(George) Bernard SHAW (1856-1950),
born in Dublin, the youngest child of unhappily married and inattentive
parents. In 1876 he moved to London, joining his mother and sister, and
began his literary career by ghosting music criticism and writing five
unsuccessful novels (including Cashel Byron's Profession, 1886, and An Unsocial Socialist, 1887, both first published in Today, in
1885-6 and 1884 respectively). During his first nine years in London he
calculated that he earned less than £10 by his pen. He wrote music,
art, and book criticism for the Dramatic Review (1885-6), Our Corner (1885-6), the Pall Mall Gazette (1885-8), the World (1886-94) and the Star (1888-90, as 'Corno di Bassetto'). His music criticism has been collected in three volumes as Shaw's Music (1981, ed. Dan H. Laurence) (see also under MUSIC, LITERATURE OF) and his theatre criticism in four volumes as The Drama Observed (1993, ed. B. Dukore). He was a drama critic for the Saturday Review (1895-8) and produced a series of remarkable and controversial weekly articles (published in book form as Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3
vols, 1932), voicing his impatience with the artificiality of the
London theatre and pleading for the performance of plays dealing with
contemporary social and moral problems. He campaigned for a theatre of
ideas in Britain comparable to that of Ibsen and Strindberg in
Scandinavia, and came nearest to achieving this with Granville-Barker at
the Court Theatre in London between 1904 and 1907. During this period
he took up various causes and joined several literary and political
societies, notably the Fabian Society, serving on the executive
committee from 1885 to 1911. Not naturally a good public speaker, he
schooled himself to become a brilliant one and gave over 1,000 lectures.
he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)
and wrote many tracts setting down his socialist and collectivist
principles. He was a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights, and an
advocate of equality of income, the abolition of private property, and a
radical change in the voting system. He also campaigned for the
simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of the English
alphabet. He was well known as a journalist and public speaker when his
first play, Widowers' Houses (pub. 1893), was produced in 1982, but it met with little success. There followed Arms and the Man (1894, pub. 1898: partly used for Oscar Straus's musical The Chocolate Soldier), The Devil's Disciple (perf. NY 1897, pub. 1901), You Never Can Tell (1899, pub. 1898), Caesar and Cleopatra (pub. 1901, perf. Berlin 1906), Mrs Warren's Profession (pub. 1898, perf. 1902), and John Bull's Other Island (1904,
pub. NY 1907), a play which, thanks to its characteristic 'Shavian'
wit, brought his first popular success in London. The critics also were
gradually persuaded that the plays were not simply dry vehicles for his
reformist zeal.
Shaw was an indefatigable worker, writing over 50 plays, including Man and Superman (pub. 1903, perf. 1905), Major Barbara (1905, pub. NY 1907), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906, pub. Berlin 1908). Getting Married (1908, pub. Berlin 1910), Misalliance (191, pub. Berlin 1911), Androcles and the Lion (pub. Berlin 1913, perf. Hamburg 1913), Pygmalion (perf. Vienna 1913, pub. Berlin 1913, later turned into the popular musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (pub. 1919, perf. 1920, both NY), Back to Methuselah (pub. and perf. NY 1921, 1922), Saint Joan (perf. NY 1923, pub. 1924), The Apple Cart (perf. Warsaw 1929, pub. Berlin 1929), Too True to Be Good (perf. Boston 1932, pub. Berlin 1932), Village Wooing (pub. Berlin 1933, perf. Dallas 1934), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (perf. NY 1935, pub. Berlin 1935), In Good King Charles's Golden Days (perf. and publ. 1939), and Buoyant Billions (perf. and pub. Zurich 1948).
