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George Bernard Shaw ( Dublín, 26 de julio de 1856- Ayot St. Lawrence, 2 de noviembre de 1950), conocido a petición del propio autor como Bernard Shaw, fue un dramaturgo, crítico y polemista irlandés cuya influencia en el teatro, la cultura y la política occidentales se extiende desde 1880 hasta nuestros días.
George Bernard Shaw. (Dublín, 1856 - Ayot Saint Lawrence, Reino Unido, 1950) Dramaturgo y periodista irlandés. Perteneciente a una familia de la burguesía protestante irlandesa, George Bernard Shaw empezó a trabajar a los dieciséis años, por lo que terminó su formación de forma autodidacta.
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.
- British (1856–1950), Irish (dual citizenship, 1934–1950)
- Shaw's Corner, Ayot St Lawrence
- 26 July 1856, Portobello, Dublin, Ireland
- Overview
- Early life and career
- First plays
George Bernard Shaw is famous for his role in revolutionizing comedic drama. He was also a literary critic and a prominent British socialist. Shaw’s most financially successful work, Pygmalion, was adapted into the popular Broadway musical My Fair Lady. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
What was George Bernard Shaw’s early life like?
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, as the youngest of three children. He was raised in genteel poverty, and his mother’s career as a professional singer influenced his interest in music, art, and literature. He remained relatively impoverished throughout his 20s, trying his hand at novel-writing several times to no avail.
How did George Bernard Shaw start writing plays?
George Bernard Shaw wrote rather unmemorable fiction throughout his 20s and early 30s. In 1885 the drama critic William Archer recruited Shaw to write book, art, and musical reviews in various publications. In 1895 Shaw began writing for the Saturday Review as a theatre critic, and from there he began to write his first plays.
What themes did George Bernard Shaw explore in his work?
George Bernard Shaw was the third and youngest child (and only son) of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. Technically, he belonged to the Protestant “ascendancy”—the landed Irish gentry—but his impractical father was first a sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant, and George Bernard grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, which to him was more humiliating than being merely poor. At first Shaw was tutored by a clerical uncle, and he basically rejected the schools he then attended; by age 16 he was working in a land agent’s office.
Shaw developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature as a result of his mother’s influence and his visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. In 1872 his mother left her husband and took her two daughters to London, following her music teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, who from 1866 had shared households in Dublin with the Shaws. In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer, and he joined his mother and elder sister (the younger one having died) in London. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. He depended upon his mother’s pound a week from her husband and her earnings as a music teacher. He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room, writing novels and reading what he had missed at school, and his evenings in search of additional self-education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities.
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His fiction failed utterly. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled Immaturity (1879; published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. His next four novels were similarly refused, as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. Shaw’s initial literary work earned him less than 10 shillings a year. A fragment posthumously published as An Unfinished Novel in 1958 (but written 1887–88) was his final false start in fiction.
Despite his failure as a novelist in the 1880s, Shaw found himself during this decade. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist, and tentatively a playwright. He became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through revolution but through “permeation” (in Sidney Webb’s term) of the country’s intellectual and political life. Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he also contributed two sections.
When Shaw began writing for the English stage, its most prominent dramatists were Sir A.W. Pinero and H.A. Jones. Both men were trying to develop a modern realistic drama, but neither had the power to break away from the type of artificial plots and conventional character types expected by theatregoers. The poverty of this sort of drama had become apparent with the introduction of several of Henrik Ibsen’s plays onto the London stage around 1890, when A Doll’s House was played in London; his Ghosts followed in 1891, and the possibility of a new freedom and seriousness on the English stage was introduced. Shaw, who was about to publish The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), rapidly refurbished an abortive comedy, Widowers’ Houses, as a play recognizably “Ibsenite” in tone, making it turn on the notorious scandal of slum landlordism in London. The result (performed 1892) flouted the threadbare romantic conventions that were still being exploited even by the most daring new playwrights. In the play a well-intentioned young Englishman falls in love and then discovers that both his prospective father-in-law’s fortune and his own private income derive from exploitation of the poor. Potentially this is a tragic situation, but Shaw seems to have been always determined to avoid tragedy. The unamiable lovers do not attract sympathy; it is the social evil and not the romantic predicament on which attention is concentrated, and the action is kept well within the key of ironic comedy.
The same dramatic predispositions control Mrs. Warren’s Profession, written in 1893 but not performed until 1902 because the lord chamberlain, the censor of plays, refused it a license. Its subject is organized prostitution, and its action turns on the discovery by a well-educated young woman that her mother has graduated through the “profession” to become a part proprietor of brothels throughout Europe. Again, the economic determinants of the situation are emphasized, and the subject is treated remorselessly and without the titillation of fashionable comedies about “fallen women.” As with many of Shaw’s works, the play is, within limits, a drama of ideas, but the vehicle by which these are presented is essentially one of high comedy.
Shaw called these first plays “unpleasant,” because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.” He followed them with four “pleasant” plays in an effort to find the producers and audiences that his mordant comedies had offended. Both groups of plays were revised and published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). The first of the second group, Arms and the Man (performed 1894), has a Balkan setting and makes lighthearted, though sometimes mordant, fun of romantic falsifications of both love and warfare. The second, Candida (performed 1897), was important for English theatrical history, for its successful production at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904 encouraged Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne to form a partnership that resulted in a series of brilliant productions there. The play represents its heroine as forced to choose between her clerical husband—a worthy but obtuse Christian socialist—and a young poet who has fallen wildly in love with her. She chooses her seemingly confident husband because she discerns that he is actually the weaker man. The poet is immature and hysterical but, as an artist, has a capacity to renounce personal happiness in the interest of some large creative purpose. This is a significant theme for Shaw; it leads on to that of the conflict between man as spiritual creator and woman as guardian of the biological continuity of the human race that is basic to a later play, Man and Superman. In Candida such speculative issues are only lightly touched on, and this is true also of You Never Can Tell (performed 1899), in which the hero and heroine, who believe themselves to be respectively an accomplished amorist and an utterly rational and emancipated woman, find themselves in the grip of a vital force that takes little account of these notions.
The strain of writing these plays, while his critical and political work went on unabated, so sapped Shaw’s strength that a minor illness became a major one. In 1898, during the process of recuperation, he married his unofficial nurse, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and friend of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The apparently celibate marriage lasted all their lives, Shaw satisfying his emotional needs in paper-passion correspondences with Ellen Terry, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and others.
George Bernard Shaw. Escritor de origen irlandés. Nació el 26 de julio de 1856 en Dublín. Cursó estudios en escuelas tanto católicas como protestantes. Cuando sus padres se divorciaron su madre y sus hermanas se instalaron en Londres, las acompañó en 1876.
El autor irlandés George Bernard Shaw recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1938; Fue muy conocido en su época por su comportamiento irónico e irreverente; George Bernard Shaw fue uno de los más importantes escritores, ensayistas, periodistas y dramaturgos a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX.
5 de nov. de 2023 · George Bernard Shaw fue un dramaturgo, crítico literario, periodista, escritor y filósofo irlandés, conocido por su obra literaria y por su contribución a la teoría del socialismo. Nacido el 26 de julio de 1856 en Dublín, Shaw fue uno de los primeros intelectuales de la época victoriana en alzar su voz para promover el socialismo.
