Shaw, George Bernard

I

Introduction

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), Irish-born writer and Nobel laureate, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote more than 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born Jonathan Swift, and the most readable music critic and best theatre critic of his generation. He was also an indefatigable writer of letters.

Although in some ways he was both visionary and mystic, naturally shy and quietly generous, Shaw was the antithesis of “romantic”. Another Irish writer, W. B. Yeats, called him “a notorious hater of romance”, and Shaw could be ruthless as a social critic and highly critical of institutional power. Yet his writing is never heavy or overly didactic—even his most serious plays are enlivened by a comic irreverence that finds expression in animated dialogue of epigrammatic brilliance. Nevertheless, his plays have been described as “unemotional as a mushroom”, and Shaw himself once wrote that “what I call drama is nothing but explanation”; adding, in the Preface to his play Mrs Warren’s Profession, “I have spared no pains to make known that my plays are built to induce not voluptuous reverie but intellectual interest”. For Shaw, a man of deep political conviction, art always had a purpose, and throughout his long career he used his drama as a vehicle for his ideas.

Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin. His impractical father, an unsuccessful and unhappy merchant, had emerged from the Protestant Irish gentry, and became an alcoholic. Shaw later described himself as “a social downstart”: a typical Shavian reversal of the common phrase “social upstart”. For extra income, his mother taught voice pupils. Shaw later remembered her as a distant and unaffectionate mother: “she did not concern herself much about us,” he recalled. After attending both Protestant and Catholic day schools, Shaw, at the age of 16, took a clerical job; thereafter he was self-educated, which perhaps accounts for the originality and independence of his thinking. When his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876.

II

Early Career

The next decade was one of frustration and near-poverty. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers: Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886), a novel about prizefighting as an occupation (anticipating the theme of prostitution as an antisocial profession in the play Mrs Warren’s Profession), and An Unsocial Socialist (1887). Shaw later estimated that he had earned less than £10 by his pen in the first nine years of his literary career. By the mid-1880s, Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became, and remained, a firm believer in vegetarianism, and he never drank spirits, coffee, or tea. He served on the Executive Committee of the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society between 1885 and 1911. The Fabians were middle-class socialists who aimed to transform British government and society through gradual “permeation”, rather than revolution, and Shaw’s socialism was never revolutionary: Lenin was to describe him as “a good man fallen among Fabians”, and in the later plays, Shaw arguably has lost faith in the political process.

Shaw supported women’s rights, equality of income, and the abolition of private property. He also campaigned for a simplification and reform of the English alphabet in the belief that this would benefit democracy. In 1889, Shaw edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in Socialism, and it is no accident that this entry into the political world approximately coincided with Shaw’s first experiments with dramatic writing. Through the Fabian Society’s founders, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw met the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom he married in 1898. They seem to have enjoyed a happy, if sexless, marriage.

Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns, from 1888 to 1890 in the Star under the signature “Corno di Bassetto” (basset horn), and later under his own initials. Shifting to the Saturday Review as drama critic, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw made his name as a controversial writer and the champion of both the work of the German composer Richard Wagner—The Perfect Wagnerite was published in 1898—and the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). In this book, he analysed Ibsen’s work as a challenge and reversal of accepted beliefs, and applauded Ibsen’s use of paradox and contradiction in his work. Shaw contrasted the intellectual depth of Ibsen’s drama with the facile and superficial triviality of the contemporary London stage.

