Even after his death, the 19th-century British playwright 'George Bernard Shaw' brought people joy with his epitaph: 'I knew if I stayed around long enough, something like this would happen.' Born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland, as the youngest of one son and two daughters, he was, unlike most Catholics, one of the few Protestants. Even without economic ability, like a true Irishman he delighted children with amusing stories, and Bernard Shaw, influenced by his father, gradually began to develop a sense of humor.
Meanwhile, his mother nurtured Bernard Shaw's artistic sensibility. A professional singer herself, she too had not received love from her own mother and so could not bestow love on her children, but she did succeed in instilling an interest in and knowledge of the arts. As if to fill the gap between herself and her incompetent husband with art, she poured her energy into music and painting. Thanks to her closeness to art galleries and museums, opera and the classics, his mother was able to cultivate an outstanding eye for art, and the reason he was later able to criticize many fields of art was because of such childhood experiences. His mother also taught Bernard Shaw Latin and even brought in a private tutor for vocal lessons; Bernard Shaw later recalled that these lessons at this time were a great help in standing before the public as an orator. But aside from his Latin education, he received almost no formal schooling, and Bernard Shaw, who transferred schools frequently, found it not at all easy to adjust to Wesleyan College, the first school he entered. After that, he transferred to a prestigious private school and a public school but couldn't adjust anywhere, and gave up on school life. In the end he came to acquire his learning through self-study.
"I am by nature weak at competition.
I have no desire to receive praise or commendation.
Therefore I have no interest at all in things like exams premised on competition.
Even if I won, rather than my own joy,
the sight of my opponent's disappointment would pain my heart.
Conversely, if I lost, my pride would be hurt."
Bernard Shaw, who gave up his studies at age 15 because he couldn't adjust to school, explained the reason for his academic failure this way, and in 1871 he began work at a real estate brokerage office. Whenever he had time, he continued, through self-study, to organize his own thoughts and write. Before long, four years passed, and his mother moved to London taking only her two daughters. Bernard Shaw too, the following year when he turned 20, resolved to become a writer and headed for London where his mother was. His early twenties, begun in London, were, unlike his swelling dreams, a continuous string of poverty and failure. He once got a job at the Edison Telephone Company, but within less than a year the company was merged into a competitor and he lost even that position. After that, for about ten years until he established himself as a writer, he had no choice but to do his apprenticeship as a writer while relying on his father's family pension and his mother's lesson fees.
By day Bernard Shaw read books or wrote at the British Museum and libraries in London, and in the evenings he went out to gatherings of London's intellectuals and artists, listening to lectures and taking part in debates—this is how he spent his days in London. At the time London was the center of the Industrial Revolution, a time when everything was changing and the intellectual fervor of the middle class was rising ever higher. The twenty-something Bernard Shaw observed all those changes with a sharp eye and took an interest in social problems, and as most of the intellectually curious young people of that time did, it was precisely at this point that he became absorbed in Marx's Das Kapital and Darwin's theory of evolution. Around this time, at the gatherings he frequently attended, he met and formed friendships with people such as the socialist Sidney Webb, the painter and craftsman William Morris, and Marx's daughter Eleanor, and like the poet Shelley he became a vegetarian.
He was an extreme vegetarian to the point of later saying things like, as long as men torment and kill animals and eat meat, humanity will keep waging war, or that he was afraid he would live forever because of vegetarianism—that this was vegetarianism's only drawback. Having long written and prepared for his debut as a writer, in 1879 he published a near-autobiographical novel, 'Immaturity,' but this novel, which sharply criticized the Victorian era, would not see the light of day until some 50 years later. After that he completed five novels, but no publisher showed interest in any of the works. When the novels that were the result of long practice were turned away by publishers, he came to realize where his talent lay, recognizing that he had a talent for 'dialogue' rather than storytelling, and so he shifted his talent to being a playwright rather than a novelist.
"Whatever you write about me,
please be sure to emphasize the fact that I underwent bitter training.
Otherwise my innate ability may be greatly exaggerated.
In truth I am not a born genius by even a fingernail's worth,
and far from being witty, I'm not even clever.
My works are the result of thoroughly honest toil.
That toil began with the clumsiest possible novel-writing
and continued steadily every day for 25 years.
If you write about my extraordinary career as a writer,
please reveal to all aspiring writers the fact
that the extraordinariness lies within the ordinary.
Emphasize that I lived not like a trifling poet dreaming or consuming artistic confections,
but like a vegetable seller."
