophies which are expounded by the characters, often in lengthy monologues. The plot follows the fictional ...
'', written in late 1928. It was, in Ervine's view, unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist, anti-democratic line that appealed to contemporary audiences. The premiere was in Warsaw in June 1928, and the first British production was two months later, at Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural Malvern Festival. The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was
Sir Edward Elgar Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestr ...
, with whom Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard. He described ''The Apple Cart'' to Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude". During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. In 1922 he had welcomed
Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...
's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the "indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock", Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant". Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his
ODNB The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September ...
biographical sketch comments that Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade, and Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.


1930s

Shaw's enthusiasm for the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed
Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 19 ...
as "the one really interesting statesman in Europe". Having turned down several chances to visit, in 1931 he joined a party led by
Nancy Astor Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor, (19 May 1879 – 2 May 1964) was an American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP), serving from 1919 to 1945. Astor's first husband was America ...
. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with
Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
, whom Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him. At a dinner given in his honour, Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them". In March 1933 Shaw was a co-signatory to a letter in ''
The Manchester Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' protesting at the continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too fantastic, no slander is too stale ... for employment by the more reckless elements of the British press." Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement. When the
Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described
Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then ...
as "a very remarkable man, a very able man", and professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was "scrupulously polite and just to Hitler". His principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled those powers to partition Poland between them. The pact was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ri ...
as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb. Shaw's first play of the decade was '' Too True to be Good'', written in 1931 and premiered in
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic.
Brooks Atkinson Justin Brooks Atkinson (November 28, 1894 – January 14, 1984) was an American theatre critic. He worked for '' The New York Times'' from 1922 to 1960. In his obituary, the ''Times'' called him "the theater's most influential reviewer of hi ...
of ''The New York Times'' commenting that Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation". The correspondent of ''
The New York Herald Tribune The ''New York Herald Tribune'' was a newspaper published between 1924 and 1966. It was created in 1924 when Ogden Mills Reid of the ''New-York Tribune'' acquired the ''New York Herald''. It was regarded as a "writer's newspaper" and competed ...
'' said that most of the play was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that although the audience enjoyed the play it was bewildered by it. During the decade Shaw travelled widely and frequently. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea. Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome in
South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...
in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country. In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise. In March 1933 they arrived at
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, to begin Shaw's first visit to the US. He had earlier refused to go to "that awful country, that uncivilized place", "unfit to govern itself... illiberal, superstitious, crude, violent, anarchic and arbitrary". He visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House. Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, Shaw was glad when his ship sailed from New York harbour. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he urged its people to be more confident and loosen their dependence on trade with Britain. He used the weeks at sea to complete two plays—''
The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles ''The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles: A Vision of Judgement'' is a 1934 play by George Bernard Shaw. The play is a satirical allegory about an attempt to create a utopian society on a Polynesian island that has recently emerged from the sea. T ...
'' and '' The Six of Calais''—and begin work on a third, ''
The Millionairess ''The Millionairess'' is a 1960 British romantic comedy film directed by Anthony Asquith, and starring Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers. Set in London, it is a loose adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1936 play of the same name. Plot By the t ...
''. Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of ''Pygmalion'' and ''Saint Joan''. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to prevent it from winning one Academy Awards, Academy Award ("Oscar"); he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source. He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study of the Oscars, Anthony Holden observes that ''Pygmalion'' was soon spoken of as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy". Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were ''Cymbeline Refinished'' (1936), ''Geneva (play), Geneva'' (1936) and ''In Good King Charles's Golden Days'' (1939). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a satire on European dictators, attracted more notice, much of it unfavourable. In particular, Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was considered mild, almost sympathetic. The third play, an historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London in May 1940. James Agate commented that the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences could take exception, and though it was long and lacking in dramatic action only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object. After their first runs none of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime. Towards the end of the decade, both Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, and he developed pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.


