Everything about George Bernard Shaw totally explained
George Bernard Shaw (
26 July 1856 –
2 November 1950) was an
Irish playwright. Born in
Dublin, he moved to
London at the age of twenty and lived in
England for the remainder of his life.
Although Shaw's first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his talent was for
drama, and during his career he authored more than sixty plays. Nearly all of his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but are leavened by a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege and found them all defective, but his ire was most aroused by the exploitation of the working class; his writings seldom fail to censure that abuse. 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 political rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding
private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthful lifestyles.
Shaw married
Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They made their home 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.
He is the only person to have been awarded both the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an
Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film
Pygmalion, respectively. Shaw would have refused his Nobel Prize outright, because he'd no desire for public honors, 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 Swedish books to English.
Biography
George Bernard Shaw was born in
Dublin in 1856 to George Carr Shaw (1814–1885), 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 (1854–1876). George briefly attended the Wesleyan Connexional School, a grammar school operated by the
Methodist New Connexion, 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 harbored a lifelong animosity toward schools and teachers, saying, "Schools and schoolmasters, as we've 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."
Shaw expressed this attitude in the astringent prologue to
Cashel Byron's Profession where 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. 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.
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. In 1906 the Shaws moved into a house, now called
Shaw's Corner, in
Ayot St Lawrence, a small village in
Hertfordshire; it was to be their home for the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a residence at 29 Fitzroy Square in London.
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 Webb 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 honor; it contains collections of his papers and photographs.
During his final years Shaw enjoyed attending to the grounds at Shaw's Corner. His death, at 94, from renal failure, was precipitated by injuries incurred by falling while pruning a tree. His ashes, mixed with those of his wife, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.
Literary works
The International Shaw Society provides a detailed chronological listing of Shaw's writings. See also
George Bernard Shaw, Unity Theatre.
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 basseto 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 Frank Harris'
Saturday Review, in which position he campaigned brilliantly to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theater 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.
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
Nibelung’s Ring, 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.” All of his music critiques have been collected in
Shaw's Music.
As the 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's 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's 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 behavior is the prime message in the book, and derives from Shaw's familial memories. This is made clear in the books'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 but misguided convert to Christianity, goes searching for God, whom she believes to be an actual person. 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 favor 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. The story is so different from Shaw's ordinary style that it's hard to believe he wrote it.
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 couldn't write a play, so the project was abandoned. Years later, Shaw tried again and, in 1892, completed the play without collaboration.
Widower's 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'd 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're 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, were fraught with incisive humor, which was exceptional in among playwrights of the Victorian era; both authors are remembered for their comedy. However, Shaw's wittiness shouldn't 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 Ibsensism.
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.
By the 1910s, Shaw was a well-established playwright. New works such as
Fanny's First Play (1911) and
Pygmalion (1912)—on which the award-winning
My Fair Lady (1956) is based—had long runs in front of large London audiences. A musical adaptation of
Arms and the Man (1894)—
The Chocolate Soldier by Oscar Strauss (1908)—was also very popular, but Shaw detested it and, for the rest of his life, forbade musicalization of his work, including a proposed Franz Lehar operetta based on
Pygmalion; the Broadway musical
My Fair Lady could be produced only after Shaw's death.
Shaw's outlook was changed by
World War I, which he uncompromisingly opposed despite incurring outrage from the public as well as from many friends. His first full-length piece, presented after the War, written mostly during it, was
Heartbreak House (1919). A new Shaw had emerged—the wit remained, but his faith in humanity had dwindled. In the preface to
Heartbreak House he said:
"It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness."
Shaw had previously supported gradual democratic change toward socialism, but now he saw more hope in government by benign strong men. This sometimes made him oblivious to the dangers of dictatorships. Near his life's end that hope failed him too. In the first act of
Buoyant Billions (1946-48), his last full-length play, his protagonist asks:
"Why appeal to the mob when ninetyfive per cent of them don't understand politics, and can do nothing but mischief without leaders? And what sort of leaders do they vote for? For Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon with their Popish plots, for Hitlers who call on them to exterminate Jews, for Mussolinis who rally them to nationalist dreams of glory and empire in which all foreigners are enemies to be subjugated."
