George+Bernard+Shaw

=George Bernard Shaw = (July 26, 1856 - November 2nd, 1950)



Biography
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26 1856 in Dublin Ireland the son of a civil servant. Although he was best known for drama, he was also proficient in the areas of journalism, music and literary criticism. He began his literary career as a novelist. Shaw’s works concerned themselves mostly with prevailing social problems, specifically with what he saw as the exploitation of the working middle class. Shaw attended various schools throughout his youth but always harboured an animosity towards schools and teachers. He is quoted as saying that "Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents".

In his personal life, Shaw was an avid Socialist and a member of the Fabian society. In 1898 he married fellow Fabian member and Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townsend. He was the first person to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature as well as an Oscar (for his work on Pygmalion, which was an adaptation of his play of the same name). He wrote 60 plays, most of which deal with social themes such as marriage, religion, class government and health care. Two of his greatest influences were Henrik Ibsen and Henry Fielding. Ibsen's plays and Fielding's expulsion from playwriting inspired him to write his own plays on the social injustices of the world around him, including the late nineteenth century censorship of plays, continued from Prime Minister Walpole's rein in the mid 1740s. The Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays especially irked him: "A gentleman who robs, insults, and suppresses me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects... But I must submit [my play] in order to obtain from him an insolent and insufferable document, which I cannot read without boiling of the blood, certifying that in his opinion -- //his// opinion!-- my play 'does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage,' and that the Lord Chamberlain therefore 'allows' its performance (confound his impudence!)." (Mainly xv)

George Bernard Shaw died at the age of 94 due to injuries incurred from falling while pruning a tree.

Listen to an [|Interview with George Bernard Shaw] from 1937.

If you would like to know what Shaw thought about something, the [|NYTimes has an archive of Shaw]: his quotes, his opinions, pictures, etc.

**Short Stories**

 * The Black Girl in Search of God
 * The Miraculous Revenge

**Novels**

 * Immaturity
 * Cashel Byron's Profession
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Unsocial Socialist
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Irrational Knot
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Love Among the Artists

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">**Plays** (In chronological order)

 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Plays Unpleasant
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Widowers' Houses
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Philanderer
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Mrs. Warren's Profession
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">To read the script with the Author's Apology, click [|HERE].
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Plays Pleasant
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Arms and the Man
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Candida
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Man of Destiny
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">You Can Never Tell
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Three Plays for Puritans
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Devil's Disciple
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Caesar and Cleopatra
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Captain Brassbound's Conversion
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Admirable Bashville
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Man and Superman
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">John Bull's Other Island
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">How He Lied to Her Husband
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Major Barbara
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Doctor's Dilemma
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Getting Married
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Glimpse of Reality
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Fascinating Foundling
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Press Cuttings
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Misalliance
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Annajanska, The Bolshevik Empress
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Fanny's First Play
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Overruled
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Androcles and the Lion
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Pygmalion
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Great Catherine
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Inca of Perusalem
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">O'Flaherty VC
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Augustus Does His Bit
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Heartbreak House
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Back to Methuselah
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Saint Joan
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">In the Beginning
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabus
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Thing Happens
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">As Far as Thought Can Reach
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Apple Cart
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Too True to be Good
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">On the Rocks
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Six of Calias
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Millionaires
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Geneva
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">In Good King Charles Golden Days
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Bouyant Billions
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Shakes Versus Shav

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">**Essays**

 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Quintessence of Ibenism
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Maxims for Revolutionists
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Preface to Major Barabara
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">How to Write a Popular Play
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Treatise on Parents and Children
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Common Sense about the War
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Dictators-Let Us Have More of Them
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">"Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical Criticism of Bernard Shaw in Three Volumes"
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">"Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings"

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">To see a selection of Shaw's Essays courtesy of Brown University, click [|HERE].

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Return to Drama in the Twentieth Century

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">**References**

 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Shaw, Bernard (1914). [|//Misalliance, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny's First Play. With a Treatise on Parents and Children//]. London: Constable and Co.. pp. 210 . [].
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Shaw, George B. "Mainly About Myself." Preface. //Seven Plays by Bernard Shaw//. New York: Dodd, Mead &, 1951. Vii-Xxvi.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Contributors
<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Mallory Slade, Karen Bilotti