Bernard Shaw, who later succeeded as a playwright, said this to his biographer Archibald Henderson, looking back on his repeatedly failing apprentice years. Continuing to write with tenacity and passion despite publishers' continued rejections, in September 1882 he was moved by a speech of the American economist Henry George, who had a great influence on the British socialist movement, and stepped into real-world engagement with a desire to solve various social problems. In 1884 he joined the 'Fabian Society,' a gathering of socialists created under the leadership of figures such as Sidney Webb; this society was a gathering of moderates who sought to build an ideal society not through revolution but through small changes within everyday life.
Bernard Shaw emerged as a lecturer who captivated audiences. Whenever there was someone who wanted to hear a lecture, he gave free lectures on the spot anywhere, in parks or on the streets. It was also during this period that he began his criticism of art. Through an introduction by William Archer, a theater theorist who first introduced Ibsen to Britain, he ran book reviews in newspapers, published art criticism in The World, and music criticism in The Star. His goal was to make his columns understandable even to people with no special knowledge of music.
"People point out that my criticism is based on personal feeling.
As if involving personal feeling were a wrong thing to do.
But criticism that lacks personal feeling is not worth reading.
They overlook this important fact.
A critic worthy of the name must be able to breathe life into the individual's daily life.
I despise people who don't even do their best and fall into self-satisfaction.
At its peak, my sensibility is insufficiently described by the words 'personal feeling.'
It is, in fact, passion. A passion for artistic perfection,
in other words, a passion for the noble beauty squirming within me."
Bernard Shaw, who had been publishing music reviews through various newspapers and magazines, said this about his view of criticism in 1890. He won people's sympathy especially with his opera criticism and established himself as a talented critic, and soon after he drew attention as a playwright as well. Bernard Shaw, who regarded Ibsen as the founder of fresh modern drama, denounced idealism like this in his 1891 essay 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism.'
The philistine is one who accepts ugliness without spiritual pain,
and idealists are self-deceiving people who, unable to endure that ugliness,
live covering reality with ideals.
He presented a new style of drama thoroughly grounded in reality. His debut work 'Widowers' Houses,' staged in 1892, re-examined the problem of the poor and emerged as the first problem play of the British theater.
Bernard Shaw, who found his own path only in his mid-thirties by turning toward playwriting, questioned the values people held by depicting the opposite of the stereotyped personalities of characters that had appeared in earlier theatrical works. Following his debut work 'Widowers' Houses,' which dealt with the problem of the urban poor, in 'Mrs. Warren's Profession,' published in 1893, he again dealt with a prostitute from a woman's standpoint and found the cause not in the individual but in socioeconomic contradictions. Because of this, the work was refused performance at all theaters, but his name as a playwright became widely known.
Beginning to get a response from plays rather than novels, Bernard Shaw dealt with a wide range of subjects—war pieces and historical pieces, works dealing with love triangles and domestic affairs, such as 'Arms and the Man,' 'The Man of Destiny,' and 'Caesar and Cleopatra'—completing one or two works a year. Not only that, he also showed unrivaled activity as a critic, taking charge of theater criticism for the weekly 'Saturday Review' from 1895 and contributing a regular column for nearly four years, striving to breathe new air into Britain's theater world. His outstanding public-lecturing skill also shone in the launch of the British Labour Party and in election campaigns helping candidates supported by the 'Fabian Society,' and together with Sidney Webb he founded the London School of Economics and Political Science—there seemed to be no limit to his activities.
George Bernard Shaw spent his thirties in varied activities—from writing plays and theater criticism to political engagement for social change—as if to compensate for the time of his twenties spent in apprenticeship. But the tall Bernard Shaw, with his pale face and reddish beard, had his immunity weakened by overwork to the point that his health deteriorated so badly that even a minor wound required surgery. In the end he handed over the theater-criticism section of the Saturday Review to a junior and decided to devote himself solely to playwriting. His worsened health forced him to reduce his work, but on the other hand he also gained a lifelong companion: he married Charlotte, who devotedly nursed him while he suffered from ill health, in 1893. A year younger than he, she was also of Irish origin, a close friend of the Webb couple of the Fabian Society, and a wealthy heiress. In fact, Bernard Shaw was famous for having dated many women throughout his life; in his youth he was too poor to even think of romance, but after establishing himself as a writer, thanks to his witty repartee, the women around him never ceased, and he mainly conveyed his feelings to women by letter. With the actress Ellen Terry, with whom he'd been close since before his marriage, he even gathered the letters they exchanged and published a collection of correspondence.
Up to now, humans have achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and love only on paper.