In 1921, Shaw completed
Back to Methuselah, his "Metabiological Pentateuch". The massive, five-play work starts in the
Garden of Eden and ends thousands of years in the future; it showcases Shaw's conviction that a "Life Force" purposefully directs evolution toward ultimate perfection. Shaw proclaimed the play a masterpiece, but many critics disagreed. The theme of a benign force directing evolution reappears in
Geneva (1938), wherein Shaw maintains humans must develop longer lifespans in order to acquire the wisdom needed for self-government.
Methuselah was followed by
Saint Joan (1923), which is generally conceded to be one of his better works. Shaw had long considered writing about
Joan of Arc, and her canonization supplied a strong incentive. The play was an international success, and is believed to have led to his Nobel Prize in Literature. 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, passages 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.
Polemical writing
In a letter to
Henry James dated
17 January 1909, Shaw said:
"I, as a Socialist, have had to preach, as much as anyone, the enormous power of the environment. We can change it; we must change it; there's absolutely no other sense in life than the task of changing it. What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there isn't a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods."
Thus he viewed writing as a way to further his
humanitarian and political agendas. His works were very popular because of their comedic content, but the public tended to disregard his messages and enjoy his work as pure entertainment. He was acutely aware of that. His preface to
Heartbreak House (1919) attributes the rejection to the need of post-World War I audiences for frivolities, after four long years of grim privation, more than to their inborn distaste of instruction. His crusading nature led him to adopt and tenaciously hold a variety of causes, which he furthered with fierce intensity, heedless of opposition and ridicule. For example,
Common Sense about the War (1914) lays out Shaw's strong objections at the onset of World War I. His stance ran counter to public sentiment and cost him dearly at the box-office, but he never compromised.
Shaw joined in the public's unreasoning attack on
vaccination against
smallpox, a dire disease that nearly killed him when he contracted it in 1881. In the preface to
Doctor’s Dilemma he made it plain he regarded traditional medical treatment as dangerous
quackery that should be replaced with sound
public sanitation, good personal hygiene and diets devoid of meat. Shaw became a
vegetarian while he was twenty-five, after hearing a lecture by H. F. Lester. In 1901, remembering the experience, he said "I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I've been a vegetarian." As a staunch vegetarian, he was a firm anti-vivisectionist and antagonistic to cruel sports for the remainder of his life. The belief in the immorality of eating animals was one of the Fabian causes near his heart and is frequently a topic in his plays and prefaces. His position, succinctly stated, was "A man of my spiritual intensity doesn't eat corpses."
As well as plays and prefaces, Shaw wrote long political treatises, such as
Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), and
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1912), a 495-page book detailing all aspects of socialistic theory as Shaw interpreted it. Excerpts of the latter were republished in 1928 as
Socialism and Liberty, Late in his life he wrote another guide to political issues,
Everybody's Political What's What (1944).
Friends and correspondents
Shaw corresponded with an array of people, many of them well-known. His letters to and from
Mrs. Patrick Campbell were adapted for the stage by
Jerome Kilty as
Dear Liar: A Comedy of Letters, as was his correspondence with the poet
Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (the intimate friend of Oscar Wilde), into the drama
Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship by
Anthony Wynn. His letters to the prominent actress,
Ellen Terry, to the boxer
Gene Tunney, and to
H.G. Wells,
have also been published. Eventually the volume of his correspondence became insupportable, as can be inferred from apologetic letters written by assistants.
Shaw campaigned against the executions of the rebel leaders of the
Easter Rising, and he became a personal friend of the
Cork-born
IRA leader
Michael Collins, whom he invited to his home for dinner while Collins was negotiating the
Anglo-Irish Treaty with
Lloyd George in London. After Collins's assassination in 1922, Shaw sent a personal message of condolence to one of Collins's sisters. He had an enduring friendship with
G. K. Chesterton, the Roman Catholic-convert British writer.
Another friend was the composer
Edward Elgar. The latter dedicated one of his late works,
Severn Suite, to Shaw; and Shaw exerted himself (eventually with success) to persuade the
BBC to commission from Elgar a third symphony, though this piece remained incomplete at Elgar's death. Shaw's correspondence with the motion picture producer
Gabriel Pascal, who was the first to successfully bring Shaw's plays to the screen and who later tried to put into motion a musical adaptation of
Pygmalion, but died before he could realize it, is published in a book titled
Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal. A stage play based on a book by Hugh Whitmore,
The Best of Friends, provides a window on the friendships of Dame
Laurentia McLachlan, OSB (late Abbess of Stanbrook) with
Sir Sydney Cockerell and Shaw through adaptations from their letters and writings.
