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George Bernard Shaw

1856–1950

 

In contrast to SAMUEL BECKETT [48] and EUGENE O'NEILL [45], George Bernard Shaw epitomizes a sense of optimism about man and his achievements.  He was another of the Irish artists to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work, 'which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty'.

      These comments provide an insight into the work of one of the world's most important dramatists, who was born in Dublin on 26th July 1856, a decade after the famine, and lived to see the arrival of the atom bomb.  His family was middle-class, decayed gentry, in financial difficulties.  A poor student at school, Shaw found employment in an estate agent's office, but did not find the work agreeable.

      In 1876 he migrated to London to join his mother and sister.  There he found desultory work as a journalist.  He attempted to write novels, but these were either failures or sold badly.  But he was tenacious.  He later commented that poverty threw his mother into the struggle for survival, and vowed never again to do 'an honest day's work'.  He thought his later success validated this early decision to disregard 'all the quack duties which lead the poor lad of fiction to the White House'.

      From his mother he had inherited a love and knowledge of music; music, indeed, had been the constant factor in his upbringing.  And it was as a music critic, and then an art critic for the newspapers that he began to be better known.  He then added drama critic to the list.  Having commented on the work of others, he thought that he might do better.

      Since 1884 he had been a socialist and member of the Fabian Society, a group of socialists who worked for the evolutionary improvement of society rather than immediate revolution.  He had been converted to socialism after hearing the American Henry George speak in London.  He was deeply involved in the society, editing Fabian Essays in 1887.  For many years he was also involved in municipal politics.

      For thirteen years Shaw wrote for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, his views on art and drama proving effective in their impact on taste.  Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he railed against the settled, comfortable nature of London theatre.  He was also a champion of Wagner.  His strong opinions about art, society, and politics proved from the beginning to be the material for his plays.

      Between 1885 and 1913 he wrote some twenty-five plays, of all lengths.  Over the length of his career, up to 1939, he wrote an average of a play a year.  These were not only produced, but were published as books, equipped with long prefaces treating not only the plays, but their subject matter and background, some of which dealt with medicine, housing, religion, and so on.  These were published by the author himself, his ostensible publisher being his agent, so that Shaw could control all details of their production.

      His first play was Widower's Houses, which attacked slum landlords.  This was followed by Arms and the Man in 1894, which lampooned the romance attached to soldiering, especially in the British Empire and America.  Mrs Warren's Profession, which dealt with a prostitute of great capacity who runs a series of brothels, continued his attack on social problems.  It was so shocking that it was banned by the censor and not produced until 1902.

      His plays have little in the way of mere mechanical plot.  They are dramas of conflict and debate, the clash of the old and the new, the young and the aged.  He remained at work until the age of eighty-three, when he wrote In Good King Charles' Golden Days.  Mentally he remained alert and caustic till the end of his life.

      In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend, an Irish heiress.  Though he maintained a London flat, in 1906 they moved to 'Shaw's Corner' at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire.

      In old age Shaw became one of those public figures whom the newspaper could rely on for comments on everything from nudism to the atom bomb.  To a vast public unacquainted with his plays and books, he became best known for My Fair Lady, a musical based on his play Pygmalion.  The estate of this strong-minded socialist benefited by many millions of dollars.

      Eccentric to the end, he had also left money for alphabet reform, another one of his quirks.  A novel revision of the alphabet was eventually awarded a prize, and a version of Androcles and the Lion was published, using the new forms - but alas the Shaw alphabet failed to gain acceptance.

      Stripped of all its merely ephemeral details, Shaw's career is still an extraordinary one.  His plays are still alive on the stage.  Though many of the issues which he addressed are now dead ones, his hatred of hypocrisy and cant is still very much alive.  He was, in the eyes of many of his admirers in Europe and America, the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, and a rival of merit to William Shakespeare.

      Shaw had hated his youth in Dublin and was glad to leave it, but he and his wife and family had financial interests there.  The perennial problems of Ireland came under his review in John Bull's Other Island, which dealt with the mental barriers between the natives of both islands.  Here, the Englishman Tom Broadbent is mystically enchanted with Ireland's romantic past, while his friend Larry Doyle is a realist, intent on transforming the dying, dreaming nation.  In this debate Shaw's own mouthpiece is the former priest Peter Keegan, whose middle way is an ideal state, a Shavian socialist commonwealth.  The play was written for the Abbey Theatre in 1904, but rejected by them, and only performed in Dublin in September 1916, a year which had seen other kinds of dreamers at large with guns on the Irish streets.

      In her will, his wife left her money to an institution to improve the manners of Irishmen - perhaps a common on her husband's own abrasive nature.  When he died Shaw left part of his estate, later enriched by royalties from My Fair Lady, to the National Gallery in Dublin, where he had spent so many happy hours as a young man.  It was from the great European masters of that collection that he gained his first hint that the ideal of the artist was 'to shew us to ourselves as we really are'.

      As Shavian scholar William F. Feeney put it: 'Shaw, young man of Dublin, senior citizen of the world, continues to stand before us on his soapbox, Mephistophelian, nimble, provocative, outrageous, teasing, or brow-beating us to hear him out.'