George Bernard ShawBorn(1856-07-26)26 July 1856Portobello, Dublin, IrelandDied2 November 1950(1950-11-02) (aged94)Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, EnglandResting placeShaw's Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, EnglandOccupationPlaywright, critic, polemicist, political activistNationalityBritish (18561950)Irish (dual nationality 193450)SpouseCharlotte Payne-Townshend (m.1898; d.1943)Signature

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.

Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and lefthe expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin. In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946.

Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion has varied about his works, but he has regularly been rated as second only to Shakespeare among British dramatists; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word "Shavian" has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.

Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street[n 1] in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (18141885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (ne Gurly; 18301913). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (18531920) and Elinor Agnes (18551876). The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland;[n 2] George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly; in the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty".

By the time of Shaw's birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this.[8] The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players.

In 1862, Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature.[14]

Between 1865 and 1871, Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated.[n 3] His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw".[n 4]

In June 1873, Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her.[n 5] Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.

Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of tuberculosis. He resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years.

Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in South Kensington, but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had no thought yet of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him, ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet. Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London.[n 6] Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer.[n 7]

Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 187980, and as in Dublin achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author.

For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a vegetarian. He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.[n 8] In rapid succession he wrote two more novels: The Irrational Knot (1880) and Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither found a publisher; each was serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine Our Corner.[n 9]

In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know... We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it".

Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French, Un Petit Drame, written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime.[37] In the same year the critic William Archer suggested a collaboration, with a plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw. The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career.

On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George. Shaw then read George's book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join ithe preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals.

After reading a tract, Why Are The Many Poor?, issued by the recently formed Fabian Society,[n 10] Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also Annie Besant, a fine orator.

"The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other"

Shaw, Fabian Tract No. 2: A Manifesto (1884).

From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education." This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism. When in 188687 the Fabians debated whether to embrace anarchism, as advocated by Charlotte Wilson, Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in Trafalgar Square addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on 13 November 1887 ("Bloody Sunday"), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties.

Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".

The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic.[55] He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons.[n 11]

The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: Cashel Byron's Profession written in 188283, and An Unsocial Socialist, begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in ToDay magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form in 1886.

In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886 he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were William Morris and John Ruskin, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of art for art's sake, and insisted that all great art must be didactic.[62]

Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known.[63] After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto.[64][n 12] In May 1890 he moved back to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability."[66] Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950.[67]

From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at The World, he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".

After using the plot of the aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer to complete Widowers' Houses (it was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage.[n 13]

Shaw's first box-office success was Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of mediocrity,[69] sneering at heroism and patriotism, heartless cleverness, and copying W.S.Gilbert's style.[69][n 14] The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matine performances to meet the demand. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson.[74]

The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated. Candida, which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in South Shields in 1895; in 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny had a single staging at Croydon. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than 2,000 in royalties.

In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the Independent Labour Party. He was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics. He persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing indirect taxation, and taxing unearned income "to extinction". Back in London, Shaw produced what Margaret Cole, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892. To Your Tents, O Israel excoriated the government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on Irish Home Rule, a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism.[n 15] In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt HutchinsonHolroyd mentions 10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in the summer of 1895.

By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. In 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" (parish councillor) in London's St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously;[n 16] when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly formed borough council.

In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden. The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In the view of the biographer and critic St John Ervine, "their life together was entirely felicitous". There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. In the early weeks of the marriage Shaw was much occupied writing his Marxist analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, published as The Perfect Wagnerite late in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "Shaw's Corner", and lived there for the rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the Adelphi and later at Whitehall Court.[94]

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays.[n 17] The first, John Bull's Other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland."[98][n 18] Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell and James Joyce, and was a close friend of Sen O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island.

Man and Superman, completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army; The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year.

Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce". These plays included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. Fanny's First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play622 performances.

Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than Blanco Posnet, ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a playthat it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful.... Hence arose an urgent demand on the part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first." The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended. The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured with the piece in the US.[n 19]

In 1899, when the Boer War began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like Home Rule, to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from the society when it followed Shaw. In the Fabians' war manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it".[118]

As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics. Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the Labour Representation Committeeprecursor of the modern Labour Party. By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished". Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in the London County Council elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as "[making] absolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics. Nationally, the 1906 general election produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body".

In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells, who had joined the society in February 1903. Wells's ideas for reformparticularly his proposals for closer cooperation with the Independent Labour Partyplaced him at odds with the society's "Old Gang", led by Shaw. According to Cole, Wells "had minimal capacity for putting [his ideas] across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity". In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself". Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later wondered whether the Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it". Although less activehe blamed his advancing yearsShaw remained a Fabian.

In 1912 Shaw invested 1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called The New Statesman, which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously. He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor, Clifford Sharp, who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw.

"I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant military power of the world."

Shaw: Common Sense About the War (1914).

After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "[h]is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present."

Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by the British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by Field Marshal Haig to visit the Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism".

Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war. The Inca of Perusalem, written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. O'Flaherty V.C., satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917. Augustus Does His Bit, a genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917.

Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the British Empire (which he thought should become the British Commonwealth). In April 1916 he wrote scathingly in The New York Times about militant Irish nationalism: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these fellow-patriots of mine leave the Bourbons nowhere."[138] Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential.[138] The Dublin Easter Rising later that month took him by surprise. After its suppression by British forces, he expressed horror at the summary execution of the rebel leaders, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish union. In How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), he envisaged a federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. Holroyd records that by this time the separatist party Sinn Fin was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were forgotten.

In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland, and joined his fellow-writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to the partition of Ireland between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw. In 1922 civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the Irish Free State. Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met Michael Collins, then head of the Free State's Provisional Government. Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, the Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces. In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death". Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.

Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 191617 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway in November, and was coolly received; according to The Times: "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it". After the London premiere in October 1921 The Times concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection". Ervine in The Observer thought the play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword.

Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah, written in 191820 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'". This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD.[150] Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention. The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays.

This mood was short-lived. In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan". The citation for the literature prize for 1925 praised his work as "...marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs".[n 20]

After Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. The book was published in 1928 and sold well.[n 21] At the end of the decade Shaw produced his final Fabian tract, a commentary on the League of Nations. He described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World".[164]

Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", The Apple Cart, written in late 1928. It was, in Ervine's view, unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist, anti-democratic line that appealed to contemporary audiences. The premiere was in Warsaw in June 1928, and the first British production was two months later, at Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural Malvern Festival. The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was Sir Edward Elgar, with whom Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard. He described The Apple Cart to Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude".

During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. In 1922 he had welcomed Mussolini's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the "indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock", Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant". Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his ODNB biographical sketch comments that Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade, and Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.

"We the undersigned are recent visitors to the USSR... We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of economic slavery, privation, unemployment and cynical despair of betterment.... Everywhere we saw [a] hopeful and enthusiastic working-class... setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our systems supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it."

Letter to The Manchester Guardian, 2 March 1933, signed by Shaw and 20 others.

Shaw's enthusiasm for the Soviet Union dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed Lenin as "the one really interesting statesman in Europe". Having turned down several chances to visit, in 1931 he joined a party led by Nancy Astor. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him.[172] At a dinner given in his honour, Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them". In March 1933 Shaw was a co-signatory to a letter in The Manchester Guardian protesting at the continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too fantastic, no slander is too stale... for employment by the more reckless elements of the British press."

Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler as "a very remarkable man, a very able man", and professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was "scrupulously polite and just to Hitler".[n 22] His principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939 MolotovRibbentrop Pact as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb.

Shaw's first play of the decade was Too True to be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in Boston in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times commenting that Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation". The correspondent of The New York Herald Tribune said that most of the play was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that although the audience enjoyed the play it was bewildered by it.

During the decade Shaw travelled widely and frequently. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea. Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome in South Africa in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country. In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise. In March 1933 they arrived at San Francisco, to begin Shaw's first visit to the US. He had earlier refused to go to "that awful country, that uncivilized place", "unfit to govern itself... illiberal, superstitious, crude, violent, anarchic and arbitrary". He visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House. Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, Shaw was glad when his ship sailed from New York harbour. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he urged its people to be more confident and loosen their dependence on trade with Britain.[184] He used the weeks at sea to complete two playsThe Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and The Six of Calaisand begin work on a third, The Millionairess.

Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of Pygmalion and Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to prevent it from winning one Academy Award ("Oscar"); he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source.[n 23] He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study of the Oscars, Anthony Holden observes that Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy".

Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished (1936), Geneva (1936) and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a satire on European dictators, attracted more notice, much of it unfavourable.[193] In particular, Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was considered mild, almost sympathetic. The third play, an historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London in May 1940. James Agate commented that the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences could take exception, and though it was long and lacking in dramatic action only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object. After their first runs none of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime.[195]

Towards the end of the decade, both Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, and he developed pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.[196]

Although Shaw's works since The Apple Cart had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat. In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles. Two touring companies took his plays all round Britain. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara (1941), was less successful both artistically and commercially than Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited.

"The rest of Shaw's life was quiet and solitary. The loss of his wife was more profoundly felt than he had ever imagined any loss could be: for he prided himself on a stoical fortitude in all loss and misfortune."

St John Ervine on Shaw, 1959

Following the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism when, in a New Statesman article, he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference. Nevertheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated peace was impossible, he publicly urged the neutral United States to join the fight. The London blitz of 194041 led the Shaws, both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September.

Shaw's final political treatise, Everybody's Political What's What, was published in 1944. Holroyd describes this as "a rambling narrative... that repeats ideas he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself". The book sold well85,000 copies by the end of the year. After Hitler's suicide in May 1945, Shaw approved of the formal condolences offered by the Irish Taoiseach, amon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin. Shaw disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all potential criminals".

Pascal was given a third opportunity to film Shaw's work with Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times its original budget and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema". The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film "a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille".

In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history.[n 24] 1946 saw the publication, as The Crime of Imprisonment, of the preface Shaw had written 20 years previously to a study of prison conditions. It was widely praised; a reviewer in the American Journal of Public Health considered it essential reading for any student of the American criminal justice system.

Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were Buoyant Billions (1947), his final full-length work; Farfetched Fables (1948) a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets, Shakes versus Shav (1949), a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and Why She Would Not (1950), which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday.

During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.

Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works. He wrote a further twelve in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly one-act pieces. Including eight earlier plays that he chose to omit from his published works, the total is sixty-two.[n 25]

Full-length plays

Adaptation

Short play

Shaw's first three full-length plays dealt with social issues. He later grouped them as "Plays Unpleasant". Widower's Houses (1892) concerns the landlords of slum properties, and introduces the first of Shaw's New Womena recurring feature of later plays. The Philanderer (1893) develops the theme of the New Woman, draws on Ibsen, and has elements of Shaw's personal relationships, the character of Julia being based on Jenny Patterson. In a 2003 study Judith Evans describes Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) as "undoubtedly the most challenging" of the three Plays Unpleasant, taking Mrs Warren's professionprostitute and, later, brothel-owneras a metaphor for a prostituted society.

Shaw followed the first trilogy with a second, published as "Plays Pleasant". Arms and the Man (1894) conceals beneath a mock-Ruritanian comic romance a Fabian parable contrasting impractical idealism with pragmatic socialism. The central theme of Candida (1894) is a woman's choice between two men; the play contrasts the outlook and aspirations of a Christian Socialist and a poetic idealist. The third of the Pleasant group, You Never Can Tell (1896), portrays social mobility, and the gap between generations, particularly in how they approach social relations in general and mating in particular.