By the early 1890s Shaw was already well known as a public speaker and journalist. His first play, Widowers’ Houses (produced in 1892 with little success), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the Romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theatre. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage—the others were Candida (1895), The Philanderer (1894), Arms and the Man (1894), The Man of Destiny (1896), Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894), and You Never Can Tell (1897)—received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs Warren’s Profession was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil’s Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1906), and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899)) fared slightly better. The Devil’s Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the American War of Independence, became a success in the United States because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements that Shaw had set out to satirize. Shaw’s next work, Man and Superman (1905), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions in the non-realistic, almost operatic third act, “Don Juan in Hell”, which has often been produced independently. Man and Superman is characterized by all the typical Shavian hallmarks. Subtitled “A Comedy and a Philosophy”, it reverses the received Mozartian idea: Don Juan becomes a man of virtue, and is assailed by predatory women; Shaw uses fantasy and dream devices on stage to add dimensions to the piece; and the whole play, in addition to being entertaining and witty, is a carefully orchestrated attack on evolutionary theory. As Shaw wrote to Henry James: “In the name of human vitality WHERE is the charm in that useless, dispiriting, discouraging fatalism which broke out so horribly in the eighteen-sixties at the word of Darwin, and persuaded people in spite of their own teeth and claws that Man is the will-less slave and victim of his environment? What is the use of writing plays?—what is the use of anything?—if there is not a Will that finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods with heaven for an environment, and if that Will is not incarnated in man....”

The destinies of individuals in the plays are represented as entirely bound up with the fate of society as a whole, and the human will is therefore of imperative importance. When Hector in Heartbreak House asks, “And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?”, Captain Shotover replies: “Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.” Yet, despite Shaw’s belief in the power of the human will—a belief that was to prompt his initially uncritical responses to Hitler and Mussolini in his play Geneva (1938) for example—the plays still leave their audiences with a sense of open-endedness and of irreducible complexity. It is this sense of difficulty and disillusionment that perhaps lends Shaw’s work, although some of it is strictly Victorian, its undeniable sense of modernity. Man and Superman ran in repertory with John Bull’s Other Island (1904), which was originally written for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, but rejected as a slur on the Irish character; the pair established Shaw’s popular reputation in London as playwright and sage.

III

High Comedy

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,” wrote Shaw in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). It is this double focus—on both the hilarious absurdity and the crushing seriousness of life—that blurs the distinctions between high drama and comedy in Shaw’s works. His mature comedies are, in fact, very serious plays. Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) are both vehicles for an examination of society’s complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara, Shaw questions the easy habits of morality that vilify the principles and practices of a munitions manufacturer while applauding the members and benefactors of the Salvation Army. By the end of the play Barbara has realized that the Salvation Army’s solutions are inadequate and the power of Undershaft, the industrialist, must be confronted and redirected—as she puts it, “[t]here is no wicked side: life is all one”. Ideas of power and social intervention fascinated Shaw, and the action of Major Barbara pivots around the Platonic recommendation that “society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek”. The former in fact happens in the play, when the Classical scholar, Adolphus Cusins, agrees to join Undershaft’s business.

In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw uses a satire both on the professions and on the artistic temperament to make serious points about human suffering. Several discussion plays followed: Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny’s First Play (1911). Although Fanny became his longest-running hit up to that time, the most durable of the three has proved to be Misalliance. The mystical side of Shaw, meanwhile, found expression in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), about the sudden conversion of a horse thief, and in Androcles and the Lion (1913), which concerned true and false religious exaltation, and used the traditions of both the medieval mystery play and the Victorian Christmas pantomime.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece Pygmalion (1913; the basis for the musical comedy and film My Fair Lady) was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; but it also deals with issues of class and social power, and exposes the power politics between Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins. “Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes,” opines Eliza after Higgins has transformed her into a “lady”, taking her away from her flower-selling and leaving her with nothing to sell but herself. When Eliza finally defies Higgins and reasserts her independence (“I’m not afraid of you and can do without you”), Higgins is impressed: “By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have...Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship.” With few of the romantic implications at the end of My Fair Lady, Shaw’s play ends, more radically, with Eliza’s self-assertion.

IV

The Post-War Years

Pygmalion was as ebullient in its outlook as Shaw’s next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intellectual watershed of World War I explains the difference. Heartbreak House was subtitled “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”, and the influence of both Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy is apparent. Shaw was disgusted by the war, which he characterized as an ugly struggle between greedy imperial powers in his Common Sense About the War (1914). Attempting to find his way out of post-war pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1921); they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed. Saint Joan (1923) was the play for which Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. In Shaw’s hands, Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius.