GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish dramatist, literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th Century Theater. Shaw was a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights and an advocate of equality of income. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Litera-ture. Shaw accepted the honor but refused the money.

George Bernard Shaw was born on 26 July 1856, in Dublin, as the son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elisabeth Shaw. His father was a drunkard, which made his son a teetotaler. Shaw went to the Wesleyan Connexional School, then moved to a private school near Dalkey, and then to Dublin's Central Model School, ending his formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. Shaw hated school but loved reading and writing. He also learned a great deal about music and art from his mother, a music teacher and singer. At the age of 15 he started to work as a junior clerk. In 1876 he went to London, joining his sister and mother. Shaw did not return to Ireland for nearly thirty years. Shaw began his literary career by writing music and theatre criticism, and novels, including the semi-autobiographical Immaturity without much success. In 1884 Shaw joined the socialist Fabian Society, and served on its execu-tive committee from 1885 to 1911. In 1895 Shaw became a drama critic for the Saturday Review. These articles were later collected in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932). Shaw also wrote music, art and drama criticism for Dramatic Review (1885-86), Our Corner (1885-86), The Pall Mall Gazette (1885-88), The World (1886-94), and The Star (1888-90) as 'Corno di Basetto'. His music criticism has been collected in Shaw's Music (1981). The Perfect Wagnerite appeared in 1898 and Caesar and Cleopatra in 1901. In 1898 Shaw married the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townshend. They settled in 1906 in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence. Shaw remained with Charlotte until her death, although he was occasionally linked with other women. He carried on a passionate correspondence over the years with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a widow and actress.

His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy,

while in plays such as Arms and the Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell», and the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).

In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methu-selah (1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the middle ages to the present. Other important plays are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful «discussion» plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classi-fied as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humor of which is directed at the medical pro-fession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class mo-rality and

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