Socialism and political beliefs
Shaw asserted each social class strove to serve its own ends with the upper and middle classes winners in the struggle and the working class the loser. He excoriated the democratic system of his time, saying workers, ruthlessly exploited by greedy employers,
lived in abject poverty and were too ignorant and apathetic to vote intelligently.
He believed this deficiency would ultimately be corrected by the emergence of long-lived supermen with experience and intelligence enough to govern properly. He called the developmental process
elective breeding but it's sometimes referred to as
shavian eugenics, largely because he thought it was driven by a "Life Force" that led women—subconsciously—to select the mates most likely to give them superior children.
The outcome Shaw envisioned is dramatised in
Back to Methuselah, a monumental play depicting human development from its beginning
in the Garden of Eden until the distant future.
In 1882, influenced by
Henry George's views on land nationalization, Shaw concluded private ownership of land and its exploitation for personal profit was a form of theft and advocated equitable distribution of land and
natural resources and their control by governments intent on promoting the commonwealth. Shaw believed income for individuals should come solely from the sale of their own labour and that poverty could be eliminated by giving equal pay to everyone. These concepts led Shaw to apply for membership in the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF), led by
H. M. Hyndman who introduced him to the works of
Karl Marx. Shaw never joined the SDF, which favored forcible reforms. Instead, in 1884, he joined the newly formed
Fabian Society, which accorded with his belief that reform should be gradual and induced by peaceful means rather than by outright revolution.
Shaw was an active Fabian. He wrote many of their pamphlets, Asked why he didn't stay permanently in the Soviet 'earthly paradise', Shaw jokingly explained that England was a hell and he was a small devil. He wrote a defense of Stalin's espousal of
Lysenkoism in a letter to
Labour Monthly
Legacy
In his old age, Shaw was a household name both in Britain and Ireland, and was famed throughout the world. His ironic wit endowed English with the adjective "Shavian", used to characterize observations such as: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world." Concerned about the vagaries of English spelling, Shaw willed a portion of his wealth (probated at £367,233 13s) to fund the creation of a new
phonemic alphabet for the English language. However, the money available was insufficient to support the project, so it was neglected for a time. This changed when his estate began earning significant royalties from the rights to
Pygmalion, once
My Fair Lady—a musical adapted from the play by
Alan Jay Lerner and
Frederick Loewe—became a hit. However, the
Public Trustee found the intended trust to be invalid because its intent was to serve a private interest instead of a charitable purpose. In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only £8600 for promoting the new alphabet, which is now called the
Shavian alphabet. The
National Gallery of Ireland,
RADA and the
British Museum all received substantial bequests.
Shaw's home, now called
Shaw's Corner, in the small village of
Ayot St Lawrence,
Hertfordshire is a
National Trust property, open to the public. The Shaw Theatre,
Euston Road, London, opened in 1971, was named in his honour. Near its entrance, opposite the new
British Library, a contemporary statue of
Saint Joan commemorates Shaw as author of that play.
The
Shaw Festival, an annual theater festival in
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, began as an eight week run of
Don Juan in Hell (as the long third act dream sequence of
Man And Superman is called when staged alone) and
Candida in 1962, and has grown into an annual festival with over 800 performances a year, dedicated to producing the works of Shaw and his contemporaries.
He is also remembered as one of the pivotal founders of the
London School of Economics, which is now called the
British Library of Political and Economic Science. The
Fabian Window designed by Shaw, hangs in the
Shaw Library in the main building of the LSE.
