Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950)

Irish dramatist, critic, and novelist, and an early member of the socialist Fabian Society, although he resigned in 1911. His plays combine comedy with political, philosophical, and controversial aspects, aiming to make an impact on his audience's social conscience as well as their emotions. They include Arms and the Man (1894), The Devil's Disciple (1897), Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913), and St Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Shaw was born in Dublin, and went to London in 1876 to work as a critic. He became a brilliant debater. Shaw combined treatment of social issues with a comic technique that relied on brilliantly witty serio-comic dialogue and playfully ironic inversion of audience expectations about character and situation. As a result, he put himself in the front line of the intellectually serious and progressive English theatre, yet also became a successful popular playwright. Altogether Shaw wrote more than 50 plays and became renowned for his wit. His theories were further explained in the voluminous prefaces to the plays, and in books such as The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism (1928). In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend (died 1943). He was a strict vegetarian, and still active and writing until his death at age 94.

Our Theatre in the Nineties (1932) contains many of his reviews published in the Saturday Review between 1895 and 1898. His first play, Widowers' Houses, was privately produced in 1892. Attacking slum landlords, it allied him with the realistic, political, and polemical movement in the theatre, pointing to people's responsibility to improve themselves and their social environment. His first public production was Arms and the Man, a cynical view of war, published as one of seven plays entitled Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Also in the volume was Mrs Warren's Profession (1898), dealing with prostitution, which was banned until 1902. Man and Superman expounds his ideas of evolution by following the character of Don Juan into hell for a debate with the devil.

The ‘anti-romantic’ comedy Pygmalion, first performed in 1913, was written for the actor Mrs Patrick Campbell (and after Shaw's death was converted to a musical as My Fair Lady). Later plays included Heartbreak House (1920), about the decline of Edwardian England; Back to Methuselah (1922), an ambitious cycle of plays offering a view of history from human beginnings to the distant future; and the historical St Joan (1923), which examines the nature of religious belief.