George Bernard Shaw

(1856–1950)

Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 1996

By the middle of this century, George Bernard Shaw had become something of an institution in Britian: an influential socialist philosopher, a revered propagandist against the Empire, a quirky eccentric ready to speak his mind (at considerable length) on almost any subject, an exceptionally successful playwright, and a much-emulated wit. That he achieved such eminence despite difficult early circumstances is more than a tribute to his genius or his charismatic personality: it represents an astonishing act of faith on his part, an unshakeable belief in his own talents.

Self-taught genius

He was born in Dublin on 26 July 1856, the third (and only boy) of three children His father was part-owner of a corn mill, a humorous but inveterate drunk whose influence on his son appears to have been negligible. His mother Lucinda was equally distant, with scant interest in either her husband or her children. She was more concerned with her largely undistinguished operatic career, and so left the upbringing of the family to ill-paid and illiterate servants. Fortunately for Shaw, his mother’s close relationship with her singing teacher, producer and confidant George Vandeleur Lee had the effect of instilling in him a deep love of music, which would become not only a source of income later on but one of his lifelong passions.

In 1876, putting behind him a job as rent collector for a prestigious Dublin estate agent and “no society that did not disgust me”, Shaw followed his mother to London where she and Lee had gone to seek their fortunes. For the next ten years he lived in this unorthodox household “with hardly a word between us”, writing a series of novels which were never published, developing his skills as an orator with the Zetetical Society, and growing the beard which was to become his famous hallmark. During this period he also developed some of the views which were to shape his life – he became a lifelong vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist, and in 1884 joined the Fabian Society, the intellectual vanguard of the British Labour Movement, reading, as he later pointed out, the works of Marx fourteen years before Lenin got round to them.

Marx, Ibsen and Archer

Then in 1885, as he approached his thirtieth year, his career finally began to take off. He found work first as an art critic on The World (until he discovered the editor was rewriting his pieces in favour of artists who were friends of hers), moved to the Pall Mall Gazette, then later wrote on music for The Star under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto (Italian for basset horn), championing the causes of Wagner and Mozart, both unpopular at the time, and Elgar, whom he fervently supported.

In 1885 Shaw also met and befriended William Archer, the drama critic and English translator of Ibsen. (According to Archer, he sat next to Shaw in the British Museum where the Irishman was simultaneously reading alternately pages from Marx’s Das Kapital and the full musical score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a feat sufficiently unusual as to provoke conversation between the two men.) It was Archer who had recommended Shaw for the job on the World, and Archer who introduced Shaw to the works of Ibsen.

This single act has probably done more for British drama this century than any other. Shaw’s eyes were opened to the theatre’s potential as more than a repository for the lurid melodrama and musty classical revivals that were the vogue in the late 19th century. Ibsen’s work had depth and vision and brought into question the fundamentals of human existence. Just as importantly for Shaw, they were as potent on the page as they were on the stage, a trait Shaw himself would take to inordinate lengths in the copious introductions and detailed stage directions he would append to the published texts of his works.

For now, however, Shaw’s first effort was to be a collaboration with Archer on an early version of Widowers’ Houses. Archer was to provide the plot and Shaw would write the words, but problems arose almost immediately when Shaw told his partner that he had already used up all his plot in the first few pages and please could he have some more? It soon became clear that a mutual admiration of Ibsen was insufficient grounds on which to base an artistic collaboration.

Sex, celebrity and success

Meanwhile, between 1885 and 1893, Shaw embarked on a series of affairs with a variety of women. He met several through the Fabians, one of whom, May Morris, the daughter of the artist William, disappointed him by marrying someone else. Others, like the actress Florence Farr, he met through the theatre. He tended to idolise women both in real life and in his plays. Yet this, his only sustained period of sexual activity, came to an end when, at the age of nearly 42, he married the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Celibacy was to be part of the deal, and over the succeeding half-century of their marriage neither party showed any sign of regretting the agreement. Shaw’s most famous ‘affairs’ thereafter were conducted by correspondence, notably with the two leading actresses Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry.

