MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND EDUCATION OF THE

REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN
WESTERN CASPIAN UNIVERSITY

PRACTICE TOPIC

Faculty: English language and Literature philology

Group: 329F2
Topic: George Bernard Shaw
Student: Aydan Mammadova

Baku – 2024
 George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950) was an Irish
playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his
first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote
many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he
wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer.
Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of
comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged
Shaw's attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care,
and class privilege.
He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the
working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for
the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its
causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses
of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and
promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics,
serving on the London County Council.
In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom
he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's
Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries
he incurred by falling from a ladder.
He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature
(1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on
the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Shaw
wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public
honours, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland.
He did reject the monetary award. requesting it be used to finance translation of
fellow playwright August Strindberg's works from Swedish to English.
Life
 Early years and family
George Bernard Shaw was born in Synge Street, Dublin, on 26 July 1856 to
George Carr Shaw (1814-85), an unsuccessful grain merchant and sometime civil
servant, and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, née Gurly (1830-1913), a professional
singer. He had two sisters, Lucinda Frances (1853-1920), a singer of musical
comedy and light opera, and Elinor Agnes (1855-76).
Education
Shaw briefly attended the Wesley College, Dublin, a grammar school
operated by the Methodist Church in Ireland, before moving to a private school
near Dalkey and then transferring to Dublin's Central Model School. He ended his
formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. He
harboured a lifelong animosity toward schools and teachers, saying, "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 the astringent prologue to Cashel
Byron's Profession young Byron's educational experience is a fictionalized
description of Shaw's own schooldays. Later, he painstakingly detailed the reasons
for his aversion to formal education in his Treatise on Parents and Children. In
brief, he considered the standardized curricula useless, deadening to the spirit and
stifling to the intellect. He particularly deplored the use of corporal punishment,
which was prevalent in his time.
When his mother left home and followed her voice teacher, George
Vandeleur Lee, to London, Shaw was almost sixteen years old. His sisters
accompanied their mother] but Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, first as a
reluctant pupil, then as a clerk in an estate office. He worked efficiently, albeit
discontentedly, for several years. In 1876, Shaw joined his mother's London
household. She, Vandeleur Lee, and his sister Lucy, provided him with a pound a
week while he frequented public libraries and the British Museum reading room
where he studied earnestly and began writing novels. He earned his allowance by
ghostwriting Vandeleur Lee's music column, which appeared in the London
Hornet. His novels were rejected, however, so his literary earnings remained
negligible until 1885, when he became self-supporting as a critic of the arts.
Personal life
Influenced by his reading, he became a dedicated socialist and a charter
member of the Fabian Society, a middle class organization established in 1884 to
promote the gradual spread of socialism by peaceful means. In the course of his
political activities he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow
Fabian; they married in 1898. The marriage was never consummated, at Charlotte's
insistence, though he had a number of affairs with married women.
In 1906 the Shaws moved into a house, now called Shaw's Corner, in Ayot
St. Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire, England; it was to be their home for
the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a residence at 29
Fitzroy Square in London.
Political activism
Shaw declined to stand as an MP, but in 1897 he was elected as a local
councillor to the London County Council as a Progressive.
Contributions
Shaw's plays were first performed in the 1890s. By the end of the decade he
was an established playwright. He wrote sixty-three plays and his output as
novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist and private correspondent was prodigious. He
is known to have written more than 250,000 letters. Along with Fabian Society
members Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas, Shaw founded the
London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895 with funding provided
by private philanthropy, including a bequest of £20,000 from Henry Hunt
Hutchinson to the Fabian Society. One of the libraries at the LSE is named in
Shaw's honour; it contains collections of his papers and photographs. Shaw helped
to found the left-wing magazine New Statesman in 1913 with the Webbs and other
prominent members of the Fabian Society.
Career
Writings
 See Works by George Bernard Shaw for listings of his novels and plays, with
links to their electronic texts, if those exist.
The International Shaw Society provides a detailed chronological listing of
Shaw's writings. Bernard Shaw, Unity Theatre. s.
Criticism
Shaw became a critic of the arts when, sponsored by William Archer, he
joined the reviewing staff of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. There he wrote under
the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto" ("basset horn") chosen because it sounded
European and nobody knew what a corno di bassetto was. In a miscellany of other
