George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, essayist, and political activist who wrote more than sixty plays over a career spanning six decades and who transformed the English-language stage from a medium of melodrama and entertainment into a vehicle for ideas, argument, and social criticism. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 (“for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”) and remains the most intellectually formidable dramatist in the history of English-language theatre.

Early Life and London

Shaw was born in Dublin to a genteel but impoverished Protestant family. His father was an unsuccessful grain merchant and a drinker; his mother was a singer who eventually left her husband for a music teacher. Shaw left school at fifteen, worked briefly as a clerk, and moved to London in 1876, where he spent nearly a decade in poverty, writing five novels that no publisher would accept. He was largely self-educated, haunting the reading room of the British Museum.

These years of failure were formative. Shaw became a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a Fabian socialist, and an extraordinarily productive journalist and critic. His music criticism (as “Corno di Bassetto” for The Star) and theatre criticism (for The Saturday Review) were brilliant — polemical, funny, devastating in their judgements, and animated by a conviction that art should serve moral and intellectual purposes.

The Plays: First Phase

Shaw began writing plays in the 1890s, consciously modelling himself on Ibsen, whose work he championed in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). His early plays attacked Victorian social hypocrisy with a directness that scandalised audiences.

Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) concerns a woman who runs a chain of brothels and the daughter who discovers the truth. It was banned from public performance in England for over thirty years. Arms and the Man (1894) is an anti-romantic comedy about war. Candida (1894) overturns the conventional love triangle. The Devil’s Disciple (1897) and Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) are historical dramas that use the past to comment on the present.

Man and Superman (1903)

Shaw’s philosophical comedy is built around his concept of the Life Force — a quasi-Darwinian, quasi-Nietzschean idea that the purpose of evolution is the creation of superior human beings, and that women are the agents of this process, pursuing men for reproductive purposes with a relentlessness that men are powerless to resist. The play’s third act, “Don Juan in Hell,” is a free-standing philosophical debate between Don Juan, the Devil, the Statue, and Doña Ana that is frequently performed separately. It is Shaw at his most intellectually ambitious.

Major Barbara (1905)

One of Shaw’s finest plays dramatises the confrontation between idealism and power. Barbara Undershaft is a Salvation Army major who believes in saving souls through charity. Her father, Andrew Undershaft, is an arms manufacturer who argues that poverty is the worst crime and that money and gunpowder do more good than sermons. The play refuses to resolve the argument — Undershaft is persuasive but morally repellent, Barbara is admirable but naive — and the audience is left to decide for itself.

Pygmalion (1913)

Shaw’s most popular play is about Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who bets that he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower seller, into a duchess by teaching her to speak properly. The play is a comedy about class, language, and identity, and Shaw was furious when audiences insisted on reading it as a romance between Higgins and Eliza — a misreading that the musical adaptation My Fair Lady (1956) cemented permanently. Shaw added a postscript to the published text insisting that Eliza married Freddy Eynsford-Hill, not Higgins.

Saint Joan (1923)

Shaw’s dramatic masterpiece — and the play that won him the Nobel Prize — is a chronicle play about Joan of Arc that treats her as a proto-Protestant and proto-nationalist whose real crime was being ahead of her time. The Epilogue, set twenty-five years after Joan’s death, asks whether the modern world would treat her any better, and answers with devastating irony. It is one of the great plays of the twentieth century.

Heartbreak House (1919)

Shaw called it “a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes” — a play that owes something to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and that depicts a group of cultivated, aimless English people drifting toward catastrophe. It is Shaw’s most pessimistic play and, in the judgement of many critics, his most artistically accomplished.

Politics

Shaw was a committed Fabian socialist from the 1880s until his death. He helped found the London School of Economics and wrote extensively on political economy, land reform, and income redistribution. His political views were sometimes eccentric and sometimes appalling — he expressed admiration for Stalin and Mussolini, visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and denied reports of the Ukrainian famine. These positions have complicated his legacy, though they have not diminished the theatrical power of his plays.

The Prefaces

Shaw’s published plays come with lengthy prose prefaces that are often as substantial as the plays themselves. These prefaces — on subjects ranging from prison reform to vaccination to the Irish question to the nature of genius — constitute one of the finest bodies of polemical prose in English. Many readers know Shaw primarily through the prefaces.

Critical Standing

Shaw is, with Shakespeare, the most performed playwright in the English language. His reputation has fluctuated — after his death he was sometimes dismissed as a mere debater whose plays were all talk and no feeling — but the best of his work (Saint Joan, Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, Pygmalion) is now securely in the permanent repertoire. He remains the supreme example of the theatre of ideas.

Collecting Shaw

Shaw first editions are plentiful because his books were printed in large quantities by Constable and Brentano’s. Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1924) are the most sought-after. The limited signed editions published by Constable bring higher prices. Shaw’s letters and postcards — he was a prolific correspondent — are widely collected. Inscribed copies are desirable but not rare, as Shaw frequently signed books.