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George Bernard Shaw |
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| W | HEN George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on 26 July 1856, it would have been quite impossible for his parents, of lower -middle-class Scottish Protestant ancestry to guess that he would be such a leading figure in the |
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world of English literature, or indeed, just how famous he would be. As a point of interest, he hated the name George and never used it, neither personally nor professionally. Many of Shaw's works, including the play Misalliance feature problematic family relationships. Perhaps this is hardly surprising given that his own early years could hardly have been free of such tensions. His father, a failed corn merchant, had a drink problem, and the young George (or should that be Bernard?) was not quite sixteen years old when his mother, a professional singer, defected to London with her voice teacher, Vandeleur Lee. His older sister, Lucy, went with them. Lucy would, in time, become a successful performer. Shaw stayed behind with his father to continue with his schooling, which he detested. Then he worked as a clerk for a time, but this wasn't any more to his taste. Shaw joined his mother and sister in London in 1876. They supported him while he embarked on a journalistic and literary career. He cut his teeth as a writer by penning five novels. He became involved in Progressive politics, and was soon a familiar figure at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park and at socialist rallies. He needed to overcome nervousness and a stammer, adopting a style of speech marked by energy and aggression, which also came through in his writings. He read widely – in public libraries and the reading rooms of the British Museum. |
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| J | OINING forces with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw founded the Fabian Society. Its aim was to promote socialism, not through revolution, but through a combination of progressive legislation, persuasion and mass education. On |
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its behalf, he lectured and wrote pamphlets. The Fabian Society was to play a major role in the foundation of both the Labour Party and the London School of Economics. On the journalistic front, Shaw worked first as an art critic, and later as a music critic, using the pseudonym of Corno di Bassetto. Then, from 1895 - 98, he served as theatre critic for the Saturday Review, earning some notoriety under the initials 'GBS'. His career as a playwright had begun in 1891 with Widower's Houses. In the twelve years that followed, he wrote almost a dozen plays, but with little success. Only rarely did he succeed in persuading any of the London theatres to produce them. A few were staged abroad. One, Mrs. Warren's Profession, fell foul of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays. Many were presented in single performances by private dramatic societies. Shaw resigned as theatre critic in 1898, following a serious illness. That was also the year he married a wealthy Irish woman, Charlotte Payne-Townsend. (He'd lived with his mother until then.) There has been much speculation that their relationship may have been platonic. Anyhow, their marriage lasted until Charlotte's death in 1943. |
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| P | ROFESSIONALLY speaking, Shaw had his first lucky break in 1904, when actor, playwright and director Harvey Granville Barker became manager of the Court Theatre on Sloane Square in Chelsea. He was to produce ten plays by |
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Shaw, taking the credit for directing them although this task was actually performed by Shaw himself. During the decade which followed, all of his plays with the exception of Pygmalion, later to be made into the musical and film, My Fair Lady, were to be produced by Barker or his friends. At last, Shaw was successful and wealthy in his own right. Yet he remained a socialist at heart, continuing to campaign energetically for the aims of the Fabian Society. For a period, he was vestryman of the London borough of St. Pancras. He also served on committees seeking the abolishment of dramatic censorship and the foundation of a subsidised National Theatre. World War I had a profound effect on Shaw. He was devastated at its outbreak, viewing it as the embodiment of the evils of capitalism and patriotism. He took very much to heart the destruction of life on such a massive scale. Indeed, his work suffered and he only penned one play, Heartbreak House, throughout the four years of fighting. However, he expressed his opposition to the war forcefully in a series of newspaper articles entitled Common Sense About the War. This led to a sharp decline in his popularity, with him being denounced as a traitor by many. |
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| F | ORTUNATELY, Shaw's loss of favour with the general public did not prove terminal. With the end of the War, differences were set aside and he soon enjoyed even greater popularity than before. His career as a playwright |
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reached new heights with a series of five plays on 'creative evolution' or the history of the human race as he saw it, collectively titled Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with St. Joan. |
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| I | N 1925, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Considering himself not to stand in need of the cash prize, he used it for the publication of an English language edition of the work of the Swedish playwright, August |
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Strindberg. His plays now regularly appeared in London. It would not be long before they would also be widely performed in the US. Shaw would write over a dozen more plays. He also achieved fame as a letter writer, writing thousands of them, his correspondents including numerous luminaries from the worlds of literature, politics and entertainment. Many of these have been collected in book-form. His status as a celebrity reached enormous proportions and he travelled widely. He visited the Soviet Union at Stalin's invitation. Yet he paid only the briefest of visits to the US; invited by William Randolf Hearst, his itinerary confined to lunch at Hearst's castle at San Simeon, California and a trip to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to give a lecture. |
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| G | EORGE Bernard Shaw died in 1950 at the age of 94. Surprisingly enough given his great age, it was a fall from a ladder while pruning a tree on his property in Ayot, Hertfordshire near London that led to his death. He continued |
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to write right up to the end. He was working on a play titled Why She Would Not when he died. He bequeathed a large proportion of his estate to a project to simplify the alphabet. The only book ever to be published in the new 'Shaw alphabet' was a text edition of his play Androcles and the Lion. When this project failed, the remainder of the money set aside for this purpose was divided between the other two beneficiaries of his will, the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Both institutions continue to receive royalties from his plays and the musical My Fair Lady. One last feature of George Bernard Shaw's life and career worth noting is the varied wealth of quotations that can be laid at his door. A man of incisive wit, these include such clear-headed and unsettling observations as Patriotism is your conviction that your country is superior to all others simply because you were born in it. There may be food for thought in his conclusion that Virtue is insufficient temptation. Should a touch of optimism be required, how about the following: Life is not meant to be easy, my child, but take courage it can be delightful. Perhaps though, the quotation to best sums up his philosophy on life is People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstance. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them. |
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The above article was witten by Frances Chapman and printed in the 27 July 2001 edition of Irelands Own. As Shaw is a relative of mine, albeit distant but then again not too distant, I felt I had to have the details on him here. I hope you have enjoyed reading about the great man. |
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