Back in the world of drama, 1891 had been a landmark year. JT Grein, a wealthy merchant, founded the Independent Theatre, primarily to produce the works of Ibsen. Ghosts was their first effort, and it received one of the most vitriolic pannings of any play ever seen in these islands – “crapulous stuff… absolutely loathsome… a dirty act done in public”. Characteristically, however, this only served to put Shaw on his mettle. He convinced Grein that his company would prove more lastingly effective if, as well as promising Ibsen, it developed new British talent as well, preferably his own. Grein agreed, Shaw duly resurrected the fragment of Widowers’ Houses, and it opened in December 1892, marking the beginning of his sixty years as a superman of the theatre. He wrote of the occasion: “I had not achieved a success; but I had provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.”

And try again he did. Although his next two plays, Mrs Warren’s Profession and The Philanderer, failed to find a producer, in 1894 his fourth, Arms and the Man, became so popular that it transferred to New York three years later, running until May 1898. While simultaneously developing his political career, Shaw continued writing plays – Candida in 1895 was followed by You Never Can Tell (1896), The Devil’s Disciple (1898) and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899). The success of The Devil’s Disciple in America brought him sufficient financial independence to give up his drama critic’s job on The Saturday Review.

Shaw’s Corner

A further fillip came in the form of his collaboration with the actor and producer Harley Granville-Barker who staged both Candida and John Bull’s Other Island at the Royal Court in 1904. This latter play was seen by the prime minister Balfour four times and was later given as a royal performance at the command of the young King Edward VII, who laughed so hard he broke his chair. Man and Superman and Major Barbara were also premiered at the Royal Court, introducing the drama of ideas to Britian and giving a new, sceptical slant on the system of Victorian values.

The next twenty years saw some of the playwright’s most famous and characteristic works, among them Androcles and the Lion (1912), Pygmalion (1914 – later, of course, to become the smash-hit musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1920) and Saint Joan (1923). In 1925 Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize – the only award he ever accepted – ironically in the year that also saw the first public production in Britain of Mrs Warren’s Profession, a play whose subject matter had hitherto been deemed unsuitable. Four years later the impresario Barry Jackson, who had premiered the monumental Back to Methuselah at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1923, founded the Malvern Festival, largely to promote Shaw’s work. Its first season included The Apple Cart and a revival of Caesar and Cleopatra, and in 1989, the sixtieth anniversary was marked by a new production of Pygmalion.

Shortly after the First World War Shaw had purchased with Charlotte the house at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire which was to be his home for the rest of his life, and which became known as ‘Shaw’s Corner’. Happy in his fame, he enjoyed close friendships with many great men and women of the day, especially fellow Fabians Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice, as well as TE Lawrence (of Arabia), poet laureate John Masefield, the wit Max Beerbohm and his Irish compatriots WB Yeats and Lady Gregory.

The long day wanes

After Saint Joan in the twenties there was a sudden hiatus in Shaw’s work for the theatre as he became preoccupied with the magnum opus on economics, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. His final group of works for the stage, written in the thirties, includes Too True to be Good (1931), On the Rocks (1933), Geneva (1936) and his last full-length play, In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1938). Although autumnal works, these plays had lost none of their polemical zest – both The Apple Cart and Too True to be Good were subtitled ‘Political Extravaganzas’ – but the plots are considerably diminished. Their effect is to create a style which is more earnest than anything in Shaw’s earlier oeuvre, but without approaching the profundity of his best.

Charlotte died in 1943 leaving the old writer lonely in his final years and increasingly frustrated by his longevity. Ironically it was his stringently ascetic lifestyle, not to mention his enormous appetite for work, which had contributed to his survival. When he finally died in 1950 at the age of 94 following a fall at his home, the Times devoted its leader to his life, the lights of Broadway were dimmed and the Indian cabinet adjourned its session, such was the international standing this extraordinary Irishman of letters had achieved. He was immensely rich, a household name throughout the English-speaking world, and one of the very few individuals to have bequeathed to the language a new adjective derived from his name.