Works
Novels
Short stories
The Black Girl in Search of God (1932)
The Miraculous Revenge
Drama
Plays Unpleasant (published 1898)
Plays Pleasant (published 1898):
Three Plays for Puritans (published 1901)
The Admirable Bashville (1901)
Man and Superman (1902-03)
John Bull's Other Island (1904)
How He Lied to Her Husband (1904)
Major Barbara (1905)
The Doctor's Dilemma (1906)
Getting Married (1908)
The Glimpse of Reality (1909)
The Fascinating Foundling (1909)
Press Cuttings (1909)
Misalliance (1910)
Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress (1917)
Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910)
Fanny's First Play (1911)
Overruled (1912)
Androcles and the Lion (1912)
Pygmalion (1912-13)
The Great Catherine (1913)
The Inca of Perusalem (1915)
O'Flaherty VC (1915)
Augustus Does His Bit (1916)
Heartbreak House (1919)
Back to Methuselah (1921)
- In the Beginning
- The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
- The Thing Happens
- Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman
- As Far as Thought Can Reach
Saint Joan (1923)
The Apple Cart (1929)
Too True To Be Good (1931)
On the Rocks (1933)
The Six of Calais (1934)
The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934)
The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909)
The Millionairess (1936)
Geneva (1938)
In Good King Charles' Golden Days (1939)
Buoyant Billions (1947)
Shakes versus Shav (1949)
Essays
Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
The Perfect Wagnerite, Commentary on the Ring (1898}
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Preface to Major Barbara {1905)
How to Write a Popular Play (1909)
Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Common Sense about the War(1914)
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928)
Debate
Shaw V. Chesterton, a debate between George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton (2000) Third Way Publications Ltd. ISBN 0-9535077-7-7
Do We Agree, a debate between G, B. Shaw and G. K. Chesterton with H. Belloc as chairman (1928)
References and footnotes
Bibliography
Barzun, Jacques. “A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from his works”. Harper Collins, 2002
Brown, G.E. “George Bernard Shaw”. Evans Brothers Ltd, 1970
Chappelow, Alan. "Shaw the Villager and Human Being - a Biographical symposium", with a preface by Dame Sybil Thorndike, (1962). "Shaw - the 'Chucker-Out", 1969. ISBN 0-4040-8359-5
Evans, T.F. “Shaw: The Critical heritage”. The Critical Heritage series. Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1976
Gibbs, A.M (Ed.). “Shaw: Interviews and Recollections”.
Gibbs, A.M. "Bernard Shaw, A Life". University Press of Florida, 2005. ISBN 0-8130-2859-0
Henderson, Archibald. “Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet”. D. Appleton & Co., 1932
Holroyd, Michael (Etd). “The Genius of Shaw: A symposium”, Hodder & Stoughton, 1979
Holroyd, Michael. "Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition", Random House, 1998. ISBN-13: 978-0393327182
Hubenka, Lloyd J. (Editor). “Bernard Shaw: Practical Politics: Twentieth-century views on politics and economics”. University of Nebraska Press, 1976
Minney, R.J. “The Bogus Image of Bernard Shaw”. London, Frewin, 1969. ISBN 0-0909-6280-X
Ohmann, Richard M. "Shaw: The Style and the Man". Wesleyan University Press, 1962. ASIN: B000OKX9H2
Owen, Harold. “Common sense about the Shaw”. George Allen and Unwin, 1915
Peters, Sally. “Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman”. Yale University Press, 1996
Rider, Dan. “Adventures with Bernard Shaw”. Morley and Mitchell Kennerley Junior.
Smith, J. Percy. “Unrepentant Pilgrim: A study of the development of Bernard Shaw”. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1965
Strauss, E. “Bernard Shaw: Art and Socialism”. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1942
Weintraub, Stanley. “Bernard Shaw 1914- 1918: Journey to Heartbreak”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973
Weintraub, Stanley. “The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical approaches to G.B.S and his work”. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1982
West, Alick. “A good man fallen among Fabians: A study of George Bernard Shaw” Lawrence and Wishart, 1974
Watson, Barbara Bellow: “A Shavian Guide to the intelligent women”. Chatto and Windus, 1964
Winsten, Stephen. “Jesting Apostle: The Life of Bernard Shaw”. Hutchinson and Co Ltd, 1956
Winsten, Stephen. “Salt and his circle: With a preface by Bernard Shaw”. Hutchinson and Co Ltd, 1951Further Information
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External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://george_bernard_shaw.totallyexplained.com">George Bernard Shaw Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
