George Bernard Shaw

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was a world-famous Irish playwright. Born in Dublin, he moved to London at the age of twenty and lived in England for the remainder of his life. Shaw's first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, but he had a bent for drama: during his career he authored more than sixty plays. Nearly all of his writings dealt sternly with prevailing social problems, but are nicely leavened by a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. He pondered education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege and found them all defective, but his ire was most aroused by the exploitation of the working class by heartless employers; his writings seldom fail to censure that abuse.

An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society and he became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which 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.

Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They made their home in Ayot St. Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder. He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These, repectively, were for his contributions to literature, and for his work on the film Pygmalion.

Biography

George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 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 briefly attended the Wesleyan Connexional School, a grammar school operated by the Methodist New Connexion, moved to a private school near Dalkey, transferred to Dublin's Central Model School and ended his formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. He harbored a lifelong animosity toward schools and teachers, saying

"Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents."

He expressed this attitude in the astringent prologue to Cashel Byron's Profession where young Byron's educational experience is a fictionalized description of Shaw's own schooldays and, later, painstakingly detailed the reasons for his aversion to formal education in his Treatise on Parents and Children. In brief, he considered the standardized curricula useless, deadening to the spirit and stifling to the intellect. He particularly deplored the use of corporal punishment, which was prevalent in his time.

Shaw was almost sixteen years old when his mother left home and followed her voice teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, to London. His sisters 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 started writing novels. He earned his allowance by ghost-writing Vandeleur Lee’s music column, which appeared in the London Hornet but his novels were rejected, so his literary earnings remained negligible until 1885, when he became self-supporting as a critic of the arts.

Influenced by his reading, he became a dedicated Socialist and a charter member of the Fabian Society, a middle class organization established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread of socialism by peaceful means. In the course of his political activities he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow Fabian; they married in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws moved into a house, now called Shaw's Corner, in Ayot St Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire; it was to be their home for the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a residence at 29 Fitzroy Square in London. During his final years Shaw enjoyed attending to the grounds at Shaw's Corner; his death, at 94, from renal failure was precipitated by injuries incurred by falling from a ladder he climbed to prune a tree. His ashes, mixed with those of his wife, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.

Shaw's plays were first performed in the 1890s. By the end of the decade he was an established playwright. He wrote sixty-three plays and his output as novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist and private correspondent was prodigious. He is known to have written more than 250,000 letters.

Along with Fabian Society members Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas, George Bernard Shaw founded the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895 with funding provided by private philanthropy, including a bequest of £20,000 from Henry Hunt Hutchinson to the Fabian Society. One of the libraries at the LSE is named in Shaw's honor; it contains collections of his papers and photographs.

Literary works

The International Shaw Society provides a detailed chronological listing of Shaw's writings. See also George Bernard Shaw, Unity Theatre

Criticism

Shaw became a critic of the arts when he, sponsored by William Archer, joined the reviewing staff of The Pall Mall Gazette in 1885, where he wrote under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto" ("basset horn") — chosen because it sounded European and nobody knew what a corno di basseto was. In a miscellany of other periodicals, including Dramatic Review (1885-86), Our Corner (1885-86), and The Pall Mall Gazette (1885-88) his byline was "GBS". From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the drama critic for Frank Harris’ Saturday Review, in which position he campaigned brilliantly to displace the artificialities and hypocricies of the Victorian stage with a theater of actuality and thought. His earnings as a critic made him self-supporting as an author and his articles for the Saturday Review made his name well-known.

Much of Shaw’s music criticism, ranging from short comments to the book-length essay — The Perfect Wagnerite — extolls the work of the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner worked 25 years composing Nibelung’s Ring, a massive four-part musical dramatization drawn from the Teutonic mythology of gods, giants, dwarves and Rhine maidens; Shaw considered it a work of genius and reviewed it in detail: Beyond the music, he saw it as an allegory of social evolution where workers, driven by “the invisible whip of hunger” seek freedom from their wealthy masters. (Wagner did have socialistic sympathies, as Shaw carefully points out, but made no such claim about his opus.) Conversely, Shaw disparaged Brahms, deriding A German Requiem by saying "it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker". Although he found Brahms lacking in intellect, he praised his musicality, saying ”…nobody can listen to Brahms’ natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions, without rejoicing in his natural gift.” Shaw's writings about music gained great popularity because they were understandable and fair, as well as pleasantly light-hearted and free of affectation, thus contrasting starkly with the dourly pretentious pedantry of most critiques in that era. All of his music critiques have been collected in Shaw's Music.

