236- ] English Literature , George Bernard Shaw

236- ] English Literature 

George Bernard Shaw 

List of works by George Bernard Shaw

The following is a list of works by George Bernard Shaw. The first section shows works in chronological sequence as written, the second tabulates these works by genre. In addition to the works listed here, Shaw produced a large quantity of journalism and criticism, particularly in his role as a music and theatre critic. These items are not included in the lists, except for the collections which Shaw himself supervised and which were published during his lifetime; these appear in the brief third section. Other collections of Shaw's journalism and correspondence, and editions of his plays, have been published since his death but again are not listed here.

The main source is the chronology provided by the International Shaw Society. Items not covered by the chronology are separately cited. Items marked are works published anonymously by or for the Fabian Society, where Shaw's authorship was later confirmed by the Society. Except where indicated, the publication year is that of first publication.

Chronological list

Date written          Title   Year first performed (plays)         Year of publication	1878  The Legg Papers (abandoned draft of novel)                unpublished	1878  "My Dear Dorothea..."                   1906
1878  Passion Play (fragment)            1971	1879  Immaturity (novel)                   1930	1880  The Irrational Knot (novel)                   serial 1885–7; book 1905
1881  Love Among the Artists (novel)           serial 1887–8; book 1900	1882  Cashel Byron's Profession (novel)           serial 1885–6; book 1886; rev 1889, 1901	1883  An Unsocial Socialist (novel)              serial 1884; book 1887
1884  "A Manifesto" (Fabian tract 2)              1884	1884  Un Petit Drame (playlet)                1959	1884–92          Widowers' Houses (play)          1893  1893; rev. 1898
1885  "The Miraculous Revenge" (short story)          1906	1885  To provident landlords and capitalists (Fabian tract 3)                  1885	1887  The true radical programme (Fabian tract 6: Shaw a contributor)                 1887
1887–88      An Unfinished Novel (novel fragment)            1958	1889  Fabian Essays in Socialism (ed. Shaw with 2 Shaw essays)                   1889; rev. 1908, 1931, 1948	1890  What socialism is (Fabian tract 13)‡                    1890
1890  "Ibsen" (Lecture before the Fabian Society)              1970	1891  The Quintessence of Ibsenism (criticism)                    1891; rev. 1913	1892  Fabian election manifesto (Fabian tract 40)‡              1892[3]
1892  The Fabian Society: what it has done, and how it has done it (Fabian tract 42)1892 rev. 1899	1892  "Vote! Vote!! Vote!!!" (Fabian Tract 43)              1892	1893  The Impossibilities of Anarchism (Fabian tract 45)                1892
1893  The Philanderer (play)          1905  1898	1893  Mrs. Warren's Profession (play)          1902  1898, rev. 1930	1893–94      Arms and the Man (play)          1894  1898, rev. 1930
1894  A Plan of Campaign for Labor (incorporating "To Your Tents, O Israel") (Fabian tract 49)‡              1894	1894  Candida (play)          1897  1898, rev. 1930	1895  The Man of Destiny (play)          1897  1898, rev. 1930
1895  The Sanity of Art (art criticism)           1895, rev. 1908	1895–96      You Never Can Tell (play)          1899  1898, rev. 1930	1896  Fabian report and resolutions to the IS and TU Congress (Fabian tract 70)‡                    1896
1896  The Devil's Disciple (play)          1897  1901, rev. 1904	1898  The Perfect Wagnerite (music criticism)               1898, rev. 1907	1898  Caesar and Cleopatra (play)          1901  1901, rev. 1930
1899  Captain Brassbound's Conversion (play)          1900  1901	1900  Fabianism and The Empire: A Manifesto (ed. Shaw)                    1900	1900  Women as councillors (Fabian tract 93)‡              1900[3]
1901  Socialism for millionaires (Fabian tract 107)              1901	1901  The Admirable Bashville (play)          1902  1901	1901–02      Man and Superman incorporating Don Juan in Hell (play)          1905  1903; rev. 1930
1904  Fabianism and the fiscal question (Fabian tract 116)                    1904	1904  John Bull's Other Island (play)          1904  1907; rev. 1930	1904  How He Lied to Her Husband (play)          1904  1907
1904  The Common Sense of Municipal Trading (social commentary)                  1908	1905  Major Barbara (play) 1905  1907; rev. 1930, 1945	1905  Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction (play) 1905  1905