These plays were published (some in collections: Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 1898; Three Plays for Puritans, 1901)
with lengthy prefaces in which Shaw clearly expresses his views as a
non-romantic and a champion of the thinking man. The dramatic conflict
in his plays is the conflict of thought and belief, not that of neurosis
or physical passion. Discussion is the basis of the plays, and his
great wit and intelligence won audiences over to the idea that mental
and moral passion could produce absorbing dramatic material. He believed
that war, disease, and the present brevity of our lifespan frustrate
the 'Life Force' (see under MAN AND SUPERMAN) and that functional
adaptation, a current of creative evolution activated by the power of
human will, was essential to any real progress, and indeed to the
survival of the species. The plays continued to be performed regularly
both during and after his lifetime (several were made into films) and
his unorthodox views, his humour, and his love of paradox have become an
institution. Amongst his other works should be mentioned The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891,
revised and expanded 1913), which reveals his debt to Ibsen as a
playwright and presents an argument for Fabian socialism; The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); Common sense about the War (1914); The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928); and Everybody's Political What's What (1944)
Shaw was a prolific letter writer. his correspondence with the
actresses Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell, with friends and
colleagues such as H.G. Wells and Gabriel Pascal, as well as several
volumes of collected letters, are available in book form.
In 1898
Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend. It seems to have been a
marriage of companionship, and they lived together until her death in
1943. He was a strict vegetarian and never drank spirits, coffee, or
tea. He died at the age of 94, as independent as ever and still writing
for the theatre. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. See The Bodley Head Collected Plays with Their Prefaces (7 vols, 1970-74).
—oOo—
The Fabian Society, a
society founded in 1884 consisting of socialists who advocate a
'Fabian' policy, as opposed to immediate revolutionary action, and named
after Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed Cunctator or
'the Delayer' [d. 203 BC - was appointed dictator after Hannibal's
crushing victory at Trasimene (217 BC). He carried on a defensive
campaign, avoiding direct engagements and harassing the enemy. Hence the
expression 'Fabian tactics' and the name of the Fabian Society (1884)
dedicated to the gradual introduction of socialism]. One of its
instigators was Thomas Davidson (1840-1900), the illegitimate son of a
Scottish shepherd, a charismatic figure with many disciples who was also
responsible for founding in 1883 the Fellowship of the New Life, a body
which at first attracted some of the same membership, although its aims
were mystical and philosophical rather than political. The Fabians
aimed to influence government and affect policy by permeation rather
than by direct power, and to provide the research and analysis to
support their own views and introduce them to others. One of their
methods was the publishing of tracts, or pamphleteering: the first two
Fabian tracts were Why Are the Many Poor? (1884) by W. L. Phillips, a house painter and one of the few working-class members, and A Manifesto (1884) by G. B. Shaw. Shaw wrote many other important tracts as did S. Webb. Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889),
edited by Shaw and with contributions by Webb, Sydney Olivier, and A.
Besant sold well and attracted much attention. The Society itself
continued to attract a distinguished membership of politicians,
intellectuals, artists, and writers, ranging from Keir Hardie, Ramsay
Macdonald, and G. D. H. Cole to E. Carpenter, E. Nesbit, R. Brooke, and
W. Crane. See Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism (1961) and N. and J. Mackenzie, The First Fabians (1977).
Widowers' Houses, a play by Bernard Shaw, first performed 1892, published 1893, and published (with The Philanderer and Mrs Warren's Profession ) in Plays Unpleasant (1898).
It is designed to show the manner in which the capitalist system
perverts and corrupts human behaviour and relationships, through a
demonstration, in Shaw's words, of 'middle-class respectability and
younger son gentility fattening on the poverty of the slum as flies
fatten on filth'.
Dr. Harry Trench, on a Rhine holiday, meets
Blanche Sartorius, travelling with her wealthy father, and proposes
marriage to her: Sartorius is willing to permit the match if Trench's
family (including his aunt Lady Roxdale) agrees to accept her as an
equal. All seems well, until it is revealed in Act II that Sartorius is a
slum landlord. Trench is horrified, refuses to accept Sartorius' money,
suggests that he and Blanche should live on his £700 a year, and is
even more horrified when Sartorius points out that this income is
derived from a mortgage of Sartorius' property, and that he himself and
his miserable rent collector Lickcheese are merely intermediaries. 'You
are the principal.' Blanche, revealing a passionate and violent nature,
rejects Trench for his hesitations. In the third act Lickcheese, himself
now rich through dubious dealings to the property market, approaches
Sartorius with an apparent philanthropic but in fact remunerative
proposition, which involves Lady Roxdale as a ground landlord and Trench
as mortgagee. Trench, now considerably more cynical, accepts the deal,
and he and Blanche are reunited.