As drama critic for the Saturday Review, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw championed Henrik Ibsen whose realistic plays scandalized the Victorian public. His influential Quintessence of Ibsenism was written in 1891.

Novels

Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels between 1879 and 1883, at the start of his career. Eventually all were published:

Cashel Byron's Profession (London, The Modern Press, 1886), written in 1882. Cashel, a rebellious schoolboy with an unsympathetic mother, runs away to Australia where he becomes a famed prizefighter. He returns to England for a boxing match, and falls in love with erudite and wealthy Lydia Carew. Lydia, drawn by sheer animal magnetism, eventually consents to marry despite the disparity of their social positions. This breach of propriety is nullified by the unpresaged discovery that Cashel is of noble lineage and heir to a fortune comparable to Lydia's. With those barriers to happiness removed, the couple settles down to prosaic family life with Lydia dominant; Cashel attains a seat in Parliament. In this novel Shaw first expresses his conviction that productive land and all other natural resources should belong to everyone in common, rather than being owned and exploited privately. The book was written in the year when Shaw first heard the lectures of Henry George who advocated such reforms.

An Unsocial Socialist (London, Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1887), written in 1883. The tale begins with a hilarious description of student antics at a girl's school then changes focus to a seemingly uncouth laborer who, it soon develops, is really a wealthy gentleman in hiding from his overly affectionate wife. He needs the freedom gained by matrimonial truancy to promote the socialistic cause, to which he is an active convert. Once the subject of socialism emerges, it dominates the story, allowing only space enough in the final chapters to excoriate the idle upper class and allow the erstwhile schoolgirls, in their earliest maturity, to marry suitably.
Love Among the Artists (Chicago, Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1900, UK, 1914), written in 1881. In the ambiance of chit-chat and frivolity among members of Victorian polite society a youthful Shaw describes his views on the arts, romantic love and the practicalities of matrimony. Dilettantes, he thinks, can love and settle down to marriage, but artists with real genius are too consumed by their work to fit that pattern. The dominant figure in the novel is Owen Jack, a musical genius, somewhat mad and quite bereft of social graces. From an abysmal beginning he rises to great fame and is lionized by socialites despite his unremitting crudity.

The Irrational Knot (New York, Brentano’s, 1905), written in 1880. Within a framework of leisure class preoccupations and frivolities Shaw disdains hereditary status and proclaims the nobility of workers. Marriage, as the knot in question, is exemplified by the union of Marian Lind, a lady of the upper class, to Edward Conolly, always a workman but now a magnate, thanks to his invention of an electric motor that makes steam engines obsolete. The marriage soon deteriorates, primarily because Marian fails to rise above the preconceptions and limitations of her social class and is, therefore, unable to share her husband's interests. Eventually she runs away with a man who is her social peer, but he proves himself a scoundrel and abandons her in desperate circumstances. Her husband rescues her and offers to take her back, but she pridefully refuses, convinced she is unworthy and certain that she faces life as a pariah to her family and friends. The preface, written when Shaw was 49, expresses gratitude to his parents for their support during the lean years while he learned to write and includes details of his early life in London.

Immaturity (London, Constable, 1931) His first novel; written in 1879, was the last one to be printed. It relates tepid romances, minor misfortunes and subdued successes in the developing career of Robert Smith, an energetic young Londoner and outspoken agnostic. Recurring condemnations of alcoholic behavior, the prime message in the book, derive from Shaw's familial memories, as is made clear from the books's preface, which was written by the mature Shaw, at the time of its belated publication. The preface is a valuable resource because it provides autobiographical details not otherwise available.

Plays

Although an earlier fragment exists, Shaw began working on his first play destined for publication, Widowers' Houses, in 1885 in collaboration with critic William Archer, who supplied the structure. Archer decided that Shaw could not write a play, so the project was abandoned. Years later, Shaw tried again and, in 1892, completed the play without collaboration. Widower's Houses, a scathing attack on slumlords, was first performed at London's Royalty Theatre on December 9, 1892. Shaw would later call it one of his worst works, but he had found his native element. His first significant financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield's American production of The Devil's Disciple (1897). He went on to write 63 plays, most of them full-length.

