George Bernard Shaw

By the time Bernard Shaw died in 1950, aged ninety-four, his arguments had been ringing through public life for more than six decades. Born in Dublin on 26 July 1856 and known, at his own insistence, as Bernard rather than George Bernard Shaw, he became an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist whose influence reached across Western theatre, culture and politics from the 1880s onward.

Shaw wrote more than sixty plays, moving between contemporary satire and historical allegory with a sharp sense of purpose. His major works include Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). He first won public success with Arms and the Man in 1894, after years of writing for the stage, and by the early twentieth century his standing was secured by works such as Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Caesar and Cleopatra. In 1925 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion, for which he received an Academy Award.

The roots of Shaw’s restless mind lay in a difficult Dublin childhood. He was the youngest child and only son in a lower-middle-class household marked by what he later called “shabby-genteel poverty.” His father, George Carr Shaw, was often ineffective and drunken; his mother, Bessie, was musically gifted but emotionally distant. Shaw found comfort in the music that filled the house, especially through the influence of George John Lee, a conductor and singing teacher close to the family. Books came his way through Lee’s students, and the young Shaw read eagerly, while also gaining a strong knowledge of choral and operatic music.

Formal schooling did not suit him. Between 1865 and 1871 he attended four schools and hated them all, later calling schools and schoolmasters “prisons and turnkeys.” At fifteen he left to work as a junior clerk for a Dublin firm of land agents, rising quickly to head cashier. In 1876 he moved to London to join his mother and sister after another sister’s death, and he never again lived in Ireland. There he struggled to establish himself, refused ordinary clerical work, and began a long, rigorous course of self-education while trying to find his place as a writer.

By the mid-1880s Shaw had become a respected theatre and music critic. A political awakening led him to the gradualist Fabian Society, where he became its most prominent pamphleteer. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he tried to bring a new realism to English-language drama, using plays not only to entertain but to press political, social and religious ideas. His views were often contentious: he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, opposed vaccination and organised religion, denounced both sides in the First World War, and criticised British policy on Ireland after the war. Later, he often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of both right and left, expressing admiration for Mussolini and Stalin.

Shaw refused state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946, but he kept writing until shortly before his death. Since then, critics have argued over his work, yet he has regularly been placed among the greatest British dramatists after Shakespeare, and “Shavian” has entered the language to describe both his ideas and his bracing way of expressing them. His words still appeal because they rarely sit still: they prod, mock, question and force the reader to take a position.