Write the Life And Works of George Barnard Shaw.

Ans.

Shaw was born at 33 Synge Street, Dublen, on 26th July, 1856. His father George Carr Shaw was a chronic drunkard and was incapable of earning enough to provide for his wife and three children-George Bernard Shaw and his two sisters. George Carr Shaw was the youngest son in a family of thirteen children. He worked as a minor official in the Public Law Courts. After a few years he retired on a small pension and went into business as a corn merchant. His alcoholism accelerated the downfall of the family’s fortunes. George Bernard Shaw’s mother was the daughter of an Irish landowner. She was an impassive woman, not given to emotions, even the maternal ones. Her children and the house-keeping generally, were left mainly in the hands of servants.

At the early age of fifteen Shaw started working for an estate agent Charles Uniacke Townshend and proved to be a highly accurate, efficient, industrious, excellent employee. Due to this efficiency he was soon promoted to the post of head cashier despite his young age. In 1872, however, his mother decided to sell the house and go to London behind Lee because she thought that her career as a singing teacher and her elder daughter’s as a singer demanded that they be near Lee. G. B. Shaw soon understood that his father was not capable of being a good controlling head of the family and also realized that his mother was fully devoted to music to the exclusion of her children.

The training and interest in music that he had received stood him in good stead in London where one of his regular positions when he took up journalism was as a music critic on the ‘Star’. He excelled not only as a critic of music but also of plays for the ‘Saturday Review’ and penned critical essays of excellence which have stood the test of time and are still read, admired and in fact highly praised by readers all around. Even when he turned to composing plays, Shaw heard the words and dialogues to be spoken by his actors with the inner ear of musician. As a result his sentences abounded in rhythm, melody and harmony and sounded very sweet to the ear. The finest example of the influence of opera on his dramas is to be found in Act III of Man and Superman.

After settling in London Shaw found it exceedingly difficult to earn a living by writing. Between his 21 and 30th year he earned virtually nothing and contributed nothing towards the household expenses. During the period he was almost totally dependent upon his mother for financial support. He began to write stories and articles and made efforts to lay the foundations of his career. One day, in September 1882, he attended a lecture by the American economist Henry George and fell under the impact of his single tax programme and then under the influence of Marxist economics.

In 1879, a friend, James Lecky had taken him to the Zetical Society’ which was an avant grade group which concerned itself with questions of reform, liberty etc. It was in a meeting of this society that he first tried his hand on public speaking. In Zetetical Society, Shaw came into close friendship with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the eminent sociologists. Under their influence he read Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ and got converted to socialism and he joined the newly founded Fabian Society which tried to bring about a gradual evolutionary change from capitalism to socialism and exercised a powerful influence on British political life during the next forty or fifty years. In the Fabian Society, he also got an opportunity to get fully acquainted with many great renowned persons including Mrs. Annie Besant.

Shaw remained occupied in politics and journalism until the age of forty two. His initiation into female company was with Mrs. Jenny Patterson but this was a very unhappy relationship for Shaw. Afterwards however, he found himself with no lack of female friends. In the 90’s, he met Florence Farr. Edith Nesbit also had a crush on him. Actually the list of his female friends was rather very long. All this adulation was a result of Shaw’s Irish gallantry.

Shaw’s first attempts at creative writing were five unsuccessful novels between 1879 and 1883. Immaturity’, ‘The Irrational Knot’, ‘Love Among the Artists’. ‘Cashel Byron’s Profession’ and ‘An Unsocial Socialist’. In 1885, he made an effort to compose a play but left it unfinished. He was, however, obsessed with Ibsen. In 1891, he published “The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ which was originality a lecture for the Fabians. But now that Shaw had begun to write plays he had instinctively realized that this was the right sphere of writing for him. He continued to write plays on burning human problems of the day such as prostitutions (Mrs. Warren’s Profession), war (‘Arms and the Man’), religious intolerance (“The Devil’s Disciple’) revenge (‘Captain Brass-bound’s Conversion’) and so on. Such plays penned by him, made him extremely unpopular.

The first year of Shaw’s married life coincided with the outbreak of the Boer War, which marked the virtual end of the confident, unshakeable Victorian era and raised doubts in many minds. Shaw’s reaction to the war was completely individual and unexpected. While deploring the financial interests which led many to advocate the war, he joined their side. In 1900, he finished Fabianism and the Empire’ and shocked many.

By the early years of the 20th century the name of Shaw was beginning slowly to be heard abroad. Caesar and Cleopatra’ was given a spectacular production at the Neues Theatre in Berlin, various other plays were staged in Viena. Leipzig. Dresden and Frankfurt, and Candida was being played in New York. The season of the intellectual drama at the Court Theatre in London in 1904 made him really popular and by 1907 there had been 701 performances of eleven of Shaw’s plays there including his ‘Getting Married’. ‘How He lied to her Husband.’ The Philanderor, Devil’s Disciple, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra etc. and also Don Juan in Hell. (the third act of ‘Man and Superman’ presented separately. It was produced on the 23rd of March 1905. The play was deeply philosophical and presented existence in terms of the ‘Life Force’ e. a spirit which inspires Man to struggle upward towards the evolution of the Superman who will be far wiser and better than Man is now.

Shaw did not enjoy foreign travels and went abroad very little. On being persuaded by his friends and wife, however, he went to Soviet Russia in 1931 and went on a voyage round the world in 1932-33. During this trip he also visited Bombay (Mumbai). Shaw died at St. Lawrence, Herts, in November 1950 in his ninety-fifth year. Today he is a playwright, appalled at the muddle-headedness of the race, a fighter for the conquest of reason over unreason, of order over disorder, of economy over waste.