About Gᴇᴏʀɢᴇ Bᴇʀɴᴀʀᴅ Sʜᴀᴡ

Gᴇᴏʀɢᴇ Bᴇʀɴᴀʀᴅ Sʜᴀᴡ   1856-1950
  Born in Dublin

  An active member of the Fabian Society

  A freethinker
  A supporter of women's rights
  An advocate of equality of income, the abolition of private property, and a radical change in the voting system
  Campaigned for the simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of the English alphabet
  Well known as a journalist and public speaker

  1885-1908: he won fame as a journalist- with the Pall Mall Gazette (1885)

  The World (1886-94) – as an art critic
  The Star (1888) – as a music critic
  A drama critic for the Saturday Review (1895-8)

  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925

Five unsuccessful novels

  IMMATURITY
  THE IRRATIONAL KNOT
  LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS
  CASHEL BYRON'S PROFESSION (1886)
  AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST (1887)

  PLAYS: PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT (1898)

• Contained seven works
• Three “unpleasant” and four “pleasant”

The Unpleasant Plays

  WIDOWERS' HOUSES (PUB. 1893)
• His first play
• It is designed to show the manner in which the capitalist system perverts and corrupts human behaviour and relationships
• Shaw's words:  “middle-class respectability and younger son gentility fattening on the poverty of the slum as flies fatten on filth”
  MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION (1894)

• Banned by the censor

  THE PHILANDERER (1893: 1905)

• A satire on the pseudo-Ibsenites and their attitude to woman

The Pleasant Plays

  ARMS AND THE MAN (1894, PUB. 1898)

• An excellent and amusing stage piece which pokes fun at the romantic conception of the soldier
• First of the truly Shavian plays

  CANDIDA (1895)

• Presents a parson, his wife, and a poet involved in “the eternal triangle”
• Main interest is focused on the characters

  THE MAN OF DESTINY (1895: 1897)
  YOU NEVER CAN TELL (1897: 1899)

  THREE PLAYS FOR PURITANS (1901)

• THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE (perf. NY 1897, pub. 1901)
• CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA ( pub. 1901, perf. Berlin 1906)
• CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION (1899:1900)

  MAN AND SUPERMAN (pub. 1903, perf. 1905)
• Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy
• The play is Shaw's paradoxical version of the Don Juan story, in which his hero John Tanner (Don Juan Tenorio), provocative, eloquent, and witty ideologue and author of the Revolutionist's Handbook (a work which appears in full as an appendix to the play), is relentlessly if obliquely pursued by Ann Whitefield, who is more interested in him as a potential husband than she is in his political theories.
• One of Shaw’s most important plays
• Deals half seriously, half comically, with woman’s pursuit of her mate
• Shaw’s first statement of his idea of the Life Force working through human beings toward perfection
• Unconventional in its construction

• Third Act: “Don Juan in Hell”

  JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND (1904, pub. NY 1907)

• A good-humoured satire
• On English and Irish prejudices
• The play revolves around Tom Broadbent and Larry Doyle
• Originally written for the Irish National Theatre

  MAJOR BARBARA (1905, pub. NY 1907)

• It portrays the conflict between spiritual and worldly power embodied in Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her machiavellian father, millionaire armaments manufacturer Andrew Undershaft.

  THE SHEWING UP OF BLANCO POSNET (1909)

• A melodramatic piece about religious conversion against a background of horse stealing and lynch-law in the West

•Banned as blasphemous by the Censor

MISALLIANCE (1910, pub. Berlin 1911)

• Inconclusive discussion of the parent-child relationship

THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS (1910)

Gᴇᴏʀɢᴇ Bᴇʀɴᴀʀᴅ Sʜᴀᴡ PART 2 1856-1950

  FANNY'S FIRST PLAY (1911, pub. Berlin 1911)

• Religious theme is combined with an attack on the critics and a further study of the relations between parents and children

  ANDROCLES AND THE LION (pub. Berlin 1913, perf. Hamburg 1913)

• An examination of the nature of early Christian religious experience

  PYGMALION (perf. Vienna 1913, pub. Berlin 1913)

• Later turned into the popular musical MY FAIR LADY

• One of the most popular plays of Bernard Shaw

• A witty and highly entertaining study of class distinction

• It describes the transformation of a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, into a passable imitation of a duchess by the phonetician Professor Henry Higgins, who undertakes this task in order to win a bet and to prove his own points about English speech and the class system: he teaches her to speak standard English and introduces her successfully to social life, thus winning his bet, but she rebels

against his dictatorial and thoughtless behaviour, and 'bolts' from his tyranny

• The play ends with a truce between the two of them, as Higgins acknowledges that she has achieved freedom and independence, and emerged from his treatment as a “tower of strength: a consort battleship”

  HEARTBREAK HOUSE (pub. 1919, perf. 1920, both NY)

• Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes

• Set in the war period

• Treats of upper-class disillusionment during the pre-War years

  BACK TO METHUSELAH (pub. and perf. NY 1921,1922)

• Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch

• An infrequently performed cycle of five plays

• Beginning in the Garden of Eden and reaching the year AD 31,920, which examines the metaphysical implications of longevity

  SAINT JOAN (perf. NY 1923, pub. 1924)

• Shaw’s finest play

• A Chronicle Play in 6 Scenes and an Epilogue 

• Based on the life and trial of Joan of Arc

• Michael Holroyd has characterised the play as “a tragedy without villains” and also as Shaw's “only tragedy”

  THE APPLE CART ( perf. Warsaw 1929, pub. Berlin 1929) 

  TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD (perf. Boston 1932, pub. Berlin 1932),

• A three-act political extravaganza 

• Opens in one of the richest cities in England, in a patient's bedroom inhabited by a ‘poor innocent microbe’ apparently made of luminous jelly, and then moves to a sea beach in a mountainous country patrolled by the omnipresent Private Meek

• Contains echoes from THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and THE TEMPEST

• Reaches its climax in a long peroration on the place of human beings in the evolution of the world

  ON THE ROCKS (1933)

  THE SIX OF CALAIS (1934)

  VILLAGE WOOING (pub. Berlin 1933, perf. Dallas 1934)

  THE SIMPLETON OF THE UNEXPECTED ISLES ( perf. NY 1935, pub. Berlin 1935)

  THE MILLIONAIRES (1936)

  GENEVA (1938)

  IN GOOD KING CHARLES'S GOLDEN DAYS ( perf. and pub. 1939)

  BUOYANT BILLIONS (perf. and pub. Zurich 1948).

  THE QUINTESSENCE OF LBSENISM (1891, revised and expanded 1913)

• Reveals his debt to Ibsen as a playwright 

• Presents an argument for Fabian socialism 

  THE PERFECT WAGNERITE (1898)

  COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR (1914)

  THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM (1928)

  EVERYBODY'S POLITICAL WHAT'S WHAT (1944)

  DRAMATIC OPINIONS AND ESSAYS (1907)