Second World War and final years

Although Shaw's works since ''The Apple Cart'' had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat. In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including ''Arms and the Man'' with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles. Two touring companies took his plays all round Britain. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, ''Major Barbara (film), Major Barbara'' (1941), was less successful both artistically and commercially than ''Pygmalion'', partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited. Following the United Kingdom declaration of war on Germany (1939), outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid Invasion of Poland, conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism when, in a ''New Statesman'' article, he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference. Nevertheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated peace was impossible, he publicly urged the neutral United States to join the fight. The The Blitz, London blitz of 1940–41 led the Shaws, both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September. Shaw's final political treatise, ''Everybody's Political What's What'', was published in 1944. Holroyd describes this as "a rambling narrative ... that repeats ideas he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself". The book sold well—85,000 copies by the end of the year. After Hitler's suicide in May 1945, Shaw approved of the formal condolences offered by the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin. Shaw disapproved of the postwar Nuremberg trials, trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all potential criminals". Pascal was given a third opportunity to film Shaw's work with ''Caesar and Cleopatra (film), Caesar and Cleopatra'' (1945). It cost three times its original budget and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema". The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film "a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille". In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the British government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history. 1946 saw the publication, as ''The Crime of Imprisonment'', of the preface Shaw had written 20 years previously to a study of prison conditions. It was widely praised; a reviewer in the ''American Journal of Public Health'' considered it essential reading for any student of the American criminal justice system. Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were ''Buoyant Billions'' (1947), his final full-length work; ''Farfetched Fables'' (1948) a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets, ''Shakes versus Shav'' (1949), a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and ''Why She Would Not'' (1950), which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday. During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.


Works


Plays

Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works. He wrote a further twelve in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly one-act play, one-act pieces. Including eight earlier plays that he chose to omit from his published works, the total is sixty-two.


Early works

Shaw's first three full-length plays dealt with social issues. He later grouped them as "Plays Unpleasant". ''Widowers' Houses'' (1892) concerns the landlords of slum properties, and introduces the first of Shaw's New Woman, New Women—a recurring feature of later plays. ''The Philanderer'' (1893) develops the theme of the New Woman, draws on Ibsen, and has elements of Shaw's personal relationships, the character of Julia being based on Jenny Patterson. In a 2003 study Judith Evans describes ''Mrs Warren's Profession'' (1893) as "undoubtedly the most challenging" of the three Plays Unpleasant, taking Mrs Warren's profession—prostitute and, later, brothel-owner—as a metaphor for a prostituted society. Shaw followed the first trilogy with a second, published as "Plays Pleasant". ''Arms and the Man'' (1894) conceals beneath a mock-Ruritanian comic romance a Fabian parable contrasting impractical idealism with pragmatic socialism. The central theme of ''Candida'' (1894) is a woman's choice between two men; the play contrasts the outlook and aspirations of a Christian socialism, Christian Socialist and a poetic idealist. The third of the Pleasant group, ''You Never Can Tell'' (1896), portrays social mobility, and the gap between generations, particularly in how they approach social relations in general and mating in particular. The "Three Plays for Puritans"—comprising ''The Devil's Disciple'' (1896), ''Caesar and Cleopatra'' (1898) and ''Captain Brassbound's Conversion'' (1899)—all centre on questions of empire and imperialism, a major topic of political discourse in the 1890s. The three are set, respectively, in Thirteen Colonies, 1770s America, Ancient Egypt, and History of Morocco#European influence (c. 1830 – 1956), 1890s Morocco. ''The Gadfly'', an adaptation of The Gadfly, the popular novel by Ethel Voynich, was unfinished and unperformed. ''The Man of Destiny'' (1895) is a short curtain raiser about Napoleon.