The "Three Plays for Puritans"comprising The Devil's Disciple (1896), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899)all centre on questions of empire and imperialism, a major topic of political discourse in the 1890s. The three are set, respectively, in 1770s America, Ancient Egypt, and 1890s Morocco.[223] The Gadfly, an adaptation of the popular novel by Ethel Voynich, was unfinished and unperformed. The Man of Destiny (1895) is a short curtain raiser about Napoleon.[225]

Full-length plays

Short plays

Shaw's major plays of the first decade of the twentieth century address individual social, political or ethical issues. Man and Superman (1902) stands apart from the others in both its subject and its treatment, giving Shaw's interpretation of creative evolution in a combination of drama and associated printed text. The Admirable Bashville (1901), a blank verse dramatisation of Shaw's novel Cashel Byron's Profession, focuses on the imperial relationship between Britain and Africa. John Bull's Other Island (1904), comically depicting the prevailing relationship between Britain and Ireland, was popular at the time but fell out of the general repertoire in later years. Major Barbara (1905) presents ethical questions in an unconventional way, confounding expectations that in the depiction of an armaments manufacturer on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other the moral high ground must invariably be held by the latter. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a play about medical ethics and moral choices in allocating scarce treatment, was described by Shaw as a tragedy. With a reputation for presenting characters who did not resemble real flesh and blood, he was challenged by Archer to present an on-stage death, and here did so, with a deathbed scene for the anti-hero.

Getting Married (1908) and Misalliance (1909)the latter seen by Judith Evans as a companion piece to the formerare both in what Shaw called his "disquisitionary" vein, with the emphasis on discussion of ideas rather than on dramatic events or vivid characterisation.[234] Shaw wrote seven short plays during the decade; they are all comedies, ranging from the deliberately absurd Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction (1905) to the satirical Press Cuttings (1909).[235]

Fulllength plays

Short plays

In the decade from 1910 to the aftermath of the First World War Shaw wrote four full-length plays, the third and fourth of which are among his most frequently staged works.[236] Fanny's First Play (1911) continues his earlier examinations of middle-class British society from a Fabian viewpoint, with additional touches of melodrama and an epilogue in which theatre critics discuss the play. Androcles and the Lion (1912), which Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice. Pygmalion (1912) is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, minor character.[238][n 26] Shaw's only full-length play from the war years is Heartbreak House (1917), which in his words depicts "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" drifting towards disaster. Shaw named Shakespeare (King Lear) and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on Congreve (The Way of the World) and Ibsen (The Master Builder).

The short plays range from genial historical drama in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Great Catherine (1910 and 1913) to a study of polygamy in Overruled; three satirical works about the war (The Inca of Perusalem, O'Flaherty V.C. and Augustus Does His Bit, 191516); a piece that Shaw called "utter nonsense" (The Music Cure, 1914) and a brief sketch about a "Bolshevik empress" (Annajanska, 1917).

Full length plays

Short plays

Saint Joan (1923) drew widespread praise both for Shaw and for Sybil Thorndike, for whom he wrote the title role and who created the part in Britain.[243] In the view of the commentator Nicholas Grene, Shaw's Joan, a "no-nonsense mystic, Protestant and nationalist before her time" is among the 20th century's classic leading female roles. The Apple Cart (1929) was Shaw's last popular success. He gave both that play and its successor, Too True to Be Good (1931), the subtitle "A political extravaganza", although the two works differ greatly in their themes; the first presents the politics of a nation (with a brief royal love-scene as an interlude) and the second, in Judith Evans's words, "is concerned with the social mores of the individual, and is nebulous." Shaw's plays of the 1930s were written in the shadow of worsening national and international political events. Once again, with On the Rocks (1933) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934), a political comedy with a clear plot was followed by an introspective drama. The first play portrays a British prime minister considering, but finally rejecting, the establishment of a dictatorship; the second is concerned with polygamy and eugenics and ends with the Day of Judgement.

The Millionairess (1934) is a farcical depiction of the commercial and social affairs of a successful businesswoman. Geneva (1936) lampoons the feebleness of the League of Nations compared with the dictators of Europe. In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), described by Weintraub as a warm, discursive high comedy, also depicts authoritarianism, but less satirically than Geneva. As in earlier decades, the shorter plays were generally comedies, some historical and others addressing various political and social preoccupations of the author. Ervine writes of Shaw's later work that although it was still "astonishingly vigorous and vivacious" it showed unmistakable signs of his age. "The best of his work in this period, however, was full of wisdom and the beauty of mind often displayed by old men who keep their wits about them."

Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages.[247] It covers the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950, but the core of the collection dates from his six years as music critic of The Star and The World in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In his view music criticism should be interesting to everyone rather than just the musical lite, and he wrote for the non-specialist, avoiding technical jargon"Mesopotamian words like 'the dominant of D major'".[n 27] He was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of Brahms and those British composers such as Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian.[66][249] He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of Handel oratorios with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists".[250] He railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.[251]

In Shaw's view, the London theatres of the 1890s presented too many revivals of old plays and not enough new work. He campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, stereotypes and worn-out conventions". As a music critic he had frequently been able to concentrate on analysing new works, but in the theatre he was often obliged to fall back on discussing how various performers tackled well-known plays. In a study of Shaw's work as a theatre critic, E. J. West writes that Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique". Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for The Saturday Review, in which he assessed more than 212 productions. He championed Ibsen's plays when many theatregoers regarded them as outrageous, and his 1891 book Quintessence of Ibsenism remained a classic throughout the twentieth century. Of contemporary dramatists writing for the West End stage he rated Oscar Wilde above the rest: "...our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre". Shaw's collected criticisms were published as Our Theatres in the Nineties in 1932.

