Shaw, George Bernard 1856-1950
Irish dramatist and critic and Nobel Prize winner

He was born in Dublin of Irish Protestant parents. After unhappy years at school and working for a firm of land-agents, he left Ireland to follow his mother and sister to London. There he entered a long period of struggle and poverty, and five novels written between 1879 and 1883 were all rejected. He came under the influence of Henry George, whom he met in 1882, and the works of Karl Marx, and developed a belief in socialism which underlay all his future work. He joined the executive committee of the Fabian Society (1884-1911), for which he edited Fabian Essays (1889) and wrote many well-known socialist tracts. As music critic for the new Star newspaper (1888-90), and later in his dramatic criticism for Frank Harris's Saturday Review (1895-98), he made his first impact on the intellectual and social consciousness of his time. To this period also belong The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), which represents Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung as a social allegory. The rest of Shaw's life, especially after his marriage (1898) to the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend, is mainly the history of his plays. His first was Widowers' Houses, begun in 1885 in collaboration with his friend William Archer. This was followed by Mrs Warren's Profession (1898, on prostitution), Arms and the Man (publ 1898) and Candida (1897, one of the first in a series of remarkable female portrayals), Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil's Disciple (publ 1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900). Shaw's long correspondence with the actresses Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell also developed during these years, and his reputation was growing in England and abroad. This was reinforced by Man and Superman (1902), one of his greatest philosophical comedies, on the theme of the human quest for a purer religious approach to life. Other notable plays from this time are John Bull's Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), and two uniquely Shavian discussion plays, Getting Married (1908) and Misalliance (1910). These embrace a wide range of subject matter, from politics and statecraft to family life, prostitution and vaccination, and he sometimes fell foul of the censors. In the years before the outbreak of World War I came two of his best-known plays; Androcles and the Lion (1912), a 'religious pantomime', and Pygmalion (1913), an anti-romantic comedy which was later adapted as a musical play, My Fair Lady in 1956 (filmed in 1964). He created wartime controversy and recrimination with his provocative Common Sense About the War (1914). After the war followed three of his greatest dramas: Heartbreak House (1919), an attempt to analyse in an English Chekhovian social environment the causes of present moral and political discontents; Back to Methuselah (1921), five plays in one, and Saint Joan (1923), in which Shaw's essentially religious nature, his genius for characterization (above all of saintly yet very human women), and his powers of dramatic argument are most clearly displayed. In 1931 he visited Russia, and the following year made a world tour with his wife. Greater perhaps than any of the plays written during the last years of his life are the two prose works: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), one of the most lucid introductions to its subjects, and The Black Girl in Search of God (1932), a modern Pilgrim's Progress. Of the later plays, only The Apple Cart (1929) has been regularly staged, although Too True to Be Good (1932) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) have many innovative features. Shaw was a passionate advocate of spelling reform, and left money in his will to fund the development of a new writing system on phonetic principles. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.

Bibliography: The Bodley Head Collected Plays with their Prefaces (7 vols, 1970-74). For Shaw's criticism see Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols, 1932) and Shaw's Music (ed Dan H Laurence, 1981). See also M Holroyd, George Bernard Shaw (3 vols, 1989-91)