228- ] English Literature - George Bernard Shaw

228- ] English Literature

George Bernard Shaw Summary

(July 26, 1856 – November 2nd, 1950)

Biography 

George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26 1856 in Dublin Ireland the son of a civil servant. Although he was best known for drama, he was also proficient in the areas of journalism, music and literary criticism. He began his literary career as a novelist. Shaw’s works concerned themselves mostly with prevailing social problems, specifically with what he saw as the exploitation of the working middle class. Shaw attended various schools throughout his youth but always harboured an animosity towards schools and teachers. He is quoted as saying that “Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents”.

In his personal life, Shaw was an avid Socialist and a member of the Fabian society. In 1898 he married fellow Fabian member and Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townsend. He was the first person to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature as well as an Oscar (for his work on Pygmalion, which was an adaptation of his play of the same name). He wrote 60 plays, most of which deal with social themes such as marriage, religion, class government and health care. Two of his greatest influences were Henrik Ibsen and Henry Fielding. Ibsen’s plays and Fielding’s expulsion from playwriting inspired him to write his own plays on the social injustices of the world around him, including the late nineteenth century censorship of plays, continued from Prime Minister Walpole’s rein in the mid 1740s. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays especially irked him:

“A gentleman who robs, insults, and suppresses me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects… But I must submit [my play] in order to obtain from him an insolent and insufferable document, which I cannot read without boiling of the blood, certifying that in his opinion — his opinion!– my play ‘does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage,’ and that the Lord Chamberlain therefore ‘allows’ its performance (confound his impudence!).” (Mainly xv)

George Bernard Shaw died at the age of 94 due to injuries incurred from falling while pruning a tree.

His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent’s office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. 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 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», 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 Methuselah (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 by Shaw 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 classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. 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 morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw’s greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw’s comedies their special flavour.

Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

Works

Short Stories

The Black Girl in Search of God

The Miraculous Revenge

Novels

Immaturity

Cashel Byron’s Profession

The Unsocial Socialist

The Irrational Knot

Love Among the Artists

Plays (In chronological order)

Plays Unpleasant

Widowers’ Houses

The Philanderer

Mrs. Warren’s Profession

To read the script with the Author’s Apology, click HERE.

Plays Pleasant

Arms and the Man

Candida

The Man of Destiny

You Can Never Tell

Three Plays for Puritans

The Devil’s Disciple

Caesar and Cleopatra

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion

The Admirable Bashville

Man and Superman

John Bull’s Other Island

How He Lied to Her Husband

Major Barbara

The Doctor’s Dilemma

Getting Married

The Glimpse of Reality

The Fascinating Foundling

Press Cuttings

Misalliance

Annajanska, The Bolshevik Empress

The Dark Lady of the Sonnets

Fanny’s First Play

Overruled

Androcles and the Lion

Pygmalion

The Great Catherine

The Inca of Perusalem

O’Flaherty VC

Augustus Does His Bit

Heartbreak House

Back to Methuselah

Saint Joan

In the Beginning

The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabus

The Thing Happens

Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman

As Far as Thought Can Reach

The Apple Cart

Too True to be Good

On the Rocks

The Six of Calias

The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles

The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet

The Millionaires

Geneva

In Good King Charles Golden Days

Bouyant Billions

Shakes Versus Shav

Essays

The Quintessence of Ibenism

The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring

Maxims for Revolutionists

Preface to Major Barabara

How to Write a Popular Play

Treatise on Parents and Children

Common Sense about the War

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

Dictators-Let Us Have More of Them

“Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism of Bernard Shaw in Three Volumes”

“Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings”