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Literature · Playwrights

George Bernard Shaw

1856–1950 · Irish

Drama of ideas; Fabian socialism

George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, moved to London and became a music and theatre critic, a leading Fabian socialist and the most prolific British playwright of his era. His witty "drama of ideas", including Pygmalion, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and Saint Joan, attacked social hypocrisy. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Academy Award for the screenplay of Pygmalion.

How to spot them

  • ▸Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle; 'Not bloody likely!'; the source of My Fair Lady
  • ▸Winner of both a Nobel Prize (1925) and an Oscar (for Pygmalion)
  • ▸The Fabian Society and co-founding the London School of Economics
  • ▸Music critic under the pen name 'Corno di Bassetto'; vegetarian and teetotaller
  • ▸Shaw's Corner at Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; the Shavian alphabet

Key works

Pygmalion (1913)

Phonetics professor Henry Higgins transforms the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle

Saint Joan (1923)

Chronicle play of Joan of Arc, written soon after her canonisation in 1920

Man and Superman (1903)

Jack Tanner is pursued by Ann Whitefield; includes the dream interlude 'Don Juan in Hell'

Major Barbara (1905)

A Salvation Army major confronts her father, the armaments magnate Andrew Undershaft

Arms and the Man (1894)

Satire on war and romance with Bluntschli, the 'chocolate cream soldier'

Mrs Warren's Profession (1893 (staged 1902))

Vivie Warren discovers her mother's fortune came from prostitution; long banned by the censor

Heartbreak House (1919)

'A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes', set in Captain Shotover's ship-like house

Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

A worldly Julius Caesar tutors the young Cleopatra in Egypt

Key ideas

  • The drama of ideas: plays as arguments about poverty, class, war, religion and women's position
  • The 'Life Force' and creative evolution (Man and Superman, Back to Methuselah)
  • Fabian gradualist socialism; he edited Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)
  • Championed Ibsen in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Dublin on 26 July 1856; died at Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, on 2 November 1950, aged 94
  • •Awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature
  • •Won the Academy Award for adapted screenplay for Pygmalion (1938), shared with the film's other writers
  • •Wrote music criticism as 'Corno di Bassetto'
  • •Co-founded the London School of Economics in 1895 with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas
  • •Married the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1898
  • •His 'Maxims for Revolutionists' in Man and Superman include 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.'
  • •His will funded a competition for a new phonetic alphabet, producing the Shavian alphabet
  • •The Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, is devoted to his plays and his era

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Sources