Often his plays succeeded in America and Germany before they did in London. Although major London productions of many of his earlier pieces were delayed for years, they are still being performed there. Examples include Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894) and You Never Can Tell (1897).

With the exception of Oscar Wilde, the humor in Shaw's writing was unmatched by his contemporaries, and he is remembered for his comedy. However, his wittiness should not obscure his important role in revolutionizing British drama. In the Victorian Era, the London stage had been regarded as a place for frothy, sentimental entertainment. Shaw made it a forum for considering moral, political and economic issues, possibly his most lasting and important contribution to dramatic art. In this, he considered himself indebted to Henrik Ibsen, who pioneered modern realistic drama, meaning drama designed to heighten awareness of some important social issue. Significantly, Widowers Houses — an example of the realistic genre — was completed after William Archer, Shaw's friend, had translated some of Ibsen's plays to English and Shaw had written The Quintessence of Ibsensism.

As Shaw's experience and popularity increased, his plays and prefaces became more voluble about reforms he advocated, without diminishing their success as entertainments. Such works, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), display Shaw's matured views, for he was approaching 50 when he wrote them. From 1904 to 1907, several of his plays had their London premieres in notable productions at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne. The first of his new plays to be performed at the Court Theatre, John Bull's Other Island (1904), while not especially popular today, made his reputation in London when King Edward VII laughed so hard during a command performance that he broke his chair.

By the 1910s, Shaw was a well-established playwright. New works such as Fanny's First Play (1911) and Pygmalion (1912) — on which My Fair Lady (1956) is based — had long runs in front of large London audiences. A musical adaptation of Arms and the Man (1894) — The Chocolate Soldier by Oscar Strauss (1908) — was also very popular, but Shaw detested it and, for the rest of his life, forbade musicalization of his work, including a proposed Franz Lehar operetta based on Pygmalion; the Broadway musical My Fair Lady could be produced only after Shaw's death.

Shaw's outlook was changed by World War I, which he uncompromisingly opposed despite incurring outrage from the public as well as from many friends. His first full-length piece, presented after the War, written mostly during it, was Heartbreak House (1919). A new Shaw had emerged — the wit remained, but his faith in humanity had dwindled. In the preface to Heartbreak House he said

"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."

Shaw had previously supported gradual democratic change toward socialism, but now he saw more hope in government by benign strong men. This sometimes made him oblivious to the dangers of dictatorships. Near his life's end that hope failed him too. In the preface of Buoyant Billions (1946-48), his last full-length play, he asks

"Why appeal to the mob when ninetyfive per cent of them do not understand politics, and can do nothing but mischief without leaders? And what sort of leaders do they vote for? For Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon with their Popish plots, for Hitlers who call on them to exterminate Jews, for Mussolinis who rally them to nationalist dreams of glory and empire in which all foreigners are enemies to be subjugated."

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.)

Methuselah was followed by Saint Joan (1923), which is generally conceded to be one of his better works. Shaw had long considered writing about Joan of Arc, and her canonization supplied a strong incentive. The play was an international success, and is believed to have led to his Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote plays for the rest of his life, but very few of them are as notable — or as often revived — as his earlier work. The Apple Cart (1929) was probably his most popular work of this era. Later full-length plays like Too True to Be Good (1931), On the Rocks (1933), The Millionairess (1935), and Geneva (1938) have been seen as marking a decline. His last significant play, In Good King Charles Golden Days has, according to St. John Ervine, passages that are equal to Shaw's major works.

Shaw's published plays come with lengthy prefaces. These tend to be more about Shaw's opinions on the issues addressed by the plays than about the plays themselves. Often his prefaces are longer than the plays they introduce. For example, the Penguin Books edition of his one-act The Shewing-up Of Blanco Posnet (1909) has a 67-page preface for the 29-page playscript.

Polemical writing

In a letter to Henry James dated 17 January, 1909, Shaw said:

“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.”

Thus he viewed writing as a way to further his humanitarian and political agendas. His works were very popular because of their comedic content, but the public tended to disregard his messages and enjoy his work as pure entertainment. He was acutely aware of that. His preface to Heartbreak House (1919) attributes the rejection to the need of post-World War I audiences for frivolities, after four long years of grim privation, more than to their inborn distaste of instruction. His crusading nature led him to adopt and tenaciously hold a variety of causes, which he furthered with fierce intensity, heedless of opposition and ridicule. For example, Common Sense about the War (1914) lays out Shaw's strong objections at the onset of World War I. His stance ran counter to public sentiment and cost him dearly at the box-office, but he never compromised.