1900–1909

Shaw's major plays of the first decade of the twentieth century address individual social, political or ethical issues. ''Man and Superman'' (1902) stands apart from the others in both its subject and its treatment, giving Shaw's interpretation of Creative Evolution (book), creative evolution in a combination of drama and associated printed text. ''The Admirable Bashville'' (1901), a blank verse dramatisation of Shaw's novel ''Cashel Byron's Profession'', focuses on the imperial relationship between British Africa, Britain and Africa. ''John Bull's Other Island'' (1904), comically depicting the prevailing relationship between Britain and Ireland, was popular at the time but fell out of the general repertoire in later years. ''Major Barbara'' (1905) presents ethical questions in an unconventional way, confounding expectations that in the depiction of an armaments manufacturer on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other the moral high ground must invariably be held by the latter. ''The Doctor's Dilemma'' (1906), a play about medical ethics and moral choices in allocating scarce treatment, was described by Shaw as a tragedy. With a reputation for presenting characters who did not resemble real flesh and blood, he was challenged by Archer to present an on-stage death, and here did so, with a deathbed scene for the anti-hero. ''Getting Married'' (1908) and ''Misalliance'' (1909)—the latter seen by Judith Evans as a companion piece to the former—are both in what Shaw called his "disquisitionary" vein, with the emphasis on discussion of ideas rather than on dramatic events or vivid characterisation. Shaw wrote seven short plays during the decade; they are all comedies, ranging from the deliberately absurd ''Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction'' (1905) to the satirical ''Press Cuttings'' (1909).


1910–1919

In the decade from 1910 to the aftermath of the First World War Shaw wrote four full-length plays, the third and fourth of which are among his most frequently staged works. ''Fanny's First Play'' (1911) continues his earlier examinations of middle-class British society from a Fabian viewpoint, with additional touches of melodrama and an epilogue in which theatre critics discuss the play. ''Androcles and the Lion'' (1912), which Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice. ''Pygmalion'' (1912) is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, minor character. Shaw's only full-length play from the war years is ''Heartbreak House'' (1917), which in his words depicts "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" drifting towards disaster. Shaw named Shakespeare (''King Lear'') and Anton Chekhov, Chekhov (''The Cherry Orchard'') as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on William Congreve, Congreve (''The Way of the World'') and Ibsen (''The Master Builder''). The short plays range from genial historical drama in ''The Dark Lady of the Sonnets'' and ''Great Catherine'' (1910 and 1913) to a study of polygamy in ''Overruled''; three satirical works about the war (''The Inca of Perusalem'', ''O'Flaherty V.C.'' and ''Augustus Does His Bit'', 1915–16); a piece that Shaw called "utter nonsense" (''The Music Cure'', 1914) and a brief sketch about a "Bolshevik empress" (''Annajanska'', 1917).


1920–1950

''Saint Joan'' (1923) drew widespread praise both for Shaw and for Sybil Thorndike, for whom he wrote the title role and who created the part in Britain. In the view of the commentator Nicholas Grene, Shaw's Joan, a "no-nonsense mystic, Protestant and nationalist before her time" is among the 20th century's classic leading female roles. ''The Apple Cart'' (1929) was Shaw's last popular success. He gave both that play and its successor, ''Too True to Be Good'' (1931), the subtitle "A political extravaganza", although the two works differ greatly in their themes; the first presents the politics of a nation (with a brief royal love-scene as an interlude) and the second, in Judith Evans's words, "is concerned with the social mores of the individual, and is nebulous." Shaw's plays of the 1930s were written in the shadow of worsening national and international political events. Once again, with ''On the Rocks'' (1933) and ''The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles'' (1934), a political comedy with a clear plot was followed by an introspective drama. The first play portrays a British prime minister considering, but finally rejecting, the establishment of a dictatorship; the second is concerned with polygamy and
eugenics Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior o ...
and ends with the Last Judgment, Day of Judgement. ''The Millionairess'' (1934) is a farcical depiction of the commercial and social affairs of a successful businesswoman. ''Geneva'' (1936) lampoons the feebleness of the League of Nations compared with the dictators of Europe. ''In Good King Charles's Golden Days'' (1939), described by Weintraub as a warm, discursive high comedy, also depicts authoritarianism, but less satirically than ''Geneva''. As in earlier decades, the shorter plays were generally comedies, some historical and others addressing various political and social preoccupations of the author. Ervine writes of Shaw's later work that although it was still "astonishingly vigorous and vivacious" it showed unmistakable signs of his age. "The best of his work in this period, however, was full of wisdom and the beauty of mind often displayed by old men who keep their wits about them."