1906  The Doctor's Dilemma (play)          1906  1911	1907  The Interlude at the Playhouse (playlet)      1907          1927	1907–08      Getting Married (play)          1908  1911
1907–08      Brieux: A Preface (criticism)                    1910	1909  The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (play) 1909  1911; rev. 1930	1909  Press Cuttings (play) 1909  1909
1909  The Glimpse of Reality (play)          1927  1926	1909  The Fascinating Foundling (play)          1928  1926	1909  Misalliance (play) 1910  1914; rev. 1930
1910  Socialism and superior brains: a reply to Mr. Mallock (Fabian tract 146)                    1926[4]	1910  The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (play)          1910  1914	1910–11      Fanny's First Play (play)          1911  1914;
1912  Androcles and the Lion (play)          1913  1916	1912  Overruled (play) 1912  1916	1912  Pygmalion          1913  1916; rev. 1941
1913  Beauty's Duty (playlet)                1932	1913  Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores (play) 1913  1919	1913–14      The Music-Cure (play)          1914  1926
1914  Common Sense about The War (political commentary)                  1914	1914  The Case for Belgium (pamphlet)                    1914[5]	1915  The Inca of Perusalem (play)          1916  1919
1915  O'Flaherty V.C. (play)  1917          1919	1915  More Common Sense about The War (political commentary)                  unpublished	1916  Augustus Does His Bit (play)          1917  1919
1916–17          Heartbreak House (play)          1920  1919	1917  Doctors’ Delusions; Crude Criminology; Sham Education (compilation)                  1931	1917  Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress (play)          1918  1919
1917  How To Settle The Irish Question (political commentary)                  1917	1917  What I Really Wrote about The War (political commentary)                  1931	1918–20      Back to Methuselah (play)          1922  1921; rev. 1930, 1945
1919  Peace Conference Hints (political commentary)                  1919	1919  Ruskin's Politics (lecture of 21 November 1919)             1921	1920–21      Jitta's Atonement (play, adapted from the German)     1923          1926
1923  Saint Joan (play) 1923  1924	1925  Imprisonment (social commentary)                    1925; rev. 1946 as The Crime of Imprisonment	1928  The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism            1928; rev. 1937
1928  The Apple Cart (play)  1929          1930	1929  The League of Nations (political commentary)                  1929	1930  Socialism: Principles and Outlook, and Fabianism (Fabian tract 233)              1929
1931  Pen Portraits and Reviews (criticism)             1931	1931–34      The Millionairess (play)          1936  1936	1932  The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (story)                   1932
1932  Essays in Fabian Socialism (reprinted tracts with 2 new essays)                    1932	1932  The Rationalization of Russia (political commentary)          1964	1933  The Future of Political Science in America (political commentary)          1933
1933  Village Wooing (play)          1934  1934	1933  On The Rocks (play) 1933  1934	1934  The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (play)  1935          1936
1934  The Six of Calais (play)          1934  1936	1934  Short Stories, Scraps, and Shavings (stories & playlets)          1934  1934	1936  Arthur and the Acetone (playlet)          1936  1936
1936  Cymbeline Refinished (play)          1937  1938	1936  Geneva (play)          1938  1939; rev. 1939, 1940, 1946, 1947	1936–47      Buoyant Billions (play)          1948  1949
1937–38          Pygmalion (film screenplay, with co-writers)          1938  1941	1938–39      In Good King Charles's Golden Days (play)          1939  1939; rev. 1947	1939  Shaw Gives Himself Away: An Autobiographical Miscellany            1939
1944  Everybody’s Political What's What (political commentary)                  1944	1948  Farfetched Fables (play)          1950  1951	1948  The RADA Graduates' Keeepsake and Counsellor (RADA handbook)            1948
1949  Sixteen Self Sketches (revision of Shaw Gives Himself Away)                   1949	1949  Shakes versus Shav (puppet play)          1949  1950	1950  Why She Would Not (play)          1957  1960
1950  Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot Saint Lawrence                    1950	Works listed by genre