periodicals, including Dramatic Review (1885-86), Our Corner (1885-86), and the
Pall Mall Gazette (1885-88) his byline was "GBS". From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was
the drama critic for his friend Frank Harris's Saturday Review, in which position he
campaigned brilliantly to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian
stage with a theatre of actuality and thought. His earnings as a critic made him self-
supporting as an author and his articles for the Saturday Review made his name
well-known.
George Bernard Shaw was highly critical of productions of Shakespeare, and
specifically denounced the dramatic practice of editing Shakespeare's plays, whose
scenes tended to be cut in order to create "acting versions". He notably held
famous 19th-century actor Sir Henry Irving in contempt for this practice, as he
expressed in one of his reviews:
"In a true republic of art, Sir Henry Irving would ere this have expiated his
acting versions on the scaffold. He does not merely cut plays; he disembowels
them. In Cymbeline he has quite surpassed himself by extirpating the antiphonal
third verse of the famous dirge. A man who would do that would do anything -cut
the coda out of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or shorten one
of Velázquez's Philips into a kitcat to make it fit over his drawing room
mantelpiece."
 Shavian scholar John F. Matthews credits him, as a result, with the
disappearance of the two-hundred-year-old tradition of editing Shakespeare into
"acting versions".
He had a very high regard for both Irish stage actor Barry Sullivan's and
Johnston Forbes-Robertson's Hamlets, but despised John Barrymore's. Barrymore
invited him to see a performance of his celebrated Hamlet, and Shaw graciously
accepted, but wrote Barrymore a withering letter in which he all but tore the
performance to shreds. Even worse, Shaw had seen the play in the company of
Barrymore's then wife, but did not dare voice his true feelings about the
performance aloud to her.
Much of Shaw's music criticism, ranging from short comments to the book-
length essay The Perfect Wagnerite, extols the work of the German composer
Richard Wagner. Wagner worked 25 years composing Der Ring des Nibelungen, a
massive four-part musical dramatization drawn from the Teutonic mythology of
gods, giants, dwarves and Rhine maidens; Shaw considered it a work of genius and
reviewed it in detail. Beyond the music, he saw it as an allegory of social evolution
where workers, driven by "the invisible whip of hunger", seek freedom from their
wealthy masters. Wagner did have socialistic sympathies, as Shaw carefully points
out, but made no such claim about his opus. Conversely, Shaw disparaged Brahms,
deriding A German Requiem by saying "it could only have come from the
establishment of a first-class undertaker". Although he found Brahms lacking in
intellect, he praised his musicality, saying "...nobody can listen to Brahms' natural
utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions,
without rejoicing in his natural gift". In the 1920s, he recanted, calling his earlier
animosity towards Brahms "my only mistake". Shaw's writings about music gained
great popularity because they were understandable to the average well-read
audience member of the day, thus contrasting starkly with the dourly pretentious
pedantry of most critiques in that era. All of his music critiques have been
collected in Shaw's Music. As a drama critic for the Saturday Review, a post he
held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw championed Henrik Ibsen whose realistic plays
scandalized the Victorian public. His influential Quintessence of Ibsenism was
written in 1891.
Novels
Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels at the start of his career between 1879
and 1883. Eventually all were published. The first to be printed was Cashel Byron's
Profession (1886), which was written in 1882. Its eponymous character, Cashel, a
rebellious schoolboy with an unsympathetic mother, runs away to Australia where
he becomes a famed prizefighter. He returns to England for a boxing match, and
falls in love with erudite and wealthy Lydia Carew. Lydia, drawn by sheer animal
magnetism, eventually consents to marry despite the disparity of their social
positions. This breach of propriety is nullified by the unpresaged discovery that
Cashel is of noble lineage and heir to a fortune comparable to Lydia's. With those
barriers to happiness removed, the couple settles down to prosaic family life with
Lydia dominant; Cashel attains a seat in Parliament. In this novel Shaw first
expresses his conviction that productive land and all other natural resources should
belong to everyone in common, rather than being owned and exploited privately.
The book was written in the year when Shaw first heard the lectures of Henry
George who advocated such reforms.
Written in 1883, An Unsocial Socialist was published in 1887. The tale
begins with a hilarious description of student antics at a girl's school then changes
focus to a seemingly uncouth laborer who, it soon develops, is really a wealthy
gentleman in hiding from his overly affectionate wife. He needs the freedom
gained by matrimonial truancy to promote the socialistic cause, to which he is an
active convert. Once the subject of socialism emerges, it dominates the story,
allowing only space enough in the final chapters to excoriate the idle upper class
and allow the to promote the socialistic cause, to which he is an active convert.
Once the subject of socialism emerges, it dominates the story, allowing only space
enough in the final chapters to excoriate the idle upper class and allow the
erstwhile schoolgirls, in their earliest maturity, to marry suitably.
 Love Among the Artists was published in the United States in 1900 and in
England in 1914, but it was written in 1881. In the ambiance of chit-chat and
frivolity among members of Victorian polite society a youthful Shaw describes his
views on the arts, romantic love and the practicalities of matrimony. Dilettantes, he
thinks, can love and settle down to marriage, but artists with real genius are too
consumed by their work to fit that pattern. The dominant figure in the novel is
Owen Jack, a musical genius, somewhat mad and quite bereft of social graces.
From an abysmal beginning he rises to great fame and is lionized by socialites