Shaw maintained a provocative and frequently self-contradictory attitude to Shakespeare (whose name he insisted on spelling "Shakespear"). Many found him difficult to take seriously on the subject; Duff Cooper observed that by attacking Shakespeare, "it is Shaw who appears a ridiculous pigmy shaking his fist at a mountain." Shaw was, nevertheless, a knowledgeable Shakespearian, and in an article in which he wrote, "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his," he also said, "But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more". Shaw had two regular targets for his more extreme comments about Shakespeare: undiscriminating "Bardolaters", and actors and directors who presented insensitively cut texts in over-elaborate productions.[259][n 28] He was continually drawn back to Shakespeare, and wrote three plays with Shakespearean themes: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Cymbeline Refinished and Shakes versus Shav. In a 2001 analysis of Shaw's Shakespearian criticisms, Robert Pierce concludes that Shaw, who was no academic, saw Shakespeare's playslike all theatrefrom an author's practical point of view: "Shaw helps us to get away from the Romantics' picture of Shakespeare as a titanic genius, one whose art cannot be analyzed or connected with the mundane considerations of theatrical conditions and profit and loss, or with a specific staging and cast of actors."

Shaw's political and social commentaries were published variously in Fabian tracts, in essays, in two full-length books, in innumerable newspaper and journal articles and in prefaces to his plays. The majority of Shaw's Fabian tracts were published anonymously, representing the voice of the society rather than of Shaw, although the society's secretary Edward Pease later confirmed Shaw's authorship. According to Holroyd, the business of the early Fabians, mainly under the influence of Shaw, was to "alter history by rewriting it". Shaw's talent as a pamphleteer was put to immediate use in the production of the society's manifestoafter which, says Holroyd, he was never again so succinct.

After the turn of the twentieth century, Shaw increasingly propagated his ideas through the medium of his plays. An early critic, writing in 1904, observed that Shaw's dramas provided "a pleasant means" of proselytising his socialism, adding that "Mr Shaw's views are to be sought especially in the prefaces to his plays". After loosening his ties with the Fabian movement in 1911, Shaw's writings were more personal and often provocative; his response to the furore following the issue of Common Sense About the War in 1914, was to prepare a sequel, More Common Sense About the War. In this, he denounced the pacifist line espoused by Ramsay MacDonald and other socialist leaders, and proclaimed his readiness to shoot all pacifists rather than cede them power and influence. On the advice of Beatrice Webb, this pamphlet remained unpublished.

The Intelligent Woman's Guide, Shaw's main political treatise of the 1920s, attracted both admiration and criticism. MacDonald considered it the world's most important book since the Bible; Harold Laski thought its arguments outdated and lacking in concern for individual freedoms.[n 29] Shaw's increasing flirtation with dictatorial methods is evident in many of his subsequent pronouncements. A New York Times report dated 10 December 1933 quoted a recent Fabian Society lecture in which Shaw had praised Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin: "[T]hey are trying to get something done, [and] are adopting methods by which it is possible to get something done". As late as the Second World War, in Everybody's Political What's What, Shaw blamed the Allies' "abuse" of their 1918 victory for the rise of Hitler, and hoped that, after defeat, the Fhrer would escape retribution "to enjoy a comfortable retirement in Ireland or some other neutral country".[271] These sentiments, according to the Irish philosopher-poet Thomas Duddy, "rendered much of the Shavian outlook pass and contemptible".

"Creative evolution", Shaw's version of the new science of eugenics, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. He introduced his theories in The Revolutionist's Handbook (1903), an appendix to Man and Superman, and developed them further during the 1920s in Back to Methuselah. A 1946 Life magazine article observed that Shaw had "always tended to look at people more as a biologist than as an artist". By 1933, in the preface to On the Rocks, he was writing that "if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it"; critical opinion is divided on whether this was intended as irony.[n 30] In an article in the American magazine Liberty in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: "There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated". Many commentators assumed that such comments were intended as a joke, although in the worst possible taste. Otherwise, Life magazine concluded, "this silliness can be classed with his more innocent bad guesses".[n 31]

Shaw's fiction-writing was largely confined to the five unsuccessful novels written in the period 18791885. Immaturity (1879) is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England, Shaw's "own David Copperfield" according to Weintraub. The Irrational Knot (1880) is a critique of conventional marriage, in which Weintraub finds the characterisations lifeless, "hardly more than animated theories". Shaw was pleased with his third novel, Love Among the Artists (1881), feeling that it marked a turning point in his development as a thinker, although he had no more success with it than with its predecessors. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is, says Weintraub, an indictment of society which anticipates Shaw's first full-length play, Mrs Warren's Profession. Shaw later explained that he had intended An Unsocial Socialist as the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism. Gareth Griffith, in a study of Shaw's political thought, sees the novel as an interesting record of conditions, both in society at large and in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s.

Shaw's only subsequent fiction of any substance was his 1932 novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, written during a visit to South Africa in 1932. The eponymous girl, intelligent, inquisitive, and converted to Christianity by insubstantial missionary teaching, sets out to find God, on a journey that after many adventures and encounters, leads her to a secular conclusion. The story, on publication, offended some Christians and was banned in Ireland by the Board of Censors.

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George Bernard Shaw - Wikipedia

George Bernard Shaw Quotes and Quotations

My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

All professions are a conspiracy against the country.

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that, to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

I am only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Martyrdom - the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.

I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice; but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable, but that I was not very lovable myself.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

You don't learn to hold your own by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Morality is not respectability.

From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness, for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot - and there you have our difference; to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.

A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but you must get at a man through his own religion, not through yours.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.

He who can does. He who can't, teaches.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

I work as my father drank.

When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

This is true joy of life-being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... instead of being a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy it there.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

This is true joy of life-the being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a right one, instead of being a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

This is true joy of life-being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... instead of being a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

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George Bernard Shaw - Famous Quotes and Authors

Really liked the title, got it from a sign on the wall of The Bernard Shaw out the back by the Big Blue Bus about a year ago. The rest utter fiction, obviously,

'Music is The Brandy For The Damned'

The person with the mind set on Go, can you please settle these senses and amount - to something rather worthy indeed

We tend to realise that this is quite full speed ahead and then some...