Dramatic works

Date written	Title	Year first performed
Year of publication
1878	Passion Play: A Dramatic Fragment	unperformed
1884	Un Petit Drame	unperformed
1884–92	Widowers' Houses	1893
1893; rev. 1898
1893	The Philanderer	1905
1898
1893	Mrs. Warren's Profession	1902
1898, rev. 1930
1893–94	Arms and the Man	1894
1898, rev. 1930
1894	Candida	1897
1898, rev. 1930
1895	The Man of Destiny	1897
1898, rev. 1930
1895–96	You Never Can Tell	1899
1898, rev. 1930
1896	The Devil's Disciple	1897
1901, rev. 1904
1898	Caesar and Cleopatra	1901
1901, rev. 1930
1899	Captain Brassbound's Conversion	1900
1901
1901	The Admirable Bashville	1902
1901
1901–02	Man and Superman incorporating Don Juan in Hell	1905
1930
1904	John Bull's Other Island	1904
1907; rev. 1930
1904	How He Lied to Her Husband	1904
1907
1905	Major Barbara (play)	1905
1907; rev. 1930, 1945
1905	Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction	1905
1905
1906	The Doctor's Dilemma	1906
1911
1907	The Interlude at the Playhouse (playlet)	1907
1927
1907–08	Getting Married	1908
1911
1909	The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet	1909
1911; rev. 1930
1909	Press Cuttings	1909
1909
1909	The Glimpse of Reality	1927
1926
1909	The Fascinating Foundling	1928
1926
1909	Misalliance	1910
1914; rev. 1930
1910	The Dark Lady of the Sonnets	1910
1914
1910–11	Fanny's First Play	1911
1914;
1912	Androcles and the Lion	1913
1916
1912	Overruled	1912
1916
1912	Pygmalion	1913
1916; rev. 1941
1913	Beauty's Duty (playlet)	unperformed
1932
1913	Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores	1913
1919
1913–14	The Music-Cure	1914
1926
1915	The Inca of Perusalem	1916
1919
1915	O'Flaherty V.C.	1917
1919
1916	Augustus Does His Bit	1917
1919
1916–17	Heartbreak House	1920
1919
1917	Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress	1918
1919
1918–20	Back to Methuselah	1922
1921; rev. 1930, 1945
1920–21	Jitta's Atonement (adapted from the German)	1923
1926
1923	Saint Joan	1923
1924
1928	The Apple Cart	1929
1930
1931–34	The Millionairess	1936
1936
1933	Village Wooing	1934
1934
1933	On The Rocks	1933
1934
1934	The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles	1935
1936
1934	The Six of Calais	1934
1936
1936	Arthur and the Acetone (playlet)	1936
1936
1936	Cymbeline Refinished	1937
1938
1936	Geneva	1938
1939; rev. 1939, 1940, 1946, 1947
1936–47	Buoyant Billions	1948
1949
1937–38	Pygmalion (film screenplay, with co-writers)	1938
1941
1938–39	In Good King Charles's Golden Days	1939
1939; rev. 1947
1948	Farfetched Fables	1950
1951
1949	Shakes versus Shav (puppet play)	1949
1950
1950	Why She Would Not	1957
1960

Political writings

Date written	Title	Year of publication
1884	"A Manifesto" (Fabian tract 2)	1884
1885	To provident landlords and capitalists (Fabian tract 3)	1885
1887	The true radical programme (Fabian tract 6: Shaw a contributor)	1887
1889	Fabian Essays in Socialism (ed. Shaw with 2 Shaw essays)	1889; rev. 1908, 1931, 1948
1890	What socialism is (Fabian tract 13)	1890
1892	Fabian election manifesto (Fabian tract 40)‡	1892
1892	The Fabian Society: what it has done, and how it has done it (Fabian tract 42)	1892 rev. 1899
1892	"Vote! Vote!! Vote!!!" (Fabian Tract 43)	1892
1893	The Impossibilities of Anarchism (Fabian tract 45)	1892
1894	A Plan of Campaign for Labor (incorporating "To Your Tents, O Israel") (Fabian tract 49)	1894
1896	Fabian report and resolutions to the IS and TU Congress (Fabian tract 70)	1896
1900	Fabianism and The Empire: A Manifesto (ed. Shaw)	1900
1900	Women as councillors (Fabian tract 93)	1900
1901	Socialism for millionaires (Fabian tract 107)	1901
1904	Fabianism and the fiscal question (Fabian tract 116)	Fabian Tracts 1902–18
1904	The Common Sense of Municipal Trading (social commentary)	1908
1910	Socialism and superior brains: a reply to Mr. Mallock (Fabian tract 146)	1926
1914	Common Sense about The War (political commentary)	1914
1914	The Case for Belgium (pamphlet)	1914
1915	More Common Sense about The War (political commentary)	unpublished
1917	How To Settle The Irish Question (political commentary)	1917
1917	What I Really Wrote about The War (political commentary)	1931
1919	Peace Conference Hints (political commentary)	1919
1919	Ruskin's Politics (lecture of 21 November 1919)	1921
1925	Imprisonment (social commentary)	1925; rev. 1946 as The Crime of Imprisonment
1928	The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism	1928; rev. 1937
1929	The League of Nations (political commentary)	1929
1930	Socialism: Principles and Outlook, and Fabianism (Fabian tract 233)	1929
1932	Essays in Fabian Socialism (reprinted tracts with 2 new essays)	1932
1932	The Rationalization of Russia (political commentary)	1964
1933	The Future of Political Science in America (political commentary)	1933
1933	The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home (lecture)	1933
1944	Everybody’s Political What's What (political commentary)	1944