Writing this in a preface, he also revealed his affection for the written word rather than the spoken word. Bernard Shaw's love for actresses such as Ellen Terry and Patrick Campbell, besides Charlotte who became his wife, is interpreted as being due to the affection he didn't receive from his mother in the course of growing up, and these experiences also gave birth, within his works, to women who broke from existing conventions. Bernard Shaw, who held his wedding at 42 and recovered his health, from this point his golden age begins.
'Man and Superman' appears, without a doubt, to be a work that emerged from an extremely elegant artistic environment. But in reality I wrote that work in the morning, and in the afternoon or evening I would go to the London city local council and fight with troublesome problems like sewers, road paving, street-lamp installation, local taxes, clerks' salaries, and so on. That is precisely why this work is completely different from other works conceived as family musicals.
Bernard Shaw, established as a playwright, now presented one after another the works that would become his masterpieces. As he revealed in the letter to his biographer, he wrote 'Man and Superman'—a work that would remain a landmark in the early 20th-century theater world—at a time when he was not in a position to be able to devote himself solely to writing it; for this reason, the work he began writing in 1901 was completed only in 1903, and it was put on stage two years after that. The biggest feature of this work is that it borrowed its motif from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, putting the inspiration he received from Don Giovanni into many parts, as if inserting the music that flowed in the opera's finale just as it was. He expressed the heaven and hell depicted as the afterlife in the opera as separate worlds where mutually opposing values prevailed, and on top of that depicted hell as a comfortable and cozy place, overturning the fixed notions people had held until then.
Following the success of Bernard Shaw's work 'Man and Superman,' which drew its motif from Don Giovanni, he published 'John Bull's Other Island,' written for staging at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; in Britain it was performed in a special show for Edward VII. The 'Major Barbara' he presented next became a topic of conversation, stirring the biggest controversy among his works. Over this work, which laid bare the hypocrisy of religion represented by the Salvation Army, some critics harshly criticized it as a work that betrayed the urgent demands of religious sensibility, while others cheered his convictions.
Bernard Shaw is an author who, in terms of theme, gave birth to the first play infused with religious passion; his success is a complete victory that no critic can belittle. Already a London celebrity, he became even more famous through the criticism and praise surrounding 'Major Barbara.' To put a little distance between himself and the fame surrounding him, in 1906 he moved to a small village called Ayot St. Lawrence, about an hour's drive from London. He spent the rest of his life with his wife in this house, which he named Shaw's Corner; this childless couple instead adopted a few actors, like Granville Barker, who had appeared in his works.
The most widely known of Bernard Shaw's works to the public would be the 1912 work 'Pygmalion.' It would later change form into a musical and into the Audrey Hepburn–starring film 'My Fair Lady,' enjoying worldwide fame. He gave the five-act play the subtitle 'A Romance' and emphasized that it was a didactic play about phonetics. At the time of its staging it drew enormous popularity, performed a total of 118 times. The process by which the linguist Higgins creates the figure of Eliza captured well Bernard Shaw's thinking, which had emphasized education for social change.
For a good person to carry out good intentions,
one must know reality correctly and reason on the basis of reality.
If, through a political science that deals with real problems,
we learn truths and lessons about humanity,
we will be able to build a new world as much as we like.
So he said.
In 1914, not long after the play Pygmalion achieved great success in its London performance, Europe was engulfed in World War I. At the time Bernard Shaw was 58, too old to go to the front and fight. Greatly shocked by this war, he briefly stopped writing and published an essay called 'Common Sense About the War,' and because of his essay—which criticized that 'Britain bears no less responsibility for the war than Germany, and that each nation, too patriotic and steeped in misguided heroism, regards war as romance'—he came under enormous criticism. On the grounds of being unpatriotic.
After that, his speeches opposing war while demanding peace and negotiation were frequently deleted through censorship, and he was eventually even expelled from the Society of Authors. Despite all this pressure Bernard Shaw did not bend his convictions, and the people who had branded him a pro-German for criticizing a Britain at war, conversely, by the time the war was ending, held him up as a figure to be proud of.
Bernard Shaw poured the experiences he went through during the war into his works, and his works—once didactic and full of dialogue—changed into a gloomy mood in which symbols appear frequently. In 'Heartbreak House,' which Bernard Shaw himself considered his best work, he depicted the spiritual ruin of the generation that started the war, and in 'Back to Methuselah'—a work dealing with the history of humanity that combined verse and prose—he unfolded a creative theory of evolution holding that humans too, through effort, could become spiritual beings like gods.