John Bull's Other Island, an ironic description of Ireland deriving from Leon Paul Blouet's John Bull and His Island
(1884) and used by G. B. Shaw as the title of a play (1904) written at
the request of Yeats 'as a patriotic contribution to the repertory of
the Irish Literary Theatre'.
Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, a
play by Bernard Shaw, first published 1903, first performed (without
Act III) in 1905 by the Stage Society at the Court Theatre.
The
play is Shaw's paradoxical version of the Don Juan story, in which his
hero John Tanner (Don Juan Tenorio), provocative, eloquent, and witty
ideologue and author of the Revolutionist's Handbook (a
work which appears in full as an appendix to the play), is relentlessly
if obliquely pursued by Ann Whitefield, who is more interested in him
as a potential husband than she is in his political theories. Ann has
been entrusted as ward by her dead father jointly to Tanner and to the
elderly respectable Ramsden, who expects her to marry the devoted and
poetic Octavius. Tanner is made aware of Ann's intentions by his
chauffeur Straker (the new man of the polytechnic revolution), and flees
to Spain whither he is pursued by Ann and her entourage, which includes
her mother and Octavius's sister Violet, who demonstrates, through a
matrimonial sub-plot, the superior force of women. Act III consists of a
dream sequence set in hell in which Tanner, captured by the brigand
Mendoza, becomes his ancestor Don Juan, Mendoza the Devil, Ramsden 'the
Statue', and Ann becomes Ana: in one of Shaw's most characteristic
'Shavio-Socratic' debates, the four characters discuss the nature of
progress, evolution, and the Life Force, the Devil arguing powerfully that man is essentially destructive,
and Don Juan arguing for the saving power of ideas and rational effort,
for the philosopher as 'nature's pilot'. In the last act Ann achieves
her object, despite Tanner's struggles; the play ends with the
announcement of their impending marriage and Tanner's submission to the
Life Force.
The concept of the Life Force bears some similarity
to Bergson's 'élan vital', although Shaw was not at the time familiar
with Bergson's work: the echo in his 'Superman' of Nietzsche's
'Übermensch' (Also sprach Zarathustra) is, however, deliberate.
Major Barbara, a play by Bernard Shaw performed 1905, published 1907.
It
portrays the conflict between spiritual and worldly power embodied in
Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her machiavellian father,
millionaire armaments manufacturer Andrew Undershaft. While visiting her
East End shelter for the poor, as part of a bargain struck between
them, he reveals that the shelter's benefactor, Lord Saxmundham, made
his money through 'Bodgers' whisky', and she suffers a crisis of faith
as she glimpses the possibility that all salvation and philanthropy are
tainted at the source: the next day, visiting his factory with her
mother Lady Britomart and her fiancé, classical scholar Adolphus Cusins,
she is further shaken to discover her father is a model employer.
Cusins enters the debate, reveals that he is technically a foundling nd
therefore eligible to inherit the Undershaft empire (as Undershaft's own
children are not), strikes a hard bargain with his prospective
father-in-law, and agrees to enter the business, partly persuaded by
Undershaft's quoting of Plato to the effect that 'society cannot be
saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gundpowder, or
else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek'. Barbara,
recovering her spirits, embraces this synthesis as a possibility of hope
for the future. The portrait of Cusins is based on G. Murray.
Pygmalion, one of the most popular plays of Bernard Shaw, first performed 1913 in Vienna, published in London, 1916.
It
describes the transformation of a Cockney flower-seller, Eliza
Doolittle, into a passable imitation of a duchess by the phