George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright and critic who had a major influence on Western theater, culture and politics.
George Bernard Shaw was born July 26, 1856 at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, Dublin.
He was the youngest of three children and only son of retail corn merchant George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (née Gurly; 1830–1913)
George attended four schools in Dublin between 1865 and 1871, all of which he hated. He was lazy in class and disliked games, but the Irish youngster was an early reader, (Shaw was reading Shakespeare before he was 10). He left school aged 15.
In the summer of 1873, Shaw's mother left Dublin for London; his two sisters joined her, leaving George with his father.
"I must have been an insufferable child," he quipped. "Most children are."
George Bernard Shaw began work aged 15 as a junior clerk in a Dublin land agency at a salary of £18 a year. He later described the work as a “damnable waste of human life”.
In early 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that his sister Agnes was dying of tuberculosis. He resigned from the land agents, and in March traveled to England to join his mother and other sister Lucy at Agnes's funeral.
After moving to London, Shaw spent many years as a struggling writer and novelist, supported by his mother. Questioned on why he allowed his aged parent to support him while he wrote unpublishable novels, Shaw responded "I did not throw myself into the battle of life. I threw my mother into it."
Shaw first found fame in the 1880s as a socialist speaker and debater, originally in open air meetings and eventually to well bred, posh audiences in fashionable halls.
Shaw's financial situation did not improve until the mid-1880s when he began a career writing book and music criticism for London newspapers.
A great advocate of Henrik Ibsen, before he started writing plays himself, Shaw devoted a lot of time in the 1880s to persuading theatre managers to put on the Norwegian's works without success.
After serving as deputy in 1888, Shaw became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto and earning two guineas a week.
In May 1890 Shaw moved to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years.
From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright.
Shaw's first stage success was Arms and the Man in 1894; a mock-Ruritanian comedy, it satirized conventions of love, military honor and class.
Shaw was regarded as the leading dramatist of his generation, and was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Shaw wrote prolifically until shortly before his death, aged 94.
He won an Oscar for the screenplay of his play Pygmalion in 1938.
Under the influence of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw brought a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his often contentious political, social and religious ideas.
Widowers' Houses, the first play of George Bernard Shaw to be staged, premiered on December 9, 1892 at the Royalty Theatre, under the auspices of the Independent Theatre Society. The drama attacked slum landlords and placed Shaw as the spearhead of a new political movement in the theatre aimed at the intellect rather than the emotions.
Shaw's plays were not regularly performed in public until he was 40. His first real earnings from the stage came in 1897 with the opening run of The Devil's Disciple in New York which bought him £2000 in royalties.
Following The Devil's Disciple, many of Shaw's plays were critical and commercial successes, including Caesar and Cleopatra (which treated a historic subject in a humorous way thus influencing subsequent historical drama, 1898), Man and Superman (a retelling of Mozart's Don Giovanni 1903), Major Barbara (depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army, 1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (Shaw's revenge for maltreatment by doctors in the past, 1906) and Androcles and the Lion (about the persecution of the early Christians, 1912).
Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion was based on a Greek myth. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved, which then came to life when he kissed it. The play was later filmed as My Fair Lady.
George Bernard Shaw wrote St Joan (1923), a play about the failure of the world to make itself a place for saints, on the occasion of Joan of Arc's canonization.
After the success of St. Joan, George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (for the screenplay of his play Pygmalion).
By the late 1920s Shaw was as famous as a movie star and was treated as such. The success of his dramas was an embarrassment to his socialist ideals.
Shaw's mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and when he was growing up in Ireland, Shaw's home was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players.
As a music critic, Shaw was a passionate admirer of Wagner and Mozart. The latter's "The Magic Flute" said the Irish writer is his own "private church."
Once whilst a music critic, Shaw was being entertained by a mediocre orchestra at a restaurant. The leader recognized the Irishman and asked him what he would like the orchestra to play next. "Dominoes" was Shaw's reply.
Shaw was a member of the gradualist Fabian Society (which aimed to bring about Socialism by gradual and peaceful means.), a socialist pamphleteer and polemicist for over 50 years, and was instrumental in the foundation of the modern Labour Party.