What once again breathed motivation into Bernard Shaw, who had been feeling his creative power gradually declining, was the canonization of Joan of Arc held in 1920. To him Joan of Arc was, rather than a martyr, a being symbolizing the possibilities of humanity and a new image of woman. With this as a start, he wrote 'Saint Joan' and once again achieved great success, and this success led to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. The Swedish Academy said, as the reason for selecting Bernard Shaw's work, that 'his works are imbued with idealism and humanity, and hidden throughout are satire that moves people and outstanding poetic beauty.' Bernard Shaw at first refused the Nobel Prize in Literature but later came to accept only the 'prize.' The prize money he refused was donated to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Society. He continued writing, attempting symbolist drama by changing the mood of plays that had until then been rooted in realism, and frequently appeared—of course at nearly 30 lectures a year—at academic gatherings like the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
In 1931, at over 70 years of age, he visited Moscow and met Stalin, and it became a time to look back on his youth when he'd been immersed in socialism. Not only that, at his wife Charlotte's wish he went on a world trip, and on this journey he stopped in India and met Gandhi. Gandhi described Bernard Shaw as 'an eternal youth who keeps a pure soul.' The Bernard Shaw couple, after India, visited in turn Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and Japan, and then arrived in the United States.
Although he had been invited by the United States several times over the decades, he had put off visiting America, thinking that Americans and the British harbored antipathy toward each other. As a result he set foot on American soil for the first time only in 1933. At the time, understanding of his creative world in America was so lacking that someone was jailed for reading a book Bernard Shaw wrote about socialism on a streetcar, but the Metropolitan Opera House lecture he delivered before an audience of as many as 3,500 became an opportunity to show his true worth.
Returning from his world trip, Bernard Shaw, with the inspiration he gained from the journey, again threw himself passionately into creative work. Varied works on humanity, art, society, and politics adorn this period. Meanwhile, in 1938 he received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for the film 'Pygmalion,' based on 'Pygmalion.' With this he became the only person to receive both the Nobel Prize in Literature and an Academy Award. The following year Bernard Shaw, staying in Frinton on Britain's east coast with his wife Charlotte, who suffered from back pain and arthritis, heard the news of World War II. Hurrying home, he analyzed newspapers and broadcasts and once again published an essay emphasizing a peace agreement, and people's reaction to it was not much different from the time of World War I. Criticism of his political stance and praise for the works staged poured out at the same time. But he could not feel this. Because his wife Charlotte's illness had worsened irreversibly. 'My wife is a woman of strong mental fortitude. She asserts her opinion to me as many as 12 times a day.' Bernard Shaw, who watched the once strong Charlotte—strong enough to say such things—suffer from illness, wrote that his heart broke when he saw her crawling. Despite his devoted nursing, Charlotte closed her eyes on September 12, 1943. What Bernard Shaw prepared for her as she departed was the music of Handel, which she had loved most in her lifetime.
Today people must work 16 hours a day to pay land prices, taxes, and interest,
and yet they say they are independent, autonomous, and enjoy tremendous freedom.
The reason they say so is partly that it was so at home and at school,
and because they heard such talk until their ears ached, from newspapers, radio, parliament, courts, and election speeches.
They genuinely believe that they uphold all social values and honor.
But in the actual polling place they cast their votes for all the vices created by selfish capital—
laziness, waste, luxury, servility, poverty, exploitation of labor, and so on.
In 1944, the 88-year-old Bernard Shaw read society this way through a book called 'Everybody's Political What's What?' Although he was a playwright enjoying the greatest fame of the time, a rich man earning big money, and a landlord owning several houses and tracts of land, he argued that land should be nationalized through compensated expropriation and that income equality should be achieved with taxes on the rich and aristocrats. He would often raise his voice toward the world with his distinctive sharp tongue, but in private settings he was a polite and generous person, a vegetarian who didn't drink or smoke, who didn't lose his warm and sentimental side; it can be said that this duality formed naturally while he lived among mutually opposing values—Britain and Ireland, Catholicism and Protestantism, capitalism and socialism.
His health worsening further from the sense of loss after his wife passed away, he secluded himself in his mansion and spent much time tending the garden. He followed his wife on November 2, 1950, from the aftereffects of falling from a ladder while pruning tree branches. He was 94 at the time—a long life befitting his usual claim that humans should live long for the completion of the self. He was a critic and playwright who greatly contributed to modern theater with diverse writings spanning all of society and with plays that coolly captured reality, over a long creative period reaching 70 years.
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