Music and drama reviews


Music

Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages. It covers the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950, but the core of the collection dates from his six years as music critic of ''The Star'' and ''The World'' in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In his view music criticism should be interesting to everyone rather than just the musical élite, and he wrote for the non-specialist, avoiding technical jargon—"Mesopotamian words like 'the dominant of D major'". He was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of Johannes Brahms, Brahms and those British composers such as Charles Villiers Stanford, Stanford and Hubert Parry, Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian. He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of George Frideric Handel, Handel oratorios with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists". He railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.


Drama

In Shaw's view, the London theatres of the 1890s presented too many revivals of old plays and not enough new work. He campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, Media stereotypes, stereotypes and worn-out conventions". As a music critic he had frequently been able to concentrate on analysing new works, but in the theatre he was often obliged to fall back on discussing how various performers tackled well-known plays. In a study of Shaw's work as a theatre critic, E. J. West writes that Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique". Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for ''The Saturday Review'', in which he assessed more than 212 productions. He championed Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen's plays when many theatregoers regarded them as outrageous, and his 1891 book ''Quintessence of Ibsenism'' remained a classic throughout the twentieth century. Of contemporary dramatists writing for the West End stage he rated Oscar Wilde above the rest: "... our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre". Shaw's collected criticisms were published as ''Our Theatres in the Nineties'' in 1932. Shaw maintained a provocative and frequently self-contradictory attitude to Shakespeare (whose name he insisted on spelling "Shakespear"). Many found him difficult to take seriously on the subject; Duff Cooper observed that by attacking Shakespeare, "it is Shaw who appears a ridiculous pigmy shaking his fist at a mountain." Shaw was, nevertheless, a knowledgeable Shakespearian, and in an article in which he wrote, "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his," he also said, "But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more". Shaw had two regular targets for his more extreme comments about Shakespeare: undiscriminating "Bardolatry, Bardolaters", and actors and directors who presented insensitively cut texts in over-elaborate productions. He was continually drawn back to Shakespeare, and wrote three plays with Shakespearean themes: ''The Dark Lady of the Sonnets'', ''Cymbeline Refinished'' and ''Shakes versus Shav''. In a 2001 analysis of Shaw's Shakespearian criticisms, Robert Pierce concludes that Shaw, who was no academic, saw Shakespeare's plays—like all theatre—from an author's practical point of view: "Shaw helps us to get away from the Romantics' picture of Shakespeare as a titanic genius, one whose art cannot be analyzed or connected with the mundane considerations of theatrical conditions and profit and loss, or with a specific staging and cast of actors."


Political and social writings

Shaw's political and social commentaries were published variously in Fabian tracts, in essays, in two full-length books, in innumerable newspaper and journal articles and in prefaces to his plays. The majority of Shaw's Fabian tracts were published anonymously, representing the voice of the society rather than of Shaw, although the society's secretary Edward R. Pease, Edward Pease later confirmed Shaw's authorship. According to Holroyd, the business of the early Fabians, mainly under the influence of Shaw, was to "alter history by rewriting it". Shaw's talent as a pamphleteer was put to immediate use in the production of the society's manifesto—after which, says Holroyd, he was never again so succinct. After the turn of the twentieth century, Shaw increasingly propagated his ideas through the medium of his plays. An early critic, writing in 1904, observed that Shaw's dramas provided "a pleasant means" of proselytising his socialism, adding that "Mr Shaw's views are to be sought especially in the prefaces to his plays". After loosening his ties with the Fabian movement in 1911, Shaw's writings were more personal and often provocative; his response to the furore following the issue of ''Common Sense About the War'' in 1914, was to prepare a sequel, ''More Common Sense About the War''. In this, he denounced the pacifist line espoused by Ramsay MacDonald and other socialist leaders, and proclaimed his readiness to shoot all pacifists rather than cede them power and influence. On the advice of Beatrice Webb, this pamphlet remained unpublished. ''The Intelligent Woman's Guide'', Shaw's main political treatise of the 1920s, attracted both admiration and criticism. MacDonald considered it the world's most important book since the Bible; Harold Laski thought its arguments outdated and lacking in concern for individual freedoms. Shaw's increasing flirtation with dictatorial methods is evident in many of his subsequent pronouncements. A ''New York Times'' report dated 10 December 1933 quoted a recent Fabian Society lecture in which Shaw had praised Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin: "[T]hey are trying to get something done, [and] are adopting methods by which it is possible to get something done". As late as the Second World War, in ''Everybody's Political What's What'', Shaw blamed the Allies of World War I, Allies' "abuse" of their 1918 victory for the rise of Hitler, and hoped that, after defeat, the Führer would escape retribution "to enjoy a comfortable retirement in Ireland or some other neutral country". These sentiments, according to the Irish philosopher-poet Thomas Duddy, "rendered much of the Shavian outlook passé and contemptible". "Creative evolution", Shaw's version of the new science of
eugenics Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior o ...
, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. He introduced his theories in ''The Revolutionist's Handbook'' (1903), an appendix to ''Man and Superman'', and developed them further during the 1920s in ''Back to Methuselah''. A 1946 ''Life'' magazine article observed that Shaw had "always tended to look at people more as a biologist than as an artist". By 1933, in the preface to ''On the Rocks'', he was writing that "if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it"; critical opinion is divided on whether this was intended as irony. In an article in the American magazine ''Liberty'' in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: "There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated". Many commentators assumed that such comments were intended as a joke, although in the worst possible taste. Otherwise, ''Life'' magazine concluded, "this silliness can be classed with his more innocent bad guesses".


