IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

G. Bernard Shaw (he hated the "George" and never used it, either personally or professionally) was born in 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry.

His parents were George Carr Shaw (1815-1885), a retired civil servant, and 'Bessie' Lucinda Elizabeth nee Gurly (1830-1913), amateur mezzo soprano singer. He had two older sisters, Lucinda Frances (1853-1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855-1876).

The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. The early years for young 'Sonny' (as he was known as a child) were a struggle in the Shaw residence. His father was an unsuccessful corn merchant and alcoholic who squandered his money on drink. In the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd Lucinda Elizabeth married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty" Being of landed gentry was no cure against the genteel poverty that pervaded the Shaw household.

It was a humiliation that Shaw often wryly referred to in his writings and Shaw: An Autobiography 1856-1898 (edited by Stanley Weintraub, 1970). His mother taught piano to help support the family and was a member of a musical society. Summers spent in the countryside greatly contributed to the development of Shaw's imaginative inner life. He was very happy at these times despite being raised by somewhat detached parents. His mother was especially busy with her music but her love of art, theatre, literature, and music had a positive affect on her only son. He often visited the National Gallery in Dublin. He was tutored by an uncle for a time and attended various schools in Dublin, although he soon developed a distaste for institutionalised learning, likening them to prisons.

When Shaw was 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 (who later became a successful music hall singer). Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completing his schooling (which he hated passionately), and working as a clerk for an estate office (which he hated just as much as school).

His sister Agnes died of tuberculosis in 1876, the same year that Bernhard (he dropped the use of his first name George at this time) moved out of his father's home and travelled to London, England, where his mother had moved a few years earlier to teach singing. She was living with voice teacher and conductor G. J. Vandeleur Lee. While living with her Shaw was now able to pursue his interest in the arts by visiting galleries and museums. He furthered his studies at the British Museum attending lectures. This led him to write critiques and essays on various subjects, often with irony and humour. Emerging themes in his works were marriage, education, politics, class struggle, and religion.

His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879) was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80, and as in Dublin achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author. Some of his articles and book reviews began appearing in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. He wrote as music critic under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto. While his first fictional efforts such as Immaturity (1879) had been rejected by publishers, he finally found his voice when he became theatre critic for Saturday Review in 1895. His other novels are Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), An Unsocial Socialist (1887), The Irrational Knot (1880), and Love Among the Artists (1881).

He read voraciously, in public libraries and in the British Museum reading room. And he became involved in progressive politics. Standing on soapboxes, at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park and at socialist rallies, he learned to overcome his stagefright and his stammer. And, to hold the attention of the crowd, he developed an energetic and aggressive speaking style that is evident in all of his writing.

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. Shaw lectured for the Fabian Society, and wrote pamphlets on the progressive arts, including The Perfect Wagnerite, an interpretation of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and The Quintessence of Ibsenism, based on a series of lectures about the progressive Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Shaw worked as an art critic, then as a music critic (writing under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto"), and finally, from 1895 to 1898, as Theatre Critic for the Saturday Review, where his reviews appeared over the infamous initials "GBS."

Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".

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. Their marriage lasted until Charlotte's death in 1943.

In 1904, Harley Granville Barker, an actor, director and playwright twenty years younger than Shaw who had appeared in a private theatre society's production of Shaw's Candida, took over the management of the Court Theatre on Sloane Square in Chelsea (outside of the "Theatreland" of the fashionable West End) and set up it up as an experimental theatre specializing in new and progressive drama. Over the next three seasons, Barker produced ten plays by Shaw (with Barker officially listed as director, and with Shaw actually directing his own plays), and Shaw began writing new plays with Barker's management specifically in mind. Over the next ten years, all but one of Shaw's plays (Pygmalion in 1914) was produced either by Barker or by Barker's friends and colleagues in the other experimental theater managements around England. With royalties from his plays, Shaw, who had become financially independent on marrying, now became quite wealthy. Throughout the decade, he remained active in the Fabian Society, in city government (he served as vestryman for the London borough of St. Pancras), and on committees dedicated to ending dramatic censorship, and to establishing a subsidized National Theatre.

In 1912 he fell in love with actress Stella Campbell, or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who became his muse and inspiration for Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. "....there are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." In the 1930's the Shaws travelled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, New Zealand, and North America. It was at this time that Shaw started with his photography in earnest. The London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, houses the archive of thousands of negatives and photographs from his every day life and travels around the world.

The outbreak of war in 1914 changed Shaw's life. For Shaw, the war represented the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, the last desperate gasps of the nineteenth-century empires, and a tragic waste of young lives, all under the guise of patriotism. He expressed his opinions in a series of newspaper articles under the title Common Sense About the War. These articles proved to be a disaster for Shaw's public stature: he was treated as an outcast in his adopted country, and there was even talk of his being tried for treason. His dramatic output ground to a halt, and he succeeded in writing only one major play during the war years, Heartbreak House, into which he projected his bitterness and despair about British politics and society.

In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles. Two touring companies took his plays all round the country. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara (1941) was less successful, artistically and commercially, than Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited.

Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, travelling the world, continually involved in local and international politics. (He visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of Stalin; and he came briefly to the United States at the invitation of William Randolph Hearst, stepping on shore only twice, for a lecture at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and for lunch at Hearst's castle in San Simeon in California). And he continued to write thousands of letters and over a dozen more plays.

During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.

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