George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw, the greatest of the many Irishmen, who have written fine plays in the English language , was born in Dublin on 26 July 1856. His father,George Carr Shaw , the youngest son in the family of 13 children, became a minor official in the Dublin law courts, but after a few years , he retired on a small pension and went into business unsuccessfully as a corn merchant. He married the daughter of an Irish land owner who soon found that the husband was a drunkard and incapable of earning enough money to provide for her and the three children who were born to them, George Bernard Shaw and his two sisters.
Mrs.Shaw had a remarkably good singing voice ,and from her and her friends young Bernard learned much good operatic music, and this was to be very useful to him afterwards. When he was sixteen, his mother and sisters left Dublin and went to live permanently in London, where Mrs.Shaw supported herself and her daughters by giving music lessons and singing at concerts.
In the mean time, Bernard Shaw had been to school in Dublin until he was fifteen. He then became a clerk and cashier in a land agent's office there until April 1876, when he followed his mother to London. When he understood that his father was unqualified to be the controlling head of the family, and that his mother was more devoted to music than to her children, he developed that extra ordinary independence of mind and spirit which was to enable him, as a man , to look upon mankind and its affairs without being swayed either by customs or by other people's conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Though he received little mother love from Mrs.Shaw, the love of music that he gained from her soon proved itself useful in London, where one his first regular positions when he took up journalism was as music critic on the star, a London evening newspaper. Both as a critic of music and a few year later as a critic of plays for the Saturday review, a weekly periodical, he wrote essays of very high quality which are still read and praised, more than fifty years after they were first printed.
When Shaw began to write plays, the musical rhythm that he kept in his inner ear helped him to pen beautiful words.
After settling in London, he depended on his mother to live for another ten years. During that period, he involved in politics and the speech by American economist Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, converted him to socialism. He joined Fabian Society which wanted to bring about a gradual evolutionary charge , than fast revolutionary change.
In his early years as a socialist , he believed that the society would improve only by making legislation aiming at equality. When he grew older , he trusted less in the power of Acts of Parliament to increase human welfare and happiness. He said, "Good people makes good laws, but good laws passed by a few do not necessarily make a good society"
He was a non-believer of religion, but lived an aesthetic life with all good qualities. He became a vegetarian and said, " Animals are our fellow creatures". He tried to write novels and plays and completed the first play "Widower's House" after seven years of its first writing. It highlighted a social issue of owners and tenants of colonies.
He highlighted social evils in his plays like "Mrs.Warren's profession","Arms and the Man", "The Devil's disciples" and " Captain Brass bound's Conversion". He was not accepted by many, but a few accepted him as leader in new ways of thought and a champion of intellectual freedom.
Bernard Shaw was the first British dramatist to write plays discussing public affairs which touched the live of very large numbers of people as just what Henrik Ibsen done.
In "Man and superman", he presented the conflict between aristocrats and the modern technology accepting man. From 1905, when man and superman was performed, Shaw was the world's most famous living playwright though he long remained unpopular with those who disliked his advanced views and his wish to reform society. He stood second only to Shakespeare among all the British playwrights and his writings were known and valued in all countries, long before he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.
He wrote fifty plays and many writings on politics. Shaw died in 1950 in his 95th year, having produced his last important play "The Apple Cart" in 1929. Shaw held that of we desire with passionate strength of will to be better and finer people and to live longer, in fact to be changed into superman, and if that strength of will is passed on to our descendants, what we desire will ultimately be brought about. The nations would then be ruled in wisdom and virtue, and war and all other evil would vanish from the earth.