Fiction

Shaw's fiction-writing was largely confined to the five unsuccessful novels written in the period 1879–1885. ''Immaturity'' (1879) is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England, Shaw's "own ''David Copperfield''" according to Weintraub. ''The Irrational Knot'' (1880) is a critique of conventional marriage, in which Weintraub finds the characterisations lifeless, "hardly more than animated theories". Shaw was pleased with his third novel, ''Love Among the Artists'' (1881), feeling that it marked a turning point in his development as a thinker, although he had no more success with it than with its predecessors. ''Cashel Byron's Profession'' (1882) is, says Weintraub, an indictment of society which anticipates Shaw's first full-length play, ''Mrs Warren's Profession''. Shaw later explained that he had intended ''An Unsocial Socialist'' as the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism. Gareth Griffiths (academic), Gareth Griffith, in a study of Shaw's political thought, sees the novel as an interesting record of conditions, both in society at large and in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s. Shaw's only subsequent fiction of any substance was his 1932 novella ''The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God'', written during a visit to South Africa in 1932. The eponymous girl, intelligent, inquisitive, and converted to Christianity by insubstantial missionary teaching, sets out to find God, on a journey that after many adventures and encounters, leads her to a secular conclusion. The story, on publication, offended some Christians and was banned in Ireland by the Board of Censors.


Letters and diaries

Shaw was a prolific correspondent throughout his life. His letters, edited by Dan H. Laurence, were published between 1965 and 1988. Shaw once estimated his letters would occupy twenty volumes; Laurence commented that, unedited, they would fill many more. Shaw wrote more than a quarter of a million letters, of which about ten per cent have survived; 2,653 letters are printed in Laurence's four volumes. Among Shaw's many regular correspondents were his childhood friend Edward McNulty; his theatrical colleagues (and ''platonic love, amitiés amoureuses'')
Mrs Patrick Campbell Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner (9 February 1865 – 9 April 1940), better known by her stage name Mrs Patrick Campbell or Mrs Pat, was an English stage actress, best known for appearing in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Barrie. She also toured th ...
and Ellen Terry; writers including Lord Alfred Douglas, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton; the boxer Gene Tunney; the nun Laurentia McLachlan; and the art expert Sydney Cockerell. In 2007 a 316-page volume consisting entirely of Shaw's letters to ''The Times'' was published. Shaw's diaries for 1885–1897, edited by Weintraub, were published in two volumes, with a total of 1,241 pages, in 1986. Reviewing them, the Shaw scholar Fred Crawford wrote: "Although the primary interest for Shavians is the material that supplements what we already know about Shaw's life and work, the diaries are also valuable as a historical and sociological document of English life at the end of the Victorian age." After 1897, pressure of other writing led Shaw to give up keeping a diary.


