George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work. He has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare.
About George Bernard Shaw in brief
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. Since Shaw’s death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare. 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 castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. In the final decade of his life he continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946. Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw. His elder siblings were Lucinda Frances and Elinor Agnes. The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. In 1862, the Shaws agreed to share a house in an affluent part of Hatch Street in Dublin with George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin’s musical circles.
Lee was a conductor and singing teacher of mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Shaw’s vocal method. Shaw retained lifelong obsession with his biological father; he later recalled that he found solace in music that abounded in the house. The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but recalled that her indifference and lack of affection for him deeply hurt him. 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 Hol Troyd and others surmise, George’s motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessy 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\”. In 1876 he 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. 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.
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