despite his unremitting crudity.
The Irrational Knot was written in 1880 and published in 1905. Within a
framework of leisure class preoccupations and frivolities Shaw disdains hereditary
status and proclaims the nobility of workers. Marriage, as the knot in question, is
exemplified by the union of Marian Lind, a lady of the upper class, to Edward
Conolly, always a workman but now a magnate, thanks to his invention of an
electric motor that makes steam engines obsolete. The marriage soon deteriorates,
primarily because Marian fails to rise above the preconceptions and limitations of
her social class and is, therefore, unable to share her husband's interests.
Eventually she runs away with a man who is her social peer, but he proves himself
a scoundrel and abandons her in desperate circumstances. Her husband rescues her
and offers to take her back, but she pridefully refuses, convinced she is unworthy
and certain that she faces life as a pariah to her family and friends. The preface,
written when Shaw was 49, expresses gratitude to his parents for their support
during the lean years while he learned to write and includes details of his early life
in London.
Shaw's first novel, Immaturity, was written in 1879 but was the last one to be
printed in 1931. It relates tepid romances, minor misfortunes and subdued
successes in the developing career of Robert Smith, an energetic young Londoner
and outspoken agnostic. Condemnation of alcoholic behaviour is the prime
message in the book, and derives from Shaw's familial memories. This is made
clear in the book's preface, which was written by the mature Shaw at the time of its
belated publication. The preface is a valuable resource because it provides
autobiographical details not otherwise available.
Short stories
A collection of Shaw's short stories, The Black Girl in Search of God and
Some Lesser Tales, was published in 1934. The Black Girl, an enthusiastic convert
to Christianity, goes searching for God. In the story, written as an allegory,
somewhat reminiscent of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Shaw uses her
adventures to expose flaws and fallacies in the religions of the world. At the story's
happy ending, the Black Girl quits her searchings in favour of rearing a family with
the aid of a red-haired Irishman who has no metaphysical inclination.
One of the Lesser Tales is The Miraculous Revenge (1885), which relates the
misadventures of an alcoholic investigator while he probes the mystery of a
graveyard-full of saintly corpses that migrates across a stream to escape association
with the body of a newly buried sinner.
Plays
The texts of plays by Shaw mentioned in this section, with the dates when
they were written and first performed can be found in Complete Plays and
Prefaces. Shaw began working on his first play destined for production, Widowers'
Houses, in 1885 in collaboration with critic William Archer, who supplied the
structure. Archer decided that Shaw could not write a play, so the project was
abandoned. Years later, Shaw tried again and, in 1892, completed the play without
collaboration. Widowers' Houses, a scathing attack on slumlords, was first
performed at London's Royalty Theatre on 9 December 1892. Shaw would later
call it one of his worst works, but he had found his medium. His first significant
financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield's American
production of The Devil's Disciple (1897). He went on to write 63 plays, most of
them full-length.
Often his plays succeeded in the United States and Germany before they did
in London. Although major London productions of many of his earlier pieces were
delayed for years, they are still being performed there. Examples include Mrs.
Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894) and You
Never Can Tell (1897).
Shaw's plays, like those of Oscar Wilde, contained incisive humour, which
was exceptional among playwrights of the Victorian era; both authors are
remembered for their comedy. However, Shaw's wittiness should not obscure his
important role in revolutionizing British drama. In the Victorian Era, the London
stage had been regarded as a place for frothy, sentimental entertainment. Shaw
made it a forum for considering moral, political and economic issues, possibly his
most lasting and important contribution to dramatic art. In this, he considered
himself indebted to Henrik Ibsen, who pioneered modern realistic drama, meaning
drama designed to heighten awareness of some important social issue.
Significantly, Widowers' Houses an example of the realistic genre was completed
after William Archer, Shaw's friend, had translated some of Ibsen's plays to English
and Shaw had written The Quintessence of Ibsenism.
As Shaw's experience and popularity increased, his plays and prefaces
became more voluble about reforms he advocated, without diminishing their
success as entertainments. Such works, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898),
Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor's Dilemma
(1906), display Shaw's matured views, for he was approaching 50 when he wrote
them. From 1904 to 1907, several of his plays had their London premieres in
notable productions at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley Granville-Barker and
J. E. Vedrenne. The first of his new plays to be performed at the Court Theatre,
John Bull's Other Island (1904), while not especially popular today, made his
reputation in London when King Edward VII laughed so hard during a command
performance that he broke his chair.
He wrote plays for the rest of his life, but very few of them are as notable or
as often revived-as his earlier work. The Apple Cart (1929) was probably his most
popular work of this era. Later full-length plays like Too True to Be Good (1931),
On the Rocks (1933), The Millionairess (1935), and Geneva (1938) have been seen
as marking a decline. His last significant play, In Good King Charles Golden Days
has, according to St. John Ervine, that are equal to Shaw's major works.
Shaw's published plays come with lengthy prefaces. These tend to be more
about Shaw's opinions on the issues addressed by the plays than about the plays
themselves. Often his prefaces are longer than the plays they introduce. For
example, the Penguin Books edition of his one-act The Shewing-up Of Blanco
Posnet (1909) has a 67-page preface for the 29-page playscript.
Resources