Miscellaneous and autobiographical

Through his journalism, pamphlets and occasional longer works, Shaw wrote on many subjects. His range of interest and enquiry included vivisection, vegetarianism, religion, language, cinema and photography, on all of which he wrote and spoke copiously. Collections of his writings on these and other subjects were published, mainly after his death, together with volumes of "wit and wisdom" and general journalism. Despite the many books written about him (Holroyd counts 80 by 1939) Shaw's autobiographical output, apart from his diaries, was relatively slight. He gave interviews to newspapers—"GBS Confesses", to ''The Daily Mail'' in 1904 is an example—and provided sketches to would-be biographers whose work was rejected by Shaw and never published. In 1939 Shaw drew on these materials to produce ''Shaw Gives Himself Away'', a miscellany which, a year before his death, he revised and republished as ''Sixteen Self Sketches'' (there were seventeen). He made it clear to his publishers that this slim book was in no sense a full autobiography.


Beliefs and opinions

Throughout his lifetime Shaw professed many beliefs, often contradictory. This inconsistency was partly an intentional provocation—the Spanish scholar-statesman Salvador de Madariaga describes Shaw as "a pole of negative electricity set in a people of positive electricity". In one area at least Shaw was constant: in his lifelong refusal to follow normal English forms of spelling and punctuation. He favoured archaic spellings such as "shew" for "show"; he dropped the "u" in words like "honour" and "favour"; and wherever possible he rejected the apostrophe in contractions such as "won't" or "that's". In his will, Shaw ordered that, after some specified legacies, his remaining assets were to form a trust to pay for fundamental reform of the English alphabet into a phonetic version of forty letters. Though Shaw's intentions were clear, his drafting was flawed, and the courts initially ruled the intended trust void. A later out-of-court agreement provided a sum of £8,300 for spelling reform; the bulk of his fortune went to the residuary legatees—the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the National Gallery of Ireland. Most of the £8,300 went on a special phonetic edition of ''Androcles and the Lion'' in the Shavian alphabet, published in 1962 to a largely indifferent reception. Shaw's views on religion and Christianity were less consistent. Having in his youth proclaimed himself an atheist, in middle age he explained this as a reaction against the Old Testament image of a vengeful Jehovah. By the early twentieth century, he termed himself a "mystic", although Gary Sloan, in an essay on Shaw's beliefs, disputes his credentials as such. In 1913 Shaw declared that he was not religious "in the sectarian sense", aligning himself with Jesus as "a person of no religion". In the preface (1915) to ''Androcles and the Lion'', Shaw asks "Why not give Christianity a chance?" contending that Britain's social order resulted from the continuing choice of Barabbas over Christ. In a broadcast just before the Second World War, Shaw invoked the Sermon on the Mount, "a very moving exhortation, and it gives you one first-rate tip, which is to do good to those who despitefully use you and persecute you". In his will, Shaw stated that his "religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution". He requested that no one should imply that he accepted the beliefs of any specific religious organisation, and that no memorial to him should "take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice". Shaw espoused racial equality, and inter-marriage between people of different races. Despite his expressed wish to be fair to Hitler, he called anti-Semitism "the hatred of the lazy, ignorant fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business". In ''The Jewish Chronicle'' he wrote in 1932, "In every country you can find rabid people who have a phobia against Jews, Jesuits, Armenians, Negroes, Freemasons, Irishmen, or simply foreigners as such. Political parties are not above exploiting these fears and jealousies." In 1903 Shaw joined in a vaccine controversies, controversy about vaccination against smallpox. He called vaccination "a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft"; in his view immunisation campaigns were a cheap and inadequate substitute for a decent programme of housing for the poor, which would, he declared, be the means of eradicating smallpox and other infectious diseases. Less contentiously, Shaw was keenly interested in transport; Laurence observed in 1992 a need for a published study of Shaw's interest in "bicycling, motorbikes, automobiles, and planes, climaxing in his joining the British Interplanetary Society, Interplanetary Society in his nineties". Shaw published articles on travel, took photographs of his journeys, and submitted notes to the Royal Automobile Club. Shaw strove throughout his adult life to be referred to as "Bernard Shaw" rather than "George Bernard Shaw", but confused matters by continuing to use his full initials—G.B.S.—as a by-line, and often signed himself "G.Bernard Shaw". He left instructions in his will that his executor (the Public Trustee) was to license publication of his works only under the name Bernard Shaw. Shaw scholars including Ervine, Judith Evans, Holroyd, Laurence and Weintraub, and many publishers have respected Shaw's preference, although the Cambridge University Press was among the exceptions with its 1988 ''Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw''.