Despite the fact that he was a democratic socialist, Shaw approved of the dictatorship of Stalin, who according to the Irish playwright , "... made good by doing things better and much more promptly than parliaments."
After the Second World War, Shaw visited the Soviet Union and spoke highly of the good things that were happening over there to the fury of the anti-communist English hierarchy.
A pacifist, Shaw opposed British involvement in the First World War. In Common Sense about the War, written in late 1914, he proposed that soldiers of both sides shoot their officers and go home. Because of his anti-war pamphlets and speeches Shaw was expelled from the Dramatists’ Club.
Shaw's experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education. He said that Eton, Harrow, Winchester and other lesser public schools should be "razed to the ground and their foundations sown with salt."
An apostate rebel from Christian upbringing, Shaw believed that God is a fiction for a weak brain. Critical of hypocritical Christians, he wrote, "The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm." He also quipped, "Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it."
A lifelong vegetarian, George Bernard Shaw said he didn't eat meat or fish as "a man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."
George Bernard Shaw always ate small meals. At 70-years-old, after nearly 60 years, he switched from a diet of macaroni with beans and lentils in soups and porridges to one with more fresh fruit and vegetables, which benefited him healthwise.
A tall red-headed man, Shaw never weighed more than ten stone.
At the age of five young George Bernard Shaw was watching his father shave, the Irish youngster asked him "Daddy, why do you shave"? His father looked at him for a full minute, then threw the razor out of his window saying "Why do I?" He never did again.
Shaw grew a beard as an adult as well, to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.
Shaw wore either woollen suits or tweed plus fours. He was famous for his Norfolk Jacket.
A witty egotist, Shaw once quipped, "I often quote myself; It adds spice to my conversation."
Shaw was once sent an invitation reading "Lady... will be at home on Tuesday between 4.00 and 6.00". Shaw returned the card annotated "Mr Bernard Shaw likewise."
In 1897 Charlotte Payne Townshend (January 20, 1857–September 12, 1943), an Anglo-Irish woman of wealth and socialist ideals, proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He declined but the following year, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down and Charlotte insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage.
The marriage ceremony between the two 41-year-olds took place on June 1, 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden, London.
There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated.
Sigmund Freud said: "Shaw has not the remotest conception of love. There is no real love affair in any of his plays. He makes a jest of Caesar's love affair-perhaps the greatest passion in history.
Deliberately not to say maliciously, he divests Cleopatra of all grandeur and degrades her into an insignificant flapper."
Shaw had a long time friendship with Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the Catholic writer, and there are many humorous stories about their complicated relationship.
He was also a close friend of Edward Elgar. However, despite his high regard for the English composer, Shaw turned down his request for an opera libretto, but was the dedicatee of The Severn Suite (1930).
Shaw formed a friendship with boxer Gene Tunney, despite the world heavyweight champion being some 40 years younger than him. The two men, along with their wives, spent a month long holiday together in 1929 in Brioni, the Adriatic resort.
Oscar Wilde said of Shaw, "He hasn't an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him."
He hated the name George and always preferred to be called simply Bernard Shaw.
Shaw was concerned about the inconsistency of English spelling and backed the idea of a new phonemic alphabet. He illustrated his campaign for spelling reform by using the word "ghoti" as a respelling of "fish." "Gh" (f) as in cough, "o"(i) as in women, "ti" (sh) as in nation. Shaw willed a portion of his wealth to aid the cause.
He wrote more than 250,000 letters in his lifetime - assuming he didn't write any in his first 10 years -that is over eight a day.
Shaw was very fond of flowers. When asked why he didn't have a single vase in his house he replied "Yes I am fond of flowers, but I'm very fond of children too, but I don't chop their heads off and stand them in pots about the house."
Shaw was an authority on photography, amassing about 10,000 prints and more than 10,000 negatives from 1898 until his death. They documentated his friends, travels, politics, plays, films and home life.
Shaw liked prize fighting boxing, going as far as to write a novel about it, Cashel Byron's Profession. He even took up the sport himself. In 1883 Shaw entered the Queensberry amateur boxing championships in London, as both a heavyweight and a middleweight, but there is no record that he actually got as far as the ring.
