George Bernard Shaw Overview

In a 1909 essay called "How to Write a Play," George Bernard Shaw argued that the great playwright must "pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes... [more]

In a 1909 essay called "How to Write a Play," George Bernard Shaw argued that the great playwright must "pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies.' In outlining this noble task, Shaw identified his own goal as a dramatist '- but not the method by which he would achieve it. Throughout his early years, the self-educated, Dublin-born writer pursued high seriousness in his novels and plays. Once settled in London as a struggling young artist, he absorbed socialist thought (Marx's daughter Elinor became a friend) and successively joined the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, and the Socialist League. Throughout the 1880s he agitated for reform both as an orator and as a writer. But Shaw's novels were rejected by publishers and his early plays, which he himself termed 'unpleasant,' tried to browbeat audiences with a grim picture of social decay. Slowly, political lessons made a dent in Shaw's literary aesthetic. He and the other Fabians disavowed revolution in favor of incremental change by means of education. As a result, Shaw let the mordant wit of his journalistic writing creep into his works for the stage. By 1905 Shaw was hitting his stride with comedic plays such as 'Man and Superman' and 'Major Barbara.' Big issues are still central '- human evolution, women's emancipation, capitalism and its discontents '- but the clash of ideologies gets a lot of laughs and never turns out exactly as expected. When Major Barbara, a zealous officer in the Salvation Army, finds out that her rich, weapons-manufacturing father is more ethical than the confession-extracting, self-righteous puritans of charity, the joke's on her. But all's well that ends well. Shaw's mix of satire and moral message achieves near perfection in 1913's 'Pygmalion,' his lovely critique of class. Mining the differential between the Queen's English and Cockney accents, Shaw made endless fun of the weight class places on superficial secondary characteristics. As Henry Higgins trains Eliza Doolittle to 'pass' in high society, the boorishness of her supposed betters becomes all the more apparent. (This dynamic gets romanticized in 'My Fair Lady,' the 1958 musical version that turned the story into a Cinderella tale.) Shaw's predilection for stubborn heroines reflected his distaste for traditional marriage and other limitations on women. His 1923 play 'Saint Joan' uses the figure of the strong-minded, visionary girl to stage the story of opression at the hands of Church and State. Perhaps Joan's fate reflects Shaw's own treatment during World War I. As an open objector to the war, he was condemned as a traitor to England. But the play's impassioned and eloquent dialogue still won Shaw a Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. Shaw has been called the greatest dramatist to write in English since Shakespeare. It is not only the examination of human aggression and morality that allows Shaw's plays to share a similar gravity to those of the Bard. From "The Devil's Disciple" (1897) to 'Saint Joan,' Shaw's plays always keep to a tempo; the action and dialogue interact as if working in a masterfully planned musical composition. Each character's voice contributes just the right sound at just the right moment. With the use of craft, Shaw succeeds, as did Shakespeare, in throwing light upon the chaotic daily goings on of life. He "arrange[d] them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies." [show less]