Shaw joined in the public’s unreasoning attack on vaccination against smallpox, a dire disease that might have killed him when he contracted it in 1881. In the preface to “Doctor’s Dilemma” he made it plain he regarded traditional medical treatment as dangerous quackery that should be replaced with sound public sanitation, good personal hygiene and diets devoid of meat. Shaw became a vegetarian while he was twenty-five, after hearing a lecture by H. F. Lester. In 1901, remembering the experience, he said "I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. As a staunch vegetarian, he was firmly anti-vivisectionist and antagonistic to cruel sports for the remainder of his life. The belief in the immorality of eating animals was one of the Fabian causes near his heart and is frequently a topic in his plays and prefaces. His position, succinctly stated, was "A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

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).

Friends and correspondents

Shaw corresponded with an array of people, many of them well-known. His letters to and from Mrs. Patrick Campbell were adapted for the stage by Jerome Kilty as Dear Liar: A Comedy of Letters; as was his correspondence with the poet Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (the intimate friend of Oscar Wilde), into the drama Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship by Anthony Wynn. His letters to the prominent actress, Ellen Terry, to the boxer Gene Tunney, and to H.G. Wells, have also been published. Eventually the volume of his correspondence became insupportable, as can be inferred from apologetic letters written by assistants.

Shaw campaigned against the executions of the rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, and he became a personal friend of the Cork-born IRA leader Michael Collins, whom he invited to his home for dinner while Collins was negotiating the Anglo-Irish Treaty with Lloyd George in London. After Collins's assassination in 1922, Shaw sent a personal message of condolence to one of Collins's sisters. He had an enduring friendship with G. K. Chesterton, the Roman Catholic-convert British writer.

Another friend was the composer Edward Elgar. The latter dedicated one of his late works, Severn Suite, to Shaw; and Shaw exerted himself (eventually with success) to persuade the BBC to commission from Elgar a third symphony, though this piece remained incomplete at Elgar's death. Shaw's correspondence with the motion picture producer Gabriel Pascal, who was the first to successfully bring Shaw's plays to the screen and who later tried to put into motion a musical adaptation of Pygmalion, but died before he could realize it, is published in a book titled Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal (ISBN 0-8020-3002-5). A stage play based on a book by Hugh Whitemore, The Best of Friends, provides a window on the friendships of Dame Laurentia McLachlan, OSB (late Abbess of Stanbrook) with Sir Sydney Cockerell and Shaw through adaptations from their letters and writings.

Socialism and political beliefs

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.

In 1882, influenced by Henry George's views on land nationalization, Shaw concluded private ownership of land and its exploitation for personal profit was a form of theft and advocated equitable distribution of land and natural resources and their control by governments intent on promoting the commonweal. Shaw believed income for individuals should come solely from the sale of their own labour and that poverty could be eliminated by giving equal pay to everyone. These concepts led Shaw to apply for membership the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), led by H. M. Hyndman who introduced him to the works of Karl Marx. Shaw never joined the SDF, which favored forcible reforms. Instead, in 1884, he joined the newly formed Fabian Society, which accorded with his belief that reform should be gradual and induced by peaceful means rather than by outright revolution. He was an active Fabian, writing many of their pamphlets, lecturing and supplying money to set up the independent socialist journal The New Age. As a Fabian he participated in the formation of the Labour Party. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism provides a clear statement of his socialistic views. As evinced in plays like Major Barbara and Pygmalion, class struggle is a motif in much of Shaw's writing.

After visiting the USSR in the 1930s and meeting Stalin, Shaw became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. The preface to his play On the Rocks (1933) is primarily an effort to justify the pogroms conducted by the OGPU. In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, he dismisses stories of a Soviet famine as slanderous and calls reports of its exploited workers falsehoods. Asked why he did not stay permanently in the Soviet 'earthly paradise', Shaw jokingly explained that England was a hell and he was a small devil. He wrote a defense of Stalin's espousal of Lysenkoism in a letter printed in the January 1949 issue of Labour Monthly.