Fiction

Date written          Title   Year of publication	1878  The Legg Papers (abandoned draft of novel)          unpublished	1879  Immaturity (novel)         1930
1880  The Irrational Knot (novel)          serial 1885–7; book 1905	1881  Love Among the Artists (novel)          serial 1887–8; book 1900	1882  Cashel Byron's Profession (novel)          serial 1885–6; book 1886; rev 1889, 1901
1883  An Unsocial Socialist (novel)          serial 1884; book 1887	1885  "The Miraculous Revenge" (short story)         1906	1887–88      An Unfinished Novel (novel fragment)          1958
1932  The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (story)         1932	1934  Short Stories, Scraps, and Shavings (stories & playlets)          1934	Criticism
Date written          Title   Year of publication	1895  The Sanity of Art (art criticism)          1895, rev. 1908	1898  The Perfect Wagnerite (analysis, Wagner's Ring cycle)          1898, rev. 1907
1890  "Ibsen" (Lecture before the Fabian Society)          1970	1891  The Quintessence of Ibsenism (criticism)          1891; rev. 1913	1907–08      Brieux: A Preface (criticism)          1910
1931  Pen Portraits and Reviews (criticism)   1931	Miscellaneous writings	Date written          Title   Year of publication
1878  "My Dear Dorothea..."          1906	1939  Shaw Gives Himself Away: An Autobiographical Miscellany  1939	1948  The RADA Graduates' Keeepsake and Counsellor (RADA handbook)  1948[11]
1949  Sixteen Self Sketches (revision of Shaw Gives Himself Away)         1949	1950  Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot Saint Lawrence    1950

Collections published in Shaw's lifetime

Title	Year of publication
Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant: (Unpleasant: Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's Profession. Pleasant: Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell.)	1898
Three Plays for Puritans ( The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion)	1901
Dramatic Opinions and Essays: (theatre criticism, Saturday Review 1895-98)	1906
Translations and Tomfooleries: (collection of short plays, including Jitta's Atonement; The Admirable Bashville; Press Cuttings; The Glimpse of Reality; Passion, Poison, and Petrification; The Fascinating Foundling; The Music-Cure)	1926
Our Theatres in the Nineties: (theatre criticism, Saturday Review 1895-98)	1932
Music In London: (music criticism, Star 1888–89; World 1890-94)	1937

  

235- ] English Literature , George Bernard Shaw

235- ] English Literature 

George Bernard Shaw 

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".[304] 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 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 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 Galsworthy to 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 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.

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 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 National Theatre. Shaw's short 1910 play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in which Shakespeare pleads with 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, 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.

General

In the 1940s the author Harold Nicolson advised the 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 as of 2016. 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, 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 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:

He was no originator of ideas. He was an insatiable adopter and adapter, an incomparable prestidigitator with the thoughts of the forerunners. Nietzsche, Samuel Butler (Erewhon), Marx, Shelley, Blake, Dickens, William Morris, Ruskin, Beethoven and Wagner all had their applications and misapplications. By bending to their service all the faculties of a powerful mind, by inextinguishable wit, and by every artifice of argument, he carried their thoughts as far as they would reach—so far beyond their sources that they came to us with the vitality of the newly created.

234 - ]English Literature , George Bernard Shaw

234- ] English Literature

George Bernard Shaw 

Plays

Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works.[215] He wrote a further twelve in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly 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 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 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 1770s America, Ancient Egypt, and 1890s Morocco. The Gadfly, an adaptation of 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 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 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 Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on 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 and ends with the 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 Brahms and those British composers such as Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian. He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of 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, 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 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 "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 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' "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, 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 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 amitiés amoureuses) Mrs Patrick Campbell 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.  

233- ] English Literature , George Bernard Shaw

233- ] English Literature

George Bernard Shaw 

1920s

Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway 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, 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 was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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'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 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 dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed Lenin 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. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, 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, he was a co-signatory to a letter in The Manchester Guardian 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 came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler 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"; though his principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 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 in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic. Brooks Atkinson 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 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 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, 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 and The Six of Calais—and begin work on a third, The Millionairess.

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 keep it from winning one 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 (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 (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 outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid 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 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 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 (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 94 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.