He regularly frequented Cafe Royal, 68 Regent Street, London.
When George Bernard Shaw was born, his family was living at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin.
Shaw's mother was close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. In 1862, the Shaws agreed to share with Lee, a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay,
He moved to London 1876 where his mother had gone years earlier having separated from her husband. Shaw never again lived in Ireland, and did not return to visit his home country for twenty-nine years
Shaw lived at Shaw's Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire from 1906 until his death in 1950. He chose to live in Ayot St Lawrence after reading inscribed on a gravestone of a woman who died aged 70, "Her time was short." Thinking if 70 years was a short time span for citizens of Ayot it's the place for me, Shaw decided to move there. The house is preserved as it was in his lifetime.
Shaw wrote much of his work in a rotating hut, located in his Ayot St Lawrence garden.
During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner.
Shaw suffered monthly from excruciating headaches, which left him surprised to be alive after each disabling bout.
Shaw died on November 2, 1950 aged 94 of kidney problems caused by a fall from a ladder while pruning a tree.
He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and Shaw's ashes mixed with his wife's were scattered over the garden of Shaw's Corner.
Shaw left the bulk of his fortune for establishing "a Fit alphabet containing at least 42 letters and thereby capable of noting with sufficient accuracy for recognition all the sounds of spoken English without having to use more than one letter for each sound."
Shaw left a third of his royalties to the National Gallery of Ireland in recognition of the education he gained there as a young man.
Sources Food For Thought by Ed Pearce, Days with Bernard Shaw by Stephen Winsten, The Penguin Book of Interviews, Daily Express
 |
| Shaw in 1914 aged 57 |
EARLY LIFE
George Bernard Shaw was born July 26, 1856 at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, Dublin.
He was the youngest of three children and only son of retail corn merchant George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (née Gurly; 1830–1913)
George attended four schools in Dublin between 1865 and 1871, all of which he hated. He was lazy in class and disliked games, but the Irish youngster was an early reader, (Shaw was reading Shakespeare before he was 10). He left school aged 15.
In the summer of 1873, Shaw's mother left Dublin for London; his two sisters joined her, leaving George with his father.
"I must have been an insufferable child," he quipped. "Most children are."
CAREER
George Bernard Shaw began work aged 15 as a junior clerk in a Dublin land agency at a salary of £18 a year. He later described the work as a “damnable waste of human life”.
In early 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that his sister Agnes was dying of tuberculosis. He resigned from the land agents, and in March traveled to England to join his mother and other sister Lucy at Agnes's funeral.
After moving to London, Shaw spent many years as a struggling writer and novelist, supported by his mother. Questioned on why he allowed his aged parent to support him while he wrote unpublishable novels, Shaw responded "I did not throw myself into the battle of life. I threw my mother into it."
 |
| Shaw in 1879 |
Shaw first found fame in the 1880s as a socialist speaker and debater, originally in open air meetings and eventually to well bred, posh audiences in fashionable halls.
Shaw's financial situation did not improve until the mid-1880s when he began a career writing book and music criticism for London newspapers.
A great advocate of Henrik Ibsen, before he started writing plays himself, Shaw devoted a lot of time in the 1880s to persuading theatre managers to put on the Norwegian's works without success.
After serving as deputy in 1888, Shaw became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto and earning two guineas a week.
In May 1890 Shaw moved to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years.
From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright.
Shaw's first stage success was Arms and the Man in 1894; a mock-Ruritanian comedy, it satirized conventions of love, military honor and class.
 |
| Shaw in 1894 at the time of Arms and the Man |
Shaw was regarded as the leading dramatist of his generation, and was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Shaw wrote prolifically until shortly before his death, aged 94.
He won an Oscar for the screenplay of his play Pygmalion in 1938.
WORKS
Under the influence of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw brought a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his often contentious political, social and religious ideas.
 |
| Gertrude Elliott & Johnston Forbes-Robertson in Caesar and Cleopatra, New York, 1906 |
Widowers' Houses, the first play of George Bernard Shaw to be staged, premiered on December 9, 1892 at the Royalty Theatre, under the auspices of the Independent Theatre Society. The drama attacked slum landlords and placed Shaw as the spearhead of a new political movement in the theatre aimed at the intellect rather than the emotions.
