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| Birth Name(s) : George Bernard Shaw |
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Full George Bernard Shaw Biography
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856–2 November 1950) was a world-renowned Irish author. Born in Dublin, he moved to London when he turned twenty. Having rejected formal schooling (toward which he had an enduring antipathy), he educated himself by independent study in the reading room of the British Museum; he also began his career there by writing novels for which he could not find a publisher.
His first success was as a music and literary critic, but he was drawn to drama and authored more than sixty plays during his career. Typically his work is leavened by a delightful vein of comedy, but nearly all of it bears earnest messages Shaw hoped his audiences would embrace.
Politically an ardent socialist, he wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society and became an accomplished orator in furtherance of its causes. Those included gaining equal political rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthful lifestyles.
George Bernard Shaw was born to George Carr Shaw (1814-1885), an unsuccessful grain merchant and sometime civil servant, and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, née Gurly (1830-1913), a professional singer. He had two sisters, Lucinda Frances (1853-1920), a singer of musical comedy and light opera, and Elinor Agnes (1854-1876).
He epitomized this attitude in the prologue of Cashel Byron's Profession where young Byron's educational experience is a fictionalized description of Shaw's own formal schooling and underscored it later in his Treatise on Parents and Children.
Just before Shaw’s sixteenth birthday (1872), his mother left home and followed her voice teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, to London. The daughters accompanied their mother, but Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, first as a reluctant pupil, then as a clerk in an estate office, where he worked efficiently, albeit discontentedly, for several years. In 1876, Shaw joined his mother’s London household. She, Vandeleur Lee, and his sister Lucy, provided him with a pound a week while he frequented public libraries and the British Museum reading room where he studied earnestly and began writing professionally. He earned his allowance by ghost-writing Vandeleur Lee’s music column, which appeared in the London Hornet. Between 1879 and 1883, due to a series of rejected novels, his literary earnings remained negligible. His situation improved after 1885, when he became self-supporting as an art and literary critic.Shaw in 1925, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
"It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness."
In 1921, Shaw completed Back to Methuselah, his "Metabiological Pentateuch." The massive, five-play work starts in the Garden of Eden and ends thousands of years in the future; it showcases Shaw's conviction that a "Life Force" purposefully directs evolution toward ultimate perfection. Shaw proclaimed the play a masterpiece, but many critics disagreed. (The theme of a benign force directing evolution reappears in Geneva (1938), wherein Shaw maintains humans must develop longer lifespans in order to acquire the wisdom needed for self-government.)
“I, as a Socialist, have had to preach, as much as anyone, the enormous power of the environment. We can change it; we must change it; there is absolutely no other sense in life than the task of changing it. What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.”
As well as plays and prefaces, Shaw wrote long political treatises, such as Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1912),, a 495-page book detailing all aspects of socialistic theory as Shaw interpreted it. Excerpts of the latter were republished in 1928 as Socialism and Liberty, Late in his life he wrote another guide to political issues, Everybody's Political What's What (1944).
Shaw asserted each social class strove to serve its own ends with the upper and middle classes winners in the struggle and the working class the loser. He excoriated the democratic system of his time, saying workers, ruthlessly exploited by greedy employers, lived in abject poverty and were too ignorant and apathetic to vote intelligently.
The Shaw Festival, an annual theater festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, began as an eight week run of Don Juan in Hell (as the long third act dream sequence of Man And Superman is called when staged alone) and Candida in 1962, and has grown into an annual festival with over 800 performances a year, dedicated to producing the works of Shaw and his contemporaries. |
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