Rum&Coke - an oddity finger role and haphazard toke/where smoke plumes feed a thousand and ten eye-candied souls

All at permitted will

She makes the upper crust difference altogether, relinquishes these ghastly fears and breathes equally amidst

Simply, radiantly satisfactory this atop scatter-ashed that

His stare is lukewarm, his fixation about to swarm so suddenly everybody hones on in

And We have an affable game wherein liquid instances curtail no such prioritised to which conversation

She and He - downright Extracurricular about to spill every way forth don'tcha know it just has to make invaluable sense again

When, where, how, why,were we waiting so very goddamn long this time...

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The Bernard Shaw - Home | Facebook

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent's office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, Don Juan in Hell, the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).

In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present.

Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful discussion plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour.

Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

George Bernard Shaw died on November 2, 1950.

To cite this pageMLA style: "George Bernard Shaw - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 6 Sep 2017. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1925/shaw-bio.html>

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George Bernard Shaw - Biographical - G.B.Shaw Nobel Prize

Mr. Carroll, 51, represents a curious blend of familiar and radical: He is best known stateside for the original practice Globe productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III that he brought to Broadway in 2013, which hewed as closely as possible to the staging choices made at the turn of the 17th century.

But he is also a founding member of the British guerrilla theater known as the Factory, which once staged a Hamlet in which any actor could end up performing any of the roles on any given night.

The Shaw Festival actors presumably knew their parts for the Secret Theater performances, about which all parties have been tight-lipped. Mr. Carroll finally allowed that one such event asked the audience to walk around Niagara on the Lake with a map, as scenes popped up around them.

Basically, our new mission is to celebrate the work and spirit of George Bernard Shaw any way we want, said Mr. Carroll, who is known throughout the company as T.C. If that includes recent works by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins or Will Eno (a fine-boned rendition of his 2010 Middletown) in its 11-play season, so be it.

Mr. Carroll has stepped into the role on the heels of two consecutive years of operating deficits. Ticket sales have followed a gradual decline over the last decade here, and plans are currently on hold to build a new theater on a tract of land that the festival purchased for $3.63 million in 2014.

One casualty of his arrival is the festivals much-discussed mandate. The first three years of its existence were devoted solely to Shaw, and for decades the repertory was confined to works written during his lifetime. (He lived to the age of 94, giving the festival quite a bit of latitude.)

Over time, the definition expanded to include contemporary works set during Shaws lifetime as well as plays on Shavian themes. It had become a bit of a running joke, about the ever-expanding mandate, Mr. Carroll said. (In fact, next years season includes a work by a playwright who missed Shaws lifetime by some 240 years: William Shakespeare.)

The repertory acting system, however, remains a hallmark of the festival. On this particular day, Jonathan Tan was assaying a smug Lord Chancellor in Shaws Saint Joan less than two hours after hopping around the stage as a frog in a charming family adaptation of Oscar Wildes tales for children. Three of Mr. Tans Wilde Tales co-stars got a longer break before making up the cast of that evenings surprise performance, 1979, a comedy about Joe Clarks absurdly short tenure as prime minister of Canada.

Still, it is Mr. Carrolls innovations that have become the talk of this towns many coffee shops and wine bars and ice cream parlors. It is not unusual to find audience members who have been attending the Shaw Festival for decades. And unsurprisingly, opinions among these stalwarts vary widely.

Change is hard, especially for people who are older, said Betty Schaeffer of Rochester, who has been coming with her husband for 31 years and had seen two previous festival stagings of Saint Joan before this years streamlined production, directed by Mr. Carroll. It all feels very, very different all of a sudden. I like it.

But Leslie Varnick and Michael St. Clair, who have been visiting from Cleveland for nearly as long, warned that the unique nature of the festival is in jeopardy.

Anyone wants to come in and put their stamp on things, of course, Ms. Varnick said. But I want the work to be honored, and a lot has been lost. It can feel a bit like a circus now.

Mr. Carroll will be the first to admit that the new approach is a work in progress. Some people in the company would rather not try something until weve worked out exactly how to do it, he said. And I say to them, Lets just get it wrong this year. And then next year, it will be much easier to get it right.

The festivities begin before each play starts. Rather than use the typical recorded preshow announcement, Mr. Carroll enlists a member of the festivals cast, crew or staff to speak live.

Gray Powell, who performed for 10 seasons under the previous artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, recently gave his first of these impromptu addresses. Its an experiment, but then, all theater is an experiment, said Mr. Powell, who has roles in Middletown and Saint Joan this season. The important thing is that T. C. has gotten people off the backs of their seats and closer to the front.

And while Mr. Powell has relished the Secret Theater forays, he occasionally balks at interactive works like Mr. Carrolls Androcles, in which the actors will elicit stories from audience members at intermission and then include them in the text.

There are certainly times when I feel like, I dont want to talk to you. I just want to look at you, he said.

When audience members ask Mr. Carroll how Shaw might have reacted to these changes, he has an answer at the ready a letter Shaw wrote in about 1930 to Barry Jackson, who wanted to name his own summer theater festival in England after the dramatist.

Shaw said, Dont do that, because you shouldnt be held back by what I am doing or have written, Mr. Carroll said. People like me and Ibsen shouldnt be sat in the road, blocking the way of the new young generation.

And if longtime festivalgoers feel that Mr. Carroll is in the way, he has thoughtfully provided plenty of juggling balls, perfect for chucking.

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Stodgy No More? The Shaw Festival is Full of Surprises - New York Times

By:David Gordon | September 06, 2017

"Mine is better than ours."Benjamin Franklin

Tom Bethell, here as often before, uses sturdy common sense to challenge experts in their own field. In a controversial article many years ago, he dared to suggest that evolutionary biologists have exaggerated the evidence for Darwinism. Though roundly criticized by supporters of orthodoxy, Mr. Bethell manifested an uncanny ability to ask disconcerting questions.

