Shaw's career started with frustration and near poverty. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers: Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882), a novel about prizefighting as an occupation that anticipates the theme of prostitution as an antisocial profession in the play Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), and An Unsocial Socialist (1883). By the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a spellbinding orator, and tentatively, a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. In 1887, Shaw spoke and marched in the Bloody Sunday demonstrations that ended up as a riot in Trafalgar Square. Through the Fabian Society’s founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw met the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom he married in 1898, soon after his earnings as a writer made him financially self-sufficient.
Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to music columns (many of them championing the controversial work of the German composer Richard Wagner) from 1888 to 1890 under the signature “Corno di Bassetto” (basset horn), later under his own initials. Shifting to the Saturday Review as drama critic, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw became the champion of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).
Playwriting
Shaw was a novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist, inveterate letter writer, politician and public speaker, but he is by far best known today as a playwright. He did not finish his first play, however, until in his mid-30s. Shaw was born at 33 Synge Street in Dublin, Ireland to rather poor Church of Ireland parents, George Carr Shaw (1814-1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Gurly) (1830-1913). Shaw had two sisters, Lucinda Frances (1853-1920), a singer of musical comedy and light opera, and Elinor Agnes (1854-1876); both died of tuberculosis.
Shaw was educated at Wesley College, Dublin and moved to London during the 1870s to embark on his literary career. He wrote five novels, none of which was published, before finding his first success in the late 1880s as a music critic on the Star newspaper, under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto". From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the drama critic on Frank Harris's Saturday Review.
During this time, Shaw became a socialist and joined the Fabian Society. He was heavily involved in politics and even held office as a borough councilor in the St. Pancras district of London from 1897 to 1903. While Shaw's political beliefs inform his plays, they do not generally overwhelm them.
Shaw started working on his first play, Widower's Houses, in 1885, in collaboration with critic William Archer. Archer, who came up with the structure, felt Shaw was no playwright (an opinion he apparently never changed), and the project was abandoned. Years later, Shaw gave it another shot and, in 1892, completed his first play—alone.
Widower's Houses debuted at London's Royalty Theatre on December 9, 1892. Shaw would later call it one of his worst works, but he had found his medium. He would go on to write over 50 plays, most of them full-length.
Many of his earliest pieces had to wait years to receive major productions in London, but they are still being performed today. Among them are Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894) and You Never Can Tell (1895).
His first financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield's American production of The Devil's Disciple (1897). Shaw, in fact, would often see his plays succeed in America (and Germany) before they did in London.
The ideas in his earliest theatrical work were unconventional, and his wit unmatched by contemporaries (save Oscar Wilde), but his plays were still designed for the theatre of his time. Once he became more experienced, and more popular, his plays tended to be less compact and talkier, though no less successful. These works from what might be called the beginning of his "middle" period include Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906).
From 1904 to 1907, several of his plays had their London premieres in notable productions at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne.
His first original play performed at the Court, John Bull's Other Island (1904), though not one of his more popular plays today, made his reputation in London when, during a command performance for King Edward VII, the King laughed so hard he broke his chair.
By the 1910s, Shaw was a well-established playwright. New works such as Fanny's First Play (1911) and Pygmalion (1912)—on which My Fair Lady was based—had long runs in front of large London audiences. (Even though Oscar Straus's The Chocolate Soldier (1908)--an adaptation of Arms And The Man--was very popular, Shaw detested it and for the rest of his life forbade any musicalization of his work, including a potential Franz Lehar operetta based on Pygmalion. Only after Shaw's death did My Fair Lady become possible.)
Many feel Shaw's outlook was changed by World War I, a war he—quite unpopularly—opposed. His first full-length piece presented after the War, written mostly during it, was Heartbreak House (1919). This seemed to be a new Shaw; the wit was still there, but the action and theme were darker, almost despairing at times.
In 1921, Shaw completed Back to Methuselah, his "Metabiological Pentateuch." The massive, five-play work starts in the Garden of Eden and ends thousands of years in the future. Shaw claimed it was a masterpiece, but many critics did not share that opinion.
His next original play, however, is generally conceded to be one of his best, Saint Joan (1923). Shaw had long thought of writing about Joan of Arc, and her recent canonization spurred him on. It was an international success, and is believed to have led to his Nobel Prize in Literature.
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He continued writing plays for the rest of his life, but very few of them are as notable—or as often revived—as his earlier work. The Apple Cart (1929) was probably his most popular work of this era. Later full-length plays like Too True to Be Good (1931)[1], On the Rocks (1933)[2], The Millionairess (1935), and Geneva (1938) have been seen as marking a decline. His last significant play, In Good King Charles Golden Days[3] has, according to St. John Ervine, passages that are equal to Shaw's major works. His last full-length work was Buoyant Billions (1946–48)[4], written when he was in his nineties.
Many of Shaw's published plays come with lengthy prefaces. These tend to be essays more about Shaw's opinions on the issues dealt with in the plays than about the plays themselves. Some prefaces are much longer than the actual play. For example, the Penguin Books edition of his one-act The Shewing-up Of Blanco Posnet (1909)[5] has a 67-page preface for the 29-page piece.
One of the world's most notable theatrical voices was silenced when Shaw died in 1950 at the age of 94 due to a fall from a ladder.[2]
