Author won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925
BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. Although essentially
shy, he created the persona of G. B. S., the showman, satirist,
controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and
dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English:
Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities.
After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist
and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects
of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the
Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to
Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at
the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in
cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and
theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes such as
Music in London 1890–1894 (3 vols, 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews
(1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols, 1931). He also
wrote five novels and some shorter fiction, including The Black
Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales and Cashel Byron’s
Profession, both published in Penguin’s Bernard Shaw Library.
He conducted a strong attack on the London theatre and was closely
associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His
plays fall into several categories: ‘Plays Pleasant’; ‘Plays
Unpleasant’; comedies; chronicle-plays; ‘metabiological Pentateuch’
(Back to Methuselah, a series of plays); and ‘political
extravaganzas’. Bernard Shaw died in 1950.
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