That ability is continually on display in The Noblest Triumph. Here, he indicts economists because they have failed to set forth in detail an answer to what should be a basic question of their discipline: Under what institutions will a society prosper? Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have neglected to analyze property rights, which are, in Mr. Bethell's view, the key to economic success. Classical economists such as David Ricardo continued Smith's policy of taking property rights for granted, and with John Stuart Mill, the last of the classics, things got worse. Mill often criticized private property and seemed to look forward to the onset of socialism, although Mill's ambiguous prose mirrored his dithering on the issue. Of course, Karl Marx said a great deal about property; but his fervent denunciations contributed little to understanding. The Austrian school, including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, stands out as an exception to Mr. Bethell's catalogue of neglect of property, while in recent years, public choice economists have written with illumination on the topic. But in large part the record of the economics profession in discussing property is blank.

This is surprising, since, Mr. Bethell holds, the case for private property is easily made. To grasp the role of private property, an essential truth must be kept in mind. Human beings have a fixed nature, which governments thwart at their peril.

Very well, then: human nature is not so malleable as Bernard Shaw and the Webbs held. Few today would deny this, but how does the fact of a fixed human nature suffice to make the case for property? In Mr. Bethell's view, the argument is simple. People tend to place their own well-being, and that of their families, above a murky "common good" defined by the state. Thus, if property is made collective, disaster will quickly follow. Under a system without private property, an individual has little incentive to conserve resources. Instead, he will seize as much as he can for his immediate benefit; if he does not, others will quickly step into the gap. Moreover, only a regime that mandates individual property rights can avoid what Garrett Hardin has memorably called the "tragedy of the commons." With secure property rights, an owner will not scuttle his long-term gains through indiscriminate exploitation of land. Instead, he will endeavor to maintain his property since it is as an economic asset.

But is not this argument simply an instance of the ancient fallacy, that human beings are narrowly selfish, unmotivated by the good of others? In the guise of a defense of human nature, has not Mr. Bethell attempted to foist on us that discredited construct, homo economicus?

Mr. Bethell readily turns this objection aside. Let us suppose that someone did limit his own use of commonly held land, hoping thereby to aid conservation. He would fail utterly in his purpose. He would merely provide those more self-interested than himself with more land to exploit. The main point is incontestable, and Mr. Bethell ably illustrates his case with many historical examples. These include Plymouth Plantation, where Governor Bradford quickly learned that a community without private property in land was "afflicted by an unwillingness to work," and the New Harmony Utopian socialist colony founded by Robert Owen. Mr. Bethell duly notes that the fortune of that sainted philanthropist rested in part on child labor.

But on one point I must issue a caution. We know, as Mr. Bethell has ably argued, that common property is inefficient. No general argument shows how inefficient it must be when compared with a system of individual property rights: This we must discern from examination of the individual case. Thus, when Mr. Bethell, with a brilliant suggestion, ascribes Irish poverty in the 19th century to the uncertain tenure of land, it does not at once follow from the "tragedy of the commons" argument that he is right. A system of firmly embedded property rights would have led to more efficient land use than the radically uncertain settlement in place there, but how much good such a system would have caused remains a subject for further research. If Mr. Bethell has not fully proved his case on Irish poverty, though, he has immensely aided the discussion through his hypothesis.

A further problem confronts any society that attempts to do away with private productive property altogetherthe famous economic calculation argument advanced by Mises and Hayek. Absent a capitalist market, a centralized economy has no means of deciding how to allocate resources. Engineering calculations alone will not tell the planner whether it is a good idea to construct a bridge with platinum. How can he make the decisions needed to assign economic goods to their best uses? Readers should note that this differs from the "tragedy of the commons." The latter argument involves incentives; the calculation argument does not. Even people totally devoted to the common good would, in a centrally directed economy, confront the calculation problem.

Mr. Bethell locates another difficulty for any regime foolish enough to strike against private property comprehensively.

Mr. Bethell, apparently, cannot for long stay away from incentives, and with good reasonthe issue is crucial. As he notes, this argument received its classic statement in Hayek's Road to Serfdom, but he also suggests that Hayek took over and developed his case from Walter Lippmann's The Good Society. How remarkable that the Great Pundit managed for once in his long career to get something right!

The case for private property goes beyond incentives and efficiency. More broadly, Bethell claims that justice itself demands individual property. He rejects the view of justice as egalitarian fairness, famously advanced by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), and resolutely adheres to the classical view of Aristotle and Aquinas, who thought that justice gives each person what is his due. Each person in an economy based on private property receives the results of his own abilities and character.

Mr. Bethell dismisses with appropriate scorn Rawls' contention that abilities, since they arise from the "genetic lottery," are collective assets best placed under control of the welfare state. In one respect, though, he pushes his argument too far. He suggests that, contrary to its critics, a market svstem minimizes selfish behavior. "A selfish person is one who takes an unfairly large share of some common good, thereby leaving unfairly small shares for everyone else." Situations that lack well-defined property rights render selfish behavior possible.

The argument is ingenious, and it suffices to explain many cases of selfishnessbut by no means all. Would not a person who assiduously seeks gifts and favors from others, but never acts generously save under compulsion, be considered selfish? And yet no problem of collective goods need be involved in this case.

The argument for private property has many implications for contemporary policy. Mr. Bethell suggests that our high-minded Masters of Wisdom in Washington have made a fetish of democracy. A Western-style political system can function only in a reasonably prosperous society, and this requires private property. A regime that moves toward a free market may have much to recommend it, even if it ranks abysmally on the index of the Americans for Democratic Action. Mr. Bethell's point needs to be taken to heart by self-styled conservatives anxious to embroil the United States in a conflict with China that could only serve further to collectivize both countries.

A few details in the book can be challenged. Wesley Hohfeld's definition of rights has nothing to do with Hegel's philosophy: Mr. Bethell has not grasped the quite simple logic of that influential system of legal categories. To call Frederic Maitland one of those who wrote "at a time when centralism was admired across the board" oversimplifies matters. Maitland (a great legal historian) was greatly influenced by the concept of pluralism, a decidedly anti-centralist trend of thought. To support his incontestably true point that socialism leads to dictatorship over workers, Mr. Bethell frequently refers to a spurious passage from Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. Some years ago, I quoted the same passage and was properly taken to task by Mr. Williamson Evers of the Hoover Institution.