Shaw's plays were not regularly performed in public until he was 40. His first real earnings from the stage came in 1897 with the opening run of The Devil's Disciple in New York which bought him £2000 in royalties.
Following The Devil's Disciple, many of Shaw's plays were critical and commercial successes, including Caesar and Cleopatra (which treated a historic subject in a humorous way thus influencing subsequent historical drama, 1898), Man and Superman (a retelling of Mozart's Don Giovanni 1903), Major Barbara (depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army, 1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (Shaw's revenge for maltreatment by doctors in the past, 1906) and Androcles and the Lion (about the persecution of the early Christians, 1912).
Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion was based on a Greek myth. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved, which then came to life when he kissed it. The play was later filmed as My Fair Lady.
George Bernard Shaw wrote St Joan (1923), a play about the failure of the world to make itself a place for saints, on the occasion of Joan of Arc's canonization.
 |
| Wikipedia |
After the success of St. Joan, George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (for the screenplay of his play Pygmalion).
By the late 1920s Shaw was as famous as a movie star and was treated as such. The success of his dramas was an embarrassment to his socialist ideals.
MUSIC
Shaw's mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and when he was growing up in Ireland, Shaw's home was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players.
As a music critic, Shaw was a passionate admirer of Wagner and Mozart. The latter's "The Magic Flute" said the Irish writer is his own "private church."
Once whilst a music critic, Shaw was being entertained by a mediocre orchestra at a restaurant. The leader recognized the Irishman and asked him what he would like the orchestra to play next. "Dominoes" was Shaw's reply.
BELIEFS
Shaw was a member of the gradualist Fabian Society (which aimed to bring about Socialism by gradual and peaceful means.), a socialist pamphleteer and polemicist for over 50 years, and was instrumental in the foundation of the modern Labour Party.
Despite the fact that he was a democratic socialist, Shaw approved of the dictatorship of Stalin, who according to the Irish playwright , "... made good by doing things better and much more promptly than parliaments."
After the Second World War, Shaw visited the Soviet Union and spoke highly of the good things that were happening over there to the fury of the anti-communist English hierarchy.
A pacifist, Shaw opposed British involvement in the First World War. In Common Sense about the War, written in late 1914, he proposed that soldiers of both sides shoot their officers and go home. Because of his anti-war pamphlets and speeches Shaw was expelled from the Dramatists’ Club.
Shaw's experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education. He said that Eton, Harrow, Winchester and other lesser public schools should be "razed to the ground and their foundations sown with salt."
An apostate rebel from Christian upbringing, Shaw believed that God is a fiction for a weak brain. Critical of hypocritical Christians, he wrote, "The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm." He also quipped, "Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it."
A lifelong vegetarian, George Bernard Shaw said he didn't eat meat or fish as "a man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."
George Bernard Shaw always ate small meals. At 70-years-old, after nearly 60 years, he switched from a diet of macaroni with beans and lentils in soups and porridges to one with more fresh fruit and vegetables, which benefited him healthwise.
APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER
A tall red-headed man, Shaw never weighed more than ten stone.
 |
| Shaw in 1911, by Alvin Langdon Coburn |
At the age of five young George Bernard Shaw was watching his father shave, the Irish youngster asked him "Daddy, why do you shave"? His father looked at him for a full minute, then threw the razor out of his window saying "Why do I?" He never did again.
Shaw grew a beard as an adult as well, to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.
Shaw wore either woollen suits or tweed plus fours. He was famous for his Norfolk Jacket.
A witty egotist, Shaw once quipped, "I often quote myself; It adds spice to my conversation."
Shaw was once sent an invitation reading "Lady... will be at home on Tuesday between 4.00 and 6.00". Shaw returned the card annotated "Mr Bernard Shaw likewise."