Legacy and influence


Theatrical

Shaw did not found a school of dramatists as such, but Crawford asserts that today "we recognise [him] as second only to Shakespeare in the British theatrical tradition ... the proponent of the theater of ideas" who struck a death-blow to 19th-century melodrama. According to Laurence, Shaw pioneered "intelligent" theatre, in which the audience was required to think, thereby paving the way for the new breeds of twentieth-century playwrights from John Galsworthy, Galsworthy to Harold Pinter, Pinter. Crawford lists numerous playwrights whose work owes something to that of Shaw. Among those active in Shaw's lifetime he includes Noël Coward, who based his early comedy ''The Young Idea'' on ''You Never Can Tell'' and continued to draw on the older man's works in later plays. T. S. Eliot, by no means an admirer of Shaw, admitted that the epilogue of ''Murder in the Cathedral'', in which Thomas Becket, Becket's slayers explain their actions to the audience, might have been influenced by ''Saint Joan''. The critic Eric Bentley comments that Eliot's later play ''The Confidential Clerk'' "had all the earmarks of Shavianism ... without the merits of the real Bernard Shaw". Among more recent British dramatists, Crawford marks Tom Stoppard as "the most Shavian of contemporary playwrights"; Shaw's "serious farce" is continued in the works of Stoppard's contemporaries Alan Ayckbourn, Henry Livings and Peter Nichols (playwright), Peter Nichols. Shaw's influence crossed the Atlantic at an early stage. Bernard Dukore notes that he was successful as a dramatist in America ten years before achieving comparable success in Britain. Among many American writers professing a direct debt to Shaw, Eugene O'Neill became an admirer at the age of seventeen, after reading ''The Quintessence of Ibsenism''. Other Shaw-influenced American playwrights mentioned by Dukore are Elmer Rice, for whom Shaw "opened doors, turned on lights, and expanded horizons"; William Saroyan, who empathised with Shaw as "the embattled individualist against the philistines"; and S. N. Behrman, who was inspired to write for the theatre after attending a performance of ''Caesar and Cleopatra'': "I thought it would be agreeable to write plays like that". Assessing Shaw's reputation in a 1976 critical study, T. F. Evans described Shaw as unchallenged in his lifetime and since as the leading English-language dramatist of the (twentieth) century, and as a master of prose style. The following year, in a contrary assessment, the playwright John Osborne castigated ''The Guardian''s theatre critic Michael Billington (critic), Michael Billington for referring to Shaw as "the greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare". Osborne responded that Shaw "is the most fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid critic or fool a dull public". Despite this hostility, Crawford sees the influence of Shaw in some of Osborne's plays, and concludes that though the latter's work is neither imitative nor derivative, these affinities are sufficient to classify Osborne as an inheritor of Shaw. In a 1983 study, R. J. Kaufmann suggests that Shaw was a key forerunner—"godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias"—of the Theatre of the Absurd. Two further aspects of Shaw's theatrical legacy are noted by Crawford: his opposition to stage censorship, which was finally ended in 1968, and his efforts which extended over many years to establish a Royal National Theatre, National Theatre. Shaw's short 1910 play ''The Dark Lady of the Sonnets'', in which Shakespeare pleads with Elizabeth I of England, Queen Elizabeth I for the endowment of a state theatre, was part of this campaign. Writing in ''The New Statesman'' in 2012 Daniel Janes commented that Shaw's reputation had declined by the time of his 150th anniversary in 2006 but had recovered considerably. In Janes's view, the many current revivals of Shaw's major works showed the playwright's "almost unlimited relevance to our times". In the same year, Mark Lawson wrote in ''The Guardian'' that Shaw's moral concerns engaged present-day audiences, and made him—like his model, Ibsen—one of the most popular playwrights in contemporary British theatre. The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada is the second largest repertory theatre company in North America. It produces plays by or written during the lifetime of Shaw as well as some contemporary works. The Gingold Theatrical Group, founded in 2006, presents works by Shaw and others in New York City that feature the humanitarian ideals that his work promoted. It became the first theatre group to present all of Shaw's stage work through its monthly concert series ''Project Shaw''.Keddy, Genevieve Rafter
"Project Shaw Presents ''Super Shaw Women''
18 July 2017, accessed 3 June 2018