But these are only minor points. Mr. Bethell has written a clear, cogent book that both sums up and advances our knowledge of property. In learning and suggestiveness. The Noblest Triumph is a triumph indeed.

[The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, by Tom Bethell (New York: St. Martin's Press) 578 pp., $29.95]

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A Theory of Fairness - A Magazine of American Culture

To be made a statue, a woman had to be a naked muse, royalty or the mother of God. Or occasionally, an icon of war, justice or virtue: Boadicea in her chariot in London, the Statue of Liberty in New York, The Motherland Calls in Volgograd.

Still, of 925 public statues in Britain, only 158 are women standing on their own. Of those, 110 are allegorical or mythical, and 29 are of Queen Victoria, according to a study of British public monuments by Caroline Criado-Perez. Just 25 are statues of historical women who are not royalty, she writes, one of whom is a ghost and only there because shes looking for the spirit of her murdered husband.

There are 43 statues of men named John.

In the United States, less than 8 percent of public statues are female. Nine of 411 national parks are dedicated to womens history. Which is why women have been stealthily gathering funds to break through the bronze ceiling and place statues of women in busy public spaces.

A campaign begun in February called Put Her on the Map aims to encourage cities and corporations to put women on the map by naming streets, statues and buildings after influential female figures. In Manchester, England, where Queen Victoria is the sole female figure out of 17 statues, the Womanchester Statue Project has been gathering funds for a statue of the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.

Monumental Women is raising money for a statue of suffragists in Central Park in New York. And a new app, The Whole Story, uses augmented reality technology to place female statues in public spaces everywhere from Washington to Milan, Prague and Rome.

Why does this matter? Because history is skewed. Because women have been rendered invisible and irrelevant for centuries. Because when little girls walk past imposing figures on pedestals, they know they represent status and authority, that this person has done or been something worthwhile.

And if women are on those pedestals, they will know women can matter and make history. Or simply that women are history.

One thing I like most about Victorias statues is that she did not pose coquettishly or aim to please the eye. She stood with authority. The primary concern of the woman Leonard Cohen called the mean governess of the huge pink maps was not whether people liked her but whether she liked them.

This monarch, who eschewed corsets and shocked doctors with her frankness about her body, was simply powerful. She loved to surround herself with beauty, most especially her husbands, but she did not give a fig about her own.

Which is lucky, because her sculptors did not flatter her. When, in 1919, the Arts Gazette asked readers to nominate the ugliest statue in London, George Bernard Shaw thought there were several of Victoria that could qualify. He asked what crime Queen Victoria committed that she should be so horribly guyed as she has been through the length and breadth of her dominions.

It was part of her personal quality that she was a tiny woman, and our national passion for telling lies in every public subject has led to her being represented as an overgrown monster. The truth, he said, was that Victoria was a little woman with great decision of manner and a beautiful speaking voice which she used in public extremely well. Instead, All young people now believe that she was a huge heap of a woman.

Heap or not, she could not be ignored. Which surely is the most obvious upside of visibility.

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Why We Should Put Women on Pedestals - New York Times

Sixteen years on from his last novel, Glasgow-based Northern Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty reflects on the events that have shaped his new book, Midwinter Break

There are days when Bernard MacLaverty likes nothing more than to hurl James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw against the radiator at the far end of his study. The author of Cal, Lamb and some of the finest short stories in the English language doesnt throw tattered copies of Ulysses or Pygmalion, nor is the hurling performed in a fit of pique or frustration when the days sentences knot or buckle. No, this is an act of great joy one involving knitted figurines of Irelands greatest men of letters and performed with the enthusiastic participation of his youngest grandson. As each figurine is equipped with a concealed magnet, victory is decided by which author hits the radiator then sticks. So is literary rivalry settled in

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'I left behind the hatred, the bombings and the fear' - The Times

THE BASICS: AN OCTOROON, a 2014 play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Peter Hinton starring AndrSills, Patrick McManus, Ryan Cunningham, Vanessa Sears, et. al. runs throughOctober 14at the Royal George Theatre, 85 Queen Street, Niagara-on-the-Lake.www.shawfest.comor1-800-511-7429. Theater opens hour before curtain, full service cozy bar in the downstairs lounge, great coffee, snacks. Runtime: a little over 2 hours and 30 minutes including one intermission.

THUMBNAIL SKETCH: In this play within a play, we first meet playwright BJJ (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, get it?) as played by AndrSills, in his underwear, at a makeup table, explaining that he wanted to revive an 1859 melodrama called The Octoroon which takes place on a slave plantation called Terrebone, but he couldnt get any of his white guy friends to play the overtly racist characters, so hes going to do that himself, as he slathers on white face makeup. Sills then takes on the roles of both the kindly George, who has returned from England to inherit a plantation, and also the role of the evil MClosky who has designs on the place and on the innocent Zoe, who is 1/8 black (an octoroon) and who may be a slave (and therefore MCloskys property along with the plantation) or might be free to marry George depending on a plot device. And, along the way, we have white actors applying blackface and redface to play the various roles required. We go back and forth between pre-American Civil War theatrics and post-Obama racial analysis. This is what theater is supposed to be. Thank you Artistic Director Tim Carroll for including AN OCTOROON in the lineup.

THE PLAYERS, THE PLAY, AND THE PRODUCTION: AN OCTOROON provides the big breakout role for AndrSills, in his third year with The Shaw Festival, having been in last seasons two race oriented plays: Athol Fugards MASTER HAROLDAND THE BOYS as well as Shaws THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK GIRL IN SEARCH OF GOD. And Sills is also currently in THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III, also at The Royal George. Hes a busy guy, but never more so than in this production, where, towards the end, he plays George and MClosky simultaneously, wearing a suit that is half one character and half the other.