True to his principles up to and beyond the end, Bernard Shaw refused to be buried at Westminster Abbey alongside the other ‘greats’, so his ashes were scattered with his wife’s in their garden at Ayot St Lawrence 

Misalliance by Bernard Shaw

Theatr Clwyd, 1997

“As a matter of fact I am overrated as an author. Most great men are.”

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on 26 July 1856, the third (and only boy) of three children. His parents showed scant interest in their offspring and Shaw had little formal education, although he did develop an abiding love of music. In 1876 he moved to London to live with his opera-singing mother and her manager George Vandeleur Lee, whose first name he adopted.

For ten years he lived in this unorthodox household, writing a series of novels which were never published, developing his skills as an orator, and growing the beard which was to become his famous hallmark. During this period he also became a lifelong vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist, and in 1884 joined the Fabian Society, the intellectual vanguard of the British Labour Movement.

Greatly influenced by Ibsen, his first play, Widowers’ Houses, opened in December 1892. This was followed by Mrs Warren’s Profession and The Philanderer, neither of which found a producer. Then in 1894 Arms and the Man became so popular that it transferred to New York where it ran until May 1898. While simultaneously growing his political career, Shaw continued to write plays – Candida in 1895 was followed by You Never Can Tell (1896), The Devil’s Disciple (1898) and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899). The success of The Devil’s Disciple in America brought him sufficient financial independence to enable him to give up his job as an art, music and drama critic and concentrate full time on his writing career.

The next twenty years saw some of his most famous and characteristic works, among them John Bull’s Other Island (1904), Man and Superman and Major Barbara (both 1905), Misalliance (1909), Androcles and the Lion (1912), Pygmalion (1914) – later, of course, to become the smash-hit musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1920) and Saint Joan (1923). In 1925 Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize – the only award he ever accepted – ironically in the year that also saw the first public production in Britain of Mrs Warren’s Profession, a play whose subject matter had hitherto been deemed unsuitable. Four years later the impresario Barry Jackson, who had premiered the monumental Back to Methuselah at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1923, founded the Malvern Festival, largely to promote Shaw’s work. Its first season included The Apple Cart and a revival of Caesar and Cleopatra and in 1989 its sixtieth anniversary was marked by a new production of Pygmalion.

After Saint Joan in the twenties there was a sudden hiatus in Shaw’s work for the theatre as he became preoccupied with his magnum opus on economics. The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. His final group of works for the stage, written in the thirties, includes Too True to be Good (1931), On the Rocks (1933), Geneva (1936) and his last full-length play, In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1938). Although autumnal works, these plays had lost none of their polemical zest – both The Apple Cart and Too True to be Good are subtitled ‘Political Extravaganzas’ – but the plots are considerably diminished. Their effect is to create a style which is more earnest than anything in Shaw’s earlier oeuvre, but without approaching the profundity of his best.

At the age of nearly 42 Shaw had married the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend and although celibate, their marriage was happy. From the end of the First World War they shared a house at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire which came to be called ‘Shaw’s Corner’. Charlotte died in 1943 leaving the old writer lonely in his final years and increasingly frustrated by his longevity. Ironically it was his stringently ascetic lifestyle, not to mention his enormous appetite for work, which had contributed to his survival. When he finally died in 1950 at the age of 94 following a fall at his home, the Times devoted its leader to his life, the lights of Broadway were dimmed and the Indian cabinet adjourned its session, such was the international standing this extraordinary Irishman of letters had achieved.

True to his principles up to and beyond the end, Bernard Shaw refused to be buried at Westminster Abbey alongside the other ‘greats’, so his ashes were scattered with his wife’s in their garden at Ayot St Lawrence.

PS

The second of these is obviously an abridged version of the first. These days, no doubt, if you needed to reduce a longer piece to its bare essentials you would simply feed it into an AI algorithm and in no time it would spit out what you wanted. In the old days we preferred to do such grunt work ourselves, and not just because there was no alternative. Making a precis of a longer piece requires skill, tact and taste, and it was never a chore I shirked.

I also had a sneaking liking for the old buffer and had even been in an outdoor production of Mrs Warren’s Profession at uni. You can read all about it here.