Shaw advocated ' eugenic politics ', notably extermination, as a means to remove from society the 'socially incompatible' and 'unfit to live'. He wrote, "The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else." . He was a consistent advocate of the use of gas chambers for mass extermination, stating in 1910 , "A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them," and in 1934, "If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?" While not an anti-Semite (Shaw wrote of Hitler that the "one hitch with his statesmanship" was his "bee in his bonnet" about the Jews) he showed marked indifference towards their lives, favoring a eugenicist's argument, in 1938, "I think we ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of the State to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable."

Shaw's legacy

In his old age, Shaw was a household name in both Britain and Ireland, and was famed throughout the world. His ironic wit endowed English with the adjective "Shavian" to characterize observations like "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world. Concerned about the vagaries of English spelling, he willed a portion of his wealth (probated at £367,233 13s) to fund the creation of a new phonemic alphabet for the English language. The money available was insufficient to support the project, so it was neglected for a time. That changed when his estate began earning significant royalties from the rights to Pygmalion, once My Fair Lady — a musical adapted from the play by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe — became a hit. However, the Public Trustee found grounds to challenge the will as being badly worded. In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only £8600 for promoting the new alphabet, which is now called the Shavian alphabet. The National Gallery of Ireland, RADA and the British Museum all received substantial bequests. His home, now called Shaw's Corner, in the small village of Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire is now a National Trust property, open to the public. The Shaw Theatre, Euston Road, London, opened in 1971, was named in his honour. Near its entrance, opposite the new British Library, a contemporary statue of Saint Joan commemorates Shaw as author of that play. His birthplace on Synge Street in Dublin now houses a small Shaw Museum.

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.

Works available online

Novels

The full texts of Cashel Byron's Profession, An Unsocial Socialist, The Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists are available online.

Drama

Plays Unpleasant (published 1898)

Plays Pleasant (published 1898):

Three Plays for Puritans (published 1901):

The Admirable Bashville (1901)
Man and Superman (1902-03)
John Bull's Other Island (1904)
How He Lied to Her Husband (1904)
Major Barbara (1905)
The Doctor's Dilemma (1906)
Getting Married (1908)
The Glimpse of Reality (1909)
The Fascinating Foundling (1909)
Press Cuttings (1909)
Misalliance (1910)
Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress (1917)
Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910)

Alternate source for "Dark Lady" (1910)

Fanny's First Play (1911)
Overruled (1912)
Androcles and the Lion (1912)
Pygmalion (1912-13)
The Great Catherine (1913)
The Inca of Perusalem (1915)
O'Flaherty VC (1915)
Augustus Does His Bit (1916)
Heartbreak House (1919)
Back to Methuselah (1921)

In the Beginning
The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
The Thing Happens
Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman
As Far as Thought Can Reach

Saint Joan (1923)
The Apple Cart (1929)
Too True To Be Good (1931)
On the Rocks (1933)
The Six of Calais (1934)
The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934)
The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909)
The Millionairess (1936)
Geneva (1938)
In Good King Charles' Golden Days (1939)
Buoyant Billions (1947)
Shakes versus Shav (1949)

Essays

Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring (1898}
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Preface to Major Barbara {1905)
How to Write a Popular Play (1909)
Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Common Sense about the War(1914)
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928)

Debate

Shaw V. Chesterton, a debate between George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton 2000 Third Way Publications Ltd. ISBN 0-9535077-7-7

References and footnotes

External links

International Shaw Society, includes a chronology of Shaw's works
The Shaw Society, UK, established in 1941
Shaw Chicago Theater A theater dedicated to the works of Shaw & his contemporaries.
The Nobel Prize Biography on Shaw, From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, (1969).
Dan H. Laurence/Shaw Collection in the University of Guelph Library, Archival and Special Collections, holds more than 3,000 items related to his writings and career
George Bernard Shaw at the Internet Movie Database
Michael Holroyd "Send for Shaw, not Shakespeare". The Times Literary Supplement, .
Sunder Katwala "Artist of the impossible". Guardian Comment, .
The Bernard Shaw Society, New York

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Tuesday March 11, 2008 at 11:57:28 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation

George Bernard Shaw

Biography

Literary works

Criticism

Novels

Plays

Polemical writing

Friends and correspondents

Socialism and political beliefs

Shaw's legacy

Works available online

Novels

Drama

Essays

Debate

References and footnotes

Further reading

External links