With his immense talent, and playing the three lead roles of playwright BJJ, George, and MClosky, this could have been all about Sills, but thanks to the Shaws deep pool of talent (including Gillian Gallow, Bonnie Beecher, and Ryan de Souza who provided design, lighting, and music) and a fine ensemble cast, the evening feels balanced but very powerful.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), for whom The Shaw Festival is named, consistently explored themes of imperialism, domination, and economic disadvantage. And we are still dealing with those problems today, if not military imperialism, then cultural imperialism, cultural domination, and systematic economic oppression. So, this play honors the legacy of Shaw, is true to the mission of The Shaw Festival, and is about as current as you can get.

In general, I do not like metatheater where the play is aware of itself as a product of a culture. I think thats our job as audience to see that. But while AN OCTOROON is a play about putting on a play, the writing, the production values, the acting are at such a high level that its not distracting at all.

The Shaw Festival (www.shawfest.com) continues to offer plays into October. While MIDDLETOWN ends onSeptember 10; WILDE TALES and Shaws ANDROCLES AND THE LION run throughOctober 7; and 1837: THE FARMERS REVOLT ends onOctober 8(note that Thanksgiving Day in Canada and Columbus Day in the U.S. are celebrated onMonday, October 9). Looking at the final weekend, DRACULA; 1979 (about Prime Minister Joe Clark); and AN OCTOROON end onOctober 14; while Shaws SAINT JOAN, the musical ME AND MY GIRL; THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III; and DANCING AT LUGHNASA close the Festivals offerings onSunday, October 15, 2017. Also note thatSundayperformances are now an hour early at both1:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

Rating: Four and half Buffalos

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AN OCTOROON at Shaw: Race in your face in one of the best shows this summer. - Buffalo Rising

Katie Roche: because the shrew must go on

Independent.ie

Emer O'Kelly finds that a post-modern approach to a classic can work well.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/theatre-arts/katie-roche-because-the-shrew-must-go-on-36092206.html

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Emer O'Kelly finds that a post-modern approach to a classic can work well.

Teresa Deevy's Katie Roche is an extraordinary play. Written in 1936, it posited in Catholic Ireland the theory that being "illegitimate" might have been the "fault" of your mother; certainly the "fault" of your father if he took off on hearing the news, but not at all the fault of the "illegitimate" child.

Nearly 30 years later, John B Keane wrote of a society in which an "illegitimate" girl, Sive, was told that being sold to a rapacious old man while in love with a young man was "more than she deserved". Nothing had changed; the child was still being stigmatised.

But while Katie Roche is threatened with the same fate as Sive, she is saved by a genuine if flawed love. Stanislaus Gregg has loved her since her early girlhood, but fled from her flawed pedigree. But his staid love was too strong, and he returns to his home to woo the young Katie, who has been working as housemaid for his maiden sister. The difference here is that Katie also loves him.

But she wants to love in her own way, wilfully and strong-mindedly, while living her youth to its full extent.

Maddened by the restraints and decorum that surround her, she defiantly flaunts a young neighbour (with whom she has long flirted) before the eyes of her husband.

Young Michael, though, is the classic "whited sepulchre" - it is he rather than the prosperous and gentle Stanislaus who thinks Katie is "no better than she should be". He would have been a very broken reed had she turned in truth to him.

The play becomes a Taming of the Shrew for rural Ireland in the years before World War II, full of the mocking cliches that Deevy saw all round her, and which she undertook to expose, both subversively and gently.

She got away without having her work banned, but her particular morality never exactly took off, despite the active encouragement and approval of both George Bernard Shaw and Denis Johnston. But then the Catholic Church didn't like them either.

It has long been my theory that Katie Roche survived the outraged eye of Mother Church because it is a comedy, albeit subtle and satirical. Shakespeare's shrew is tamed against her will; Deevy's adapts rather than submits, and thus saves her own independent soul. And of course, her love for the staid Stanislaus has never been in question.

The play was written in the era of expressionism, and Caroline Byrne's new production for the Abbey (truncated, but fairly expertly so) is delivered in that style, on an open stage designed in post-modern style by Joanna Satcher and lit by Paul Keogan; the opening mud and mire in which Katie is trapped adapts throughout to regulated panels of possible escape and freedom.

Caoilfhionn Dunne and Sean Campion head the cast as Katie and Stanislaus, and are touchingly and superbly matched. Good support comes from Kevin Creedon as the feckless Michael, Donal O'Kelly as Reuben, the wandering deus-ex-machina, and Siobhan McSweeney as the gentle, spinster-ish Amelia.

*******

Beryl (the Peril) and Eejit are sisters who live together in the house they presume was left to them by their vicious old mother. We know she was vicious because, although she's dead and gone, and had suffered from dementia, she was the one who nicknamed them from their given names of Pearl and Edith. And their late father was happy to be equally beastly.

Now Beryl, awaiting her pension, suffers from agoraphobia, while Eejit keeps the household going through writing romantic novels for Mills & Boon. Until their solicitor writes to tell them that the former gardener, Miguel from Spain, who was bedding more than the plants, is actually the legatee.

Cue a black comedy that's a cross between Arsenic and Old Lace and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? And it's actually jolly funny when you skip over gaps in credibility.

Skipping those yawning gaps would be easier with both better acting and better, much slicker direction.

The latter, by Eamonn B Shanahan, is lumpish, while Helen Roche's Beryl is unconvincing as an ageing neurotic. Even comedy requires conviction.

Billie Traynor fares infinitely better as Eejit; presumably as the author of the piece, she is well under its skin.

Beryl and Eejit is a co-production between Poppin and DoItYerself, playing at Theatre Upstairs at Lanigan's Bar on Eden Quay in Dublin.

Sunday Indo Living

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Katie Roche: because the shrew must go on - Independent.ie