Author Spotlight: George Bernard Shaw
- Andria Pasco
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw is a revered name in English theatre, best known for works such as Candida and Pygmalion.
Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856. The youngest of three siblings, his parents were a singer and a retired civil servant. After several failed ventures, his father became an alcoholic, and his mother was forced to take on additional work to support the family. His mother’s penchant for the arts, music, and creativity in general was passed on to Shaw. This contributed to him having the same creative acuity and passion for art. Shaw was tutored by his uncle and attended several schools, but he disliked institutionalized learning.
In 1876, Shaw left Ireland for London and took on several odd jobs to make a living. The difficulty of his life caused him to abandon his initial dream of becoming a painter. However, his writing career started when he took ghostwriting assignments for a column in a weekly satirical publication called the Hornet. From then on, Shaw’s interest in writing grew, and he decided to pursue it. Within the first seven years after moving to London, Shaw penned five novels, but all of which failed.
Later on in the 1880s, Shaw became intertwined with politics. He became an active member of the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, and the Socialist League. He would become very attached to the Fabian Society, even writing most of their pamphlets promoting socialism. He also rose as a prominent figure in journalism, having been appointed as drama critic for the Fortnightly Review.
Eventually, Shaw met playwright and founder of the Independent Theatre, J.T. Grein. The latter managed to convince Shaw to show him one of his earliest plays. Grein was blown away after seeing it. On December 9, 1892, Shaw's first play to be staged, titled Widower’s Houses, opened at the Royalty Theatre in Soho. The plot is about the encounter and relationship of a young doctor named Harry Trench and a businessman’s daughter, Blanche Sartorius. This became the first of a trilogy of plays called Plays Unpleasant.
This trilogy was followed by another one, called Plays Pleasant. This second trilogy had one of Shaw’s most popular works to date, Candida. The play revolves around the eponymous Candida’s choice between two men: a socialist and a poetic idealist.
Since then, Shaw wrote plenty more plays, almost always in a trilogy. All the plays in each trilogy had an impactful central theme, just like the Three Plays for Puritans, which tackles imperialism in three settings and periods.
Despite writing those trilogies, Shaw had yet to reach the pinnacle of success in play productions. It was in 1912 when he wrote the masterpiece that he would become most known for: Pygmalion. The story revolved around a British professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who takes on the challenge of tutoring an impoverished woman named Eliza Doolittle and having her pass for a high-society lady. The play is named after an ancient Greek figure, Pygmalion, who fell in love with one of his own statues after it came to life. The show has been staged and adapted multiple times. The most notable was the stage musical and movie, My Fair Lady.
In 1925, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” His reputation as a playwright only flourished all the more. However, he continued to write pamphlets about political and social issues. Having witnessed the First World War, Shaw was loudly not in favor of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War.
Shaw’s playwright career culminated on July 23, 1950, with his last curtain call of his work, Why She Would Not. He passed away only four months later because of kidney failure as a result of being bedridden after a bad fall.
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