The Plays of George Bernard Shaw.
On July 26 1856 Irish playwright and co-founder of the London School of Economics George Bernard Shaw was born. As a writer, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (and an Oscar. George Bernard Shaw was born in Synge Street, Dublin to George Carr Shaw, an unsuccessful grain merchant and sometime civil servant, and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, a professional singer. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. When Shaw just short of his sixteenth birthday, his mother left her husband and son and moved with Vandeleur Lee to London where the two set up a household, along with Shaw's older sister Lucy. After working in an estate agent's office for a while he moved to London as a young man (where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society for which he composed many pamphlets . Together with Beatrice and Sidney Webb Shaw founded the Fabian Society a socialist political organization dedicated to transforming Britain into a socialist state not by revolution but by systematic progressive legislation, bolstered by persuasion and mass education. The Fabian society would later be instrumental in founding the London School of Economics and the Labour Party. In 1891 at the invitation of J.T. Grein a merchant, theatre critic, and director of a progressive private new-play society,Shaw his first play, Widower's Houses Shaw's first plays were published in volumes titled "Plays Unpleasant" (containing Widowers' Houses. The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's Profession and "Plays Pleasant" (which had Arms and the Man, Candida. The Man of Destiny and. You Never Can Tell. The plays were filled with what would become Shaw's signature wit, accompanied by healthy doses of social criticism which stemmed from his Fabian Society leanings. These plays would not go on to be his best remembered, or those for which he had high regard, but they laid the groundwork for the oversized career to come . In 1897 Shaw attained his first commercial success with the American premiere of. The Devil’s Disciple which enabled him to quit his job as a drama critic and to make his living solely as a playwright. In 1898 after a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic and moved out of his mother's house (where he was still living) to marry Charlotte Payne-Townsend, an Irish woman of independent means. Although Shaw occasionally linked with other women, this marriage lasted until Charlotte's death in 1943 . The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen had a great influence on Shaw's thinking. For a summer meeting of the Fabian Society in 1890 he wrote. The Quintessence of Ibsenism (in which he considered Ibsen a pioneer, "who declares that it is right to do something hitherto regarded as infamous.". Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw by far his most popular work, was first performed in 1913 "Although Shaw that he had written a didactic play about phonetics, and its anti-heroic protagonist, Henry Higgins is indeed a speech professional, what playgoers saw was a high comedy about love and class, about a cockney flower-girl from Covent Garden educated to pass as a lady, and the repercussions of the experiment... The First World War as Pygmalion nearing its hundredth sell-out performance, and gave Shaw excuse to wind down the production.", according to one of the leading experts on Shaw Stanley Weintraub . During World War I Shaw’s anti-war pamphlets and speeches made him very unpopular as a public figure. In Heartbreak House (performed 1920 he exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the carnage. Next came. Back to Methuselah (and Saint Joan (acclaim for which led to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1925 Shaw continued to write plays and essays until his death in 1950 at the age of 94. At yovisto you can learn more about George Bernard Shaw in the educational Encyclopedia Britannica production 'Shaw vs. Shakespeare I: The Character of Caesar'