George bernard shaw (1856-1950)

Shaw was a novelist and short-story teller, book reviewer, art, music, and theatre critic, socialist essayist. But he is best remembered as a dramatist, the author of 47 plays. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his drama Saint Joan.

Shaw was born in Dublin and was descended, in his own words, from a family of an Irish gentleman who lacked the income of a gentleman. At the age of 14 he started to work as a clerk in a land agent’s office. At 20 he went to London. He studied Marx and Engels, but rejected the idea of a revolutionary reconstruction of the world. He became a member of the Fabian society that preached an unrevolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism. Shaw believed in active and individually willed kind of evolution, urged on by what he called the Life Force.

In 1895 he became dramatic critic for the Saturday Review: his deliberately provocative reviews stirred up contemporary English ideas about plays and acting and enlarged the intellectual horizons of his readers. He championed Henrik Ibsen and published in 1891 a study of Ibsen titled The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which presented the Norwegian dramatist as a realistic and reforming playwright, who addressed himself to the problems of modern life and introduced genuine discussion in his dialogue.

Shaw introduced on the English stage a new type of play – the British social drama (also known as the publicistic drama, or the drama of ideas). He did not reject the drama which treated universal human problems, such as love and death. He admitted that plays of this type were more lasting while social plays were of interest only as long as the particular problem existed. But he said: “If people are rotting and starving in all directions and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must.” The reviewing of new plays over a period of years had given Shaw an expert knowledge of the structural devices employed by the authors of the “well-made play” of the late nineteenth century, and when he came to write his own plays, he was able to use conventional dramatic structure and even conventional themes for highly unconventional purposes. From the beginning, his aim as a dramatist was to shock his audiences into taking a new view of their society and the moral problems that arose out of it. “I must warn my readers,” he wrote, “that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures”. Not only did he delight in standing the popular view on its head but he went further: beginning by persuading his audience by means of dramatic action and dialogue that the conventional hero was the villain and the conventional villain was the hero, he would swing everything around again to show that the conventional hero was the hero after all, but in a very different sense from that which the audience had originally thought.

The dramatical situations of Shaw’s plays are significant not so much in themselves but as the starting points for the discussion by the heroes of various social problems. At the nucleus of each play lies a central idea. In Widower’s Houses it is the exploitation of the urban poor by capitalists; in Philanderer, free love; in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, prostitution; in Candida, the woman’s position in the family; in Caesar and Cleopatra, the policy of conquest and the principles of government; in Man and Superman, love, marriage, socialism, and capitalist civilization; in John Bull’s Other Island, the relations between the English and the Irish, the national character, practicality and romanticism; in On the Rocks and The Apple Cart, bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism, etc. Grouped around a central problem is a multitude of other problems. The plays are provided with prefaces in which Shaw explores the themes more fully.

Shaw’s artistic device is the paradox, i.e. the opinion contradicting that which is regarded as obvious. In Man and Superman, for example, they are :

“Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same”.

“Never resist temptation: prove all things, hold fast that which is good”.

“Do not love your neighbour as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence; if on bad, an injury. ”

The very action of Shaw’s plays is based on paradoxical situations. Respectable members of society live on immoral earnings (Widower’s Houses). A priest becomes a rebel, while a godless man performs an act of Christian self-sacrifice (The Devil’s Disciple). In his earlier plays Shaw would take a conventional stage type, reverse it and then prove that the reversal was the truth. In Arms and Man the romantic stage soldier is substituted by a mercenary who knows fear and hunger; in Mrs. Warren’s profession he replaces the romantic courtesan with the woman conducting the profitable, but unpleasant, trade of prostitution.

As a rule Shaw’s characters are highly original. Some of them are closer to him: John Tanner in Man and Superman, Richard Dudgeon in The Devil’s Disciple, Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House. However they are not idealized and do not win an easy victory in their discussion with their opponents.

Shaw’s greatest innovation were his female characters. The 19th century English drama admitted two kinds of women: either a weak, tender martyr figure, or a strong-willed impassioned heroine. Shaw created the emancipated woman who is not only equal to man but often surpasses him in intelligence, will-power, and spiritual strength. Some of his heroines are faultless (Candida). Others are invested with features typical of people of a particular social standing (Cleopatra).

The 19th century novel and drama were frankly didactic. Shaw chose a different way of reaching the public. One of his characters, Father Rogan, says the words which could be said by Shaw himself: “ My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world. ”In the play Back to Methuselah another character says: “Most of the extraordinary ideas have come up first as jests.” That Shaw’s humour had a profound effect cannot be denied but some critics air the opinion that the message would have been greater if the wit had been less.

Shaw’s literary career can be divided into two major periods: from the 1870s to World War I and from World War I to the end of his life. He devoted more than 70 years to intensive creative quest, mastering different genres, defending the theory and embodying in practice the principles of realism in art. In his essay Three Plays by Brieux (1909) he stated that great art cannot be created for its own sake. He believed that great writers are apostles doing what used to be called the Will of God. He placed such emphasis on the idea of the “high priesthood” of artists that in his appraisal a mediocre dramatist could be compared with Shakespeare as long as he exposed evil. As a playwright Shaw himself attacked the ills of the society in which he lived.

The first cycle of Shaw’s plays, Plays Unpleasant , appeared in 1892-93. The most remarkable plays of the cycle – Widower’s Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession – are interesting not only for the revelation of life’s contradictions, but also for their gripping dramatic action. The plays have long provocative prefaces attacking a great variety of problems including theatrical censorship.

The cycle of Pleasant Plays (1894-97) is concerned, as the writer saw it, “less with the crimes of society, and more with its romantic follies and the struggle of individuals against these follies”. The cycle incorporated the antiromantic comedy Arms and the Man, the psychological drama Candida, the historical extravaganza The Man of Destiny, and the comedy You Can Never Tell.

In the third cycle, Three Plays for Puritans (1898-99), Shaw, in the struggle for a socially engaged and realistic art, campaigned both against naturalism of modern drama and against pseudo-romanticism of sentimental drama. In The Devil’s Disciple he threw new light on the world of Puritanism with its pretence of virtue. Caesar and Cleopatra is directed against militarism. Captain. Brassbound’s Conversion studies the correlation of formal legality and true morality.

Within the first twenty years of the 20th century Shaw continued to demonstrate creative inventiveness with his philosophical comedy Man and Superman (1901-03), the satirical dramas John Bull’s Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), the fable-play Androcles and the Lion (1912), the “poem ” Pygmalion (1912-13), and the tragicomedy Heartbreak House (1913-17), subtitled “a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes” that suggests Anton Chekhov in its depiction of the imminent collapse of a civilization.

The most important features of Shaw’s artistic method and the originality of his theatre are the keen sense of social commitment, the pronounced intellectual atmosphere, and the brilliance of the dialogue.