George Bernard Shaw: A Biography
George Bernard Shaw, one of most influential writers and thinkers of the later 19th and 20th centuries, was born in 1856 to George and Lucinda Shaw in Dublin. Though both of his parents came from landed gentry, money was tight; his mother was disinherited upon marrying George, who was himself a struggling grain merchant and an alcoholic. The Shaws worked hard to keep up appearances, living a life of what Shaw later called “shabby genteel poverty.”
Shaw gave up formal schooling in 1871 at the age of 15, and moved to London in 1876 to join his mother and sisters. Lucinda Shaw and her daughters had emigrated in 1873 so that Mrs. Shaw could continue her music studies with Vandeleur Lee, her music teacher and extremely close companion. Lee helped Shaw obtain work as a ghostwriter for music criticism, which set the young man on his long writing career. By 1884 he was publishing political pamphlets, by 1885 he was a published novelist, and in 1892 he wrote his first play.
In addition to his prolific writing, Shaw’s voracious intellect led him to participate in several debate teams and public political conversations in his early adulthood. In 1878, he joined the Zetetical Society, a debating club; he also became a vegetarian and proponent of women’s rights, noting that his time with the Zetetical Society made him “accustomed from the first to work with women and to regard their presence and participation in public affairs as a matter of course.” The most significant event in Shaw’s political awakening came in 1881, when he heard a speech by American economist Henry George that ignited his lifelong advocacy for socialism as a guiding economic and political principle. By 1884 he had joined the Fabian Society, an advocacy group that believed in incremental, gradual social progress toward a socialist society. He rose through their ranks, and continued to publish and lecture for the Fabians for decades.
Shaw’s dedication to his politics was matched by his rich creative output. In addition to his lectures, pamphlets, and novels, Shaw is best known as a playwright. Mrs. Warren’s Profession comes early in Shaw’s dramatic trajectory, the third entry in his Plays Unpleasant cycle. Each of these plays, including Widower’s Houses and The Philanderer, took a satirical look at capitalist systems and the oppression they exert on the poor. As such, they drew the ire of the Lord Chamberlain, responsible for granting permission for the production of plays; Mrs. Warren’s Profession elicited particular objections and was banned from public performance for thirty years.
In 1898, Shaw courted and married Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Despite Shaw’s occasional affairs and the marriage apparently never being consummated, the two spent a happy life together, traveling the world and writing. Throughout the marriage, Shaw’s dramatic writing continued feverishly, including major works Arms and the Man, Candida, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan. Shaw was a global celebrity, with his work produced all over Europe, and in 1926 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Per Hallström’s presentation speech, he noted the unique combination of political fire and “rollicking gaiety” in Shaw’s satires, noting that Shaw “had to fool people into laughing so they should not hit upon the idea of hanging him.”
In the years between Charlotte’s death in 1943 and his own in 1950 at the age of 94, Shaw did not slow down. His extensive correspondence continued; when he could no longer write by hand, he used a typewriter. In the last three years of his life, Shaw wrote no fewer than six brand new plays. After his death, Shaw’s ashes were mixed with his late wife’s, and both were sprinkled in the garden of their shared home.
Throughout his towering dramatic career, Shaw kept his firm sense of social, economic, and gender equality at the core of his work. Shaw saw the class system as oppressive and exploitative of the poor, particularly women, and believed in drama and art as more effective means of communicating his Socialist beliefs than force or violence. In his introduction to Plays Unpleasant, the collection to which Mrs. Warren’s Profession belongs, Shaw writes “Rich men without conviction are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity;” that bedrock belief in the economic realities of prescribed moralism informed his work for the duration of his career.
To see Shaw’s writing come to life on stage, join us at Lantern Theater Company for Mrs. Warren’s Profession, one of his earliest, funniest, and most incisive plays. Update: The show has been extended through October 16, 2016; visit our website for tickets and information.
