VII. Supplementary reading. What was g. B. Shaw’s contribution to the world literature?

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish-born writer, is considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature’s great letter writers.

A visionary and mystic, inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions. Leavening even his most serious works for the stage with a comic texture, he turned what might have been treatises in other hands into plays animated by epigrams and lively dialogue.

Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin. His impractical father, an unsuccessful merchant, had emerged from the Protestant Irish gentry; for extra income his mother taught voice pupils. After attending both Protestant and Catholic day schools, Shaw, at the age of 16, took a clerical job; thereafter he was self-educated. When his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876.

The next decade was one of frustration and near poverty. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers. He joined the Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. Through the Fabian Society’s founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw met the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne Townshend, whom he married in 1898.

His first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was banned by the censor as obscene.

With the discussion plays that followed - Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny’s First Play (1911) - Shaw moved into what might be described as serious farce; intellectual comedy with his usual verve for dialogue, but introducing nonrealistic elements that he later exploited more fully.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Pygmalion (1913; many years later popular also as a film and as the basis for the musical comedy My Fair Lady), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.

Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen. Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence on November 2, 1950.

Although he founded no “school” of playwrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of manners, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time.

UNIT 9