George Bernard Shaw – Biography
George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education
was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working
in an estate agent's office for a while he moved to London as a young man
(1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic
in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian
Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career
as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to
illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were
called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among
these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely
attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man and
The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical
rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest
and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more
openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell»,
the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and
Superman (1903).
In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in
Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same period he worked on
his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the
well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to
the present.
Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a
historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and
the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history
and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major
Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful «discussion» plays, the
audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that
man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as
an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as
a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the
medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex
relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty
study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality
and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the
stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social
corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour.
Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950,
the year of his death.
From Nobel Lectures,
Literature 1901-1967, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam |
