BERNARD SHAW
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950)
was an Irish playwright. Although his first profitable writing was music and
literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of
journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays.
Nearly all his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but have
a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education,
marriage, religion, government, health care and class privilege.
He was most angered by what
he perceived as the exploitation of the working class, and most of his writings
censure that abuse. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches
for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of
its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating
abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land,
and promoting healthy lifestyles.
Shaw married Charlotte
Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St.
Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from
chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling.
He is the only person to
have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938),
for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion,
respectively. Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no
desire for public honors, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered
it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be
used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.
Writings
The International Shaw Society provides a detailed chronological listing of
Shaw's writings. See also George Bernard Shaw, Unity Theatre. View Shaw's
Works for listings of his novels and plays, with links to their electronic
texts, if those exist.
Criticism
Shaw became a critic of the arts when, sponsored by William Archer, he
joined the reviewing staff of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. There he wrote under the pseudonym "Corno
di Bassetto" ("basset horn")—chosen because it sounded
European and nobody knew what a corno di bassetto was. In a miscellany
of other periodicals, including Dramatic Review (1885–86), Our Corner
(1885–86), and the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88) his byline was
"GBS". From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the drama critic for Frank Harris'
Saturday Review, in which position he campaigned brilliantly to displace
the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theater of
actuality and thought. His earnings as a critic made him self-supporting as an
author and his articles for the Saturday Review made his name
well-known.
He had a very high regard for both Irish stage actor Barry Sullivan's and Johnston
Forbes-Robertson's Hamlets, but despised John Barrymore's. Barrymore invited
him to see a performance of his celebrated Hamlet, and Shaw graciously
accepted, but wrote Barrymore a withering letter in which he all but tore the
performance to shreds. Even worse, Shaw had seen the play in the company of
Barrymore's then-wife, but did not dare voice his true feelings about the
performance aloud to her.
Much of Shaw's music criticism, ranging from short comments to the
book-length essay The Perfect Wagnerite, extols the work of the German
composer Richard Wagner. Wagner worked 25 years composing Der Ring des
Nibelungen, a massive four-part musical dramatization drawn from the
Teutonic mythology of gods, giants, dwarves and Rhine maidens; Shaw considered
it a work of genius and reviewed it in detail. Beyond the music, he saw it as
an allegory of social evolution where workers, driven by "the invisible
whip of hunger", seek freedom from their wealthy masters. Wagner did have
socialistic sympathies, as Shaw carefully points out, but made no such claim
about his opus. Conversely, Shaw disparaged Brahms, deriding A German
Requiem by saying "it could only have come from the establishment of a
first-class undertaker".Although he found Brahms lacking in intellect, he
praised his musicality, saying "...nobody can listen to Brahms' natural
utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber
compositions, without rejoicing in his natural gift". In the 1920s, he
recanted, calling his earlier animosity towards Brahms "my only
mistake". Shaw's writings about music gained great popularity because they
were understandable and fair, as well as pleasantly light-hearted and free of
affectation, thus contrasting starkly with the dourly pretentious pedantry of
most critiques in that era. All of his music critiques have been collected in Shaw's
Music. As a drama critic for the Saturday Review, a post he held
from 1895 to 1898, Shaw championed Henrik Ibsen whose realistic plays
scandalized the Victorian public. His influential Quintessence of Ibsenism
was written in 1891.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
Immaturity
Cashel Byron's Profession
An Unsocial
Socialist
The
Irrational Knot
Love Among
the Artists
Short
stories
The Black
Girl in Search of God (1932)
The
Miraculous Revenge
Drama
Essays
Quintessence
of Ibsenism (1891)
The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring (1898)
Maxims for
Revolutionists (1903)
Preface to Major Barbara (1905)
How to Write a Popular Play (1909)
Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Common Sense about the War (1914)
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism (1928)
Dictators - Let Us Have More of Them (1938)
"Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical
Criticism Of Bernard Shaw in Three Volumes" (1955)
"Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard
Shaw's Writings" (1961)
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