General

In the 1940s the author Harold Nicolson advised the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, National Trust not to accept the bequest of Shaw's Corner, predicting that Shaw would be totally forgotten within fifty years. In the event, Shaw's broad cultural legacy, embodied in the widely used term "Shavian", has endured and is nurtured by Shaw Societies in various parts of the world. The original society was founded in London in 1941 and survives; it organises meetings and events, and publishes a regular bulletin ''The Shavian''. The Shaw Society of America began in June 1950; it foundered in the 1970s but its journal, adopted by Penn State University Press, continued to be published as ''Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies'' until 2004. A second American organisation, founded in 1951 as "The Bernard Shaw Society", remains active . More recent societies have been established in Japan and India. Besides his collected music criticism, Shaw has left a varied musical legacy, not all of it of his choosing. Despite his dislike of having his work adapted for the musical theatre ("my plays set themselves to a verbal music of their own") two of his plays were turned into musical comedies: ''Arms and the Man'' was the basis of ''The Chocolate Soldier'' in 1908, with music by Oscar Straus (composer), Oscar Straus, and ''Pygmalion'' was adapted in 1956 as ''My Fair Lady'' with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. Although he had a high regard for Elgar, Shaw turned down the composer's request for an opera libretto, but played a major part in persuading the BBC to commission Elgar's Symphony No. 3 (Elgar/Payne), Third Symphony, and was the dedicatee of ''The Severn Suite'' (1930). The substance of Shaw's political legacy is uncertain. In 1921 Shaw's erstwhile collaborator William Archer, in a letter to the playwright, wrote: "I doubt if there is any case of a man so widely read, heard, seen, and known as yourself, who has produced so little effect on his generation." Margaret Cole, who considered Shaw the greatest writer of his age, professed never to have understood him. She thought he worked "immensely hard" at politics, but essentially, she surmises, it was for fun—"the fun of a brilliant artist". After Shaw's death, Pearson wrote: "No one since the time of Tom Paine has had so definite an influence on the social and political life of his time and country as Bernard Shaw." In its obituary tribute to Shaw, ''The Times Literary Supplement'' concluded:


Notes


References


Citations


Sources


Books

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Shaw's writings

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Journals

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Newspapers

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Online

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External links

* * (About 50 ebooks of Shaw's works and some additional Shaw-related material) * * (More links to Shaw-related material) * (19 downloads for audiobooks) * (Information on Broadway productions, 1894 to present) * (Lists all film and TV versions of Shaw's works since 1921)
Shaw photographs held at LSE Library

International Shaw Society

The Shaw Society, UK, established in 1941



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Harry Ransom Center
at The University of Texas at Austin * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Shaw, George Bernard George Bernard Shaw, 1856 births 1950 deaths 19th-century British dramatists and playwrights 19th-century Irish dramatists and playwrights 19th-century male writers 20th-century British dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Irish dramatists and playwrights 20th-century British male writers Accidental deaths from falls Accidental deaths in England Anti-vivisectionists Articles containing video clips Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners British eugenicists British male dramatists and playwrights British music critics British Nobel laureates British screenwriters British socialists Burials at Ayot St Lawrence Classical music critics Deaths from kidney failure English-language spelling reform advocates Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature PEN International Irish anti-vaccination activists Irish Dominion League Irish male dramatists and playwrights Irish music critics Irish Nobel laureates Irish people of English descent Irish screenwriters Irish socialists Members of St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council Members of the Fabian Society Writers from Dublin (city) Nobel laureates in Literature People associated with the British Museum People associated with the London School of Economics People associated with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art People educated at Wesley College, Dublin People from Ayot St Lawrence People from Portobello, Dublin Victorian novelists 20th-century British screenwriters Holodomor deniers