1. Brown, G.E. "George Bernard Shaw". Evans Brothers Ltd, 2009

2. Chappelow, Alan. "Shaw the Villager and Human Being - a Biographical
symposium", with a preface by Dame
3. Sybil Thorndike "Shaw - the 'Chucker-Out", 2008. ISBN 0-404-08359-5
4. Elliot, Vivian. "Dear Mr Shaw Selections from Bernard Shaw's postbag"
Bloomsbury, 2007 ISBN 0-7475-0256-0 . With an introduction by Michael
Holroyd
5. Evans, T.F. "Shaw: The Critical heritage". The Critical Heritage series.
Routlege & Kegan Paul, 2006
6. Gibbs, A.M (Ed.). "Shaw: Interviews and Recollections".
7. Gibbs, A.M. "Bernard Shaw, A Life". University of Florida Press, 2005.
ISBN 0-8130-2859-0
8. Henderson, Archibald. "Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet". D. Appleton
& Co., 2010
9. Holroyd, Michael (Etd). "The Genius of Shaw: A symposium", Hodder &
Stoughton, 2009
10.Holroyd, Michael. "Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition",
Random House, 2014. ISBN 978-0-393-32718-2
11.Hubenka, Lloyd J. (Editor). "Bernard Shaw: Practical Politics: Twentieth-
century views on politics and economics". University of Nebraska Press,
2013
12.Minney, R.J. "The Bogus Image of Bernard Shaw". London, Frewin, 1969.
ISBN 0-09-096280-X
13.Ohmann, Richard M. "Shaw: The Style and the Man". Wesleyan University
Press, 2012. ASIN: B0000KX9H2
14.Owen, Harold. "Common sense about the Shaw". George Allen and Unwin,
2010
15.Peters, Sally. "Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman". Yale University
Press, 2007 ISBN 978-0-300-06097-3
16.Rider, Dan. "Adventures with Bernard Shaw". Morley and Mitchell
Kennerley Junior.
17.Smith, J. Percy. "Unrepentant Pilgrim: A study of the development of
Bernard Shaw". Victor Gollancz Ltd, 2006
18.Stone, Dan (2009). Breeding superman: Nietzsche, race and eugenics in
Edwardian and interwar Britain.
19.Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-0-85323-997-0.
20.Strauss, E. "Bernard Shaw: Art and Socialism." Victor Gollancz Ltd, 2012
21.Weintraub, Stanley. "Bernard Shaw 1914-1918: Journey to Heartbreak".
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2013
22.Weintraub, Stanley. "The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical approaches to
G.B.S and his work". Frederick Ungar