RELATIONSHIPS
In 1897 Charlotte Payne Townshend (January 20, 1857–September 12, 1943), an Anglo-Irish woman of wealth and socialist ideals, proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He declined but the following year, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down and Charlotte insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage.
The marriage ceremony between the two 41-year-olds took place on June 1, 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden, London.
There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated.
 |
| Charlotte and Bernard Shaw (centre) with friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb |
Sigmund Freud said: "Shaw has not the remotest conception of love. There is no real love affair in any of his plays. He makes a jest of Caesar's love affair-perhaps the greatest passion in history.
Deliberately not to say maliciously, he divests Cleopatra of all grandeur and degrades her into an insignificant flapper."
Shaw had a long time friendship with Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the Catholic writer, and there are many humorous stories about their complicated relationship.
He was also a close friend of Edward Elgar. However, despite his high regard for the English composer, Shaw turned down his request for an opera libretto, but was the dedicatee of The Severn Suite (1930).
Shaw formed a friendship with boxer Gene Tunney, despite the world heavyweight champion being some 40 years younger than him. The two men, along with their wives, spent a month long holiday together in 1929 in Brioni, the Adriatic resort.
Oscar Wilde said of Shaw, "He hasn't an enemy in the world and none of his friends like him."
He hated the name George and always preferred to be called simply Bernard Shaw.
HOBBIES AND INTERESTS
Shaw was concerned about the inconsistency of English spelling and backed the idea of a new phonemic alphabet. He illustrated his campaign for spelling reform by using the word "ghoti" as a respelling of "fish." "Gh" (f) as in cough, "o"(i) as in women, "ti" (sh) as in nation. Shaw willed a portion of his wealth to aid the cause.
He wrote more than 250,000 letters in his lifetime - assuming he didn't write any in his first 10 years -that is over eight a day.
Shaw was very fond of flowers. When asked why he didn't have a single vase in his house he replied "Yes I am fond of flowers, but I'm very fond of children too, but I don't chop their heads off and stand them in pots about the house."
Shaw was an authority on photography, amassing about 10,000 prints and more than 10,000 negatives from 1898 until his death. They documentated his friends, travels, politics, plays, films and home life.
Shaw liked prize fighting boxing, going as far as to write a novel about it, Cashel Byron's Profession. He even took up the sport himself. In 1883 Shaw entered the Queensberry amateur boxing championships in London, as both a heavyweight and a middleweight, but there is no record that he actually got as far as the ring.
He regularly frequented Cafe Royal, 68 Regent Street, London.
HOMES
When George Bernard Shaw was born, his family was living at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin.
 |
| Shaw's birthplace (2012 ) J.-H. Janßen - |
Shaw's mother was close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. In 1862, the Shaws agreed to share with Lee, a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay,
He moved to London 1876 where his mother had gone years earlier having separated from her husband. Shaw never again lived in Ireland, and did not return to visit his home country for twenty-nine years
Shaw lived at Shaw's Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire from 1906 until his death in 1950. He chose to live in Ayot St Lawrence after reading inscribed on a gravestone of a woman who died aged 70, "Her time was short." Thinking if 70 years was a short time span for citizens of Ayot it's the place for me, Shaw decided to move there. The house is preserved as it was in his lifetime.
Shaw wrote much of his work in a rotating hut, located in his Ayot St Lawrence garden.
During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner.
 |
| Garden of Shaw's Corner. By Jason Ballard |
LAST YEARS AND DEATH
Shaw suffered monthly from excruciating headaches, which left him surprised to be alive after each disabling bout.
Shaw died on November 2, 1950 aged 94 of kidney problems caused by a fall from a ladder while pruning a tree.
He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and Shaw's ashes mixed with his wife's were scattered over the garden of Shaw's Corner.
Shaw left the bulk of his fortune for establishing "a Fit alphabet containing at least 42 letters and thereby capable of noting with sufficient accuracy for recognition all the sounds of spoken English without having to use more than one letter for each sound."
Shaw left a third of his royalties to the National Gallery of Ireland in recognition of the education he gained there as a young man.
Sources Food For Thought by Ed Pearce, Days with Bernard Shaw by Stephen Winsten, The Penguin Book of Interviews, Daily Express
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