I.

Introduction

George Bernard Shaw (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.