George Bernard Shaw

I

Introduction

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish-born writer, considered the most significant British dramatist since William Shakespeare. His plays are essentially brilliant dialogues on such topics as religion, politics, money, science, marriage, and art. Although regarded as comedies, the plays represent a serious effort to influence the ideas and attitudes of the audience. Often, conventional ideas are inverted or twisted to shock the public into a fresh awareness. Despite his emphasis on ideas, Shaw created probably the most memorable collection of dramatic characters since the 17th century.

In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), Shaw is regarded as the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature’s great letter writers.

II

Early Years

Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. His father, from the Protestant Irish upper class, was an unsuccessful and unhappy merchant and an alcoholic. Shaw later described himself as “a social downstart,” in typical fashion reversing the standard phrase “social upstart.” For extra income his mother gave singing lessons. Shaw later remembered her as a distant and unaffectionate mother.

After attending both Protestant and Catholic day schools, Shaw took a clerical job at the age of 16. Thereafter he was self-educated, a situation that may partly explain the originality and independence of his thinking. After his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London. Shaw joined them there in 1876, at the age of 20.

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III

Early Career

Shaw’s first decade in London, beginning in 1876, was one of frustration and near poverty. He wrote five novels between 1879 and 1883 and received numerous rejections from publishers. Only two of the novels eventually found publishers: Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882), about prizefighting as an occupation, and An Unsocial Socialist (1883). Shaw later said of these works, “I wrote them because I knew I had to do something and was incapable of doing anything else. I hated them and felt ashamed of them afterwards, for they reminded me of the dreadful years when I walked the streets of London in shabby clothes without a penny in my pocket. But they taught me my job.”

By the mid-1880s Shaw had discovered the writings of political philosopher Karl Marx and turned to public speaking and writing socialist propaganda and critical journalism. He also became, and remained, a firm believer in vegetarianism, and he never drank alcohol, coffee, or tea. He joined the newly founded Fabian Society in 1884 and served on its executive committee from 1885 to 1911. The Fabian Society was a middle-class socialist group that felt capitalism had created an unjust society. Its members aimed at transforming English government and society gradually and did not promote revolution.

Shaw supported women’s rights, equality of income, and the abolition of private property. He also campaigned for a simplification and reform of English spelling in the belief that this would benefit democracy. Through the Fabian Society’s founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw met an Irish heiress, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom he married in 1898.

Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns, from 1888 to 1890 under the signature “Corno di Bassetto” (basset horn) and later under his own initials. He wrote favorably on the music of German composer Richard Wagner and the dramas of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Wagner was then regarded as mad, and Ibsen’s work was considered offensive. Shaw helped alter attitudes toward both.

In 1898 Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite appeared, championing Wagner. As drama critic for the Saturday Review, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw became Ibsen’s champion. In his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Shaw analyzed Ibsen’s work as a challenge and reversal of accepted beliefs, and he applauded Ibsen’s use of paradox and contradiction.

IV

The First Plays

By the early 1890s Shaw was already well known as a public speaker and journalist. But his early plays met with little success. In general, they puzzled audiences with their analytic treatment of themes at the time considered inappropriate for the stage. Also puzzling was Shaw’s use of wit and paradox, which made the audience uncertain about his viewpoint and the seriousness of his intentions. The first plays received brief runs at best or no productions at all.

Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (produced in 1892), borrowed devices and aims from Ibsen and confused audiences by ignoring the conventions of English drama at that time. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a play about prostitution first produced in 1902, was banned by censors as obscene. To gain a larger audience Shaw published his first seven works for the stage as Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). In addition to Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, the volume included Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell.

Shaw published a second volume of plays, Three Plays for Puritans, in 1901. It contained The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. The Devil’s Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the American Revolution, became a success in the United States because of its wit and because audiences enjoyed the very melodramatic elements Shaw had set out to satirize. The Devil’s Disciple was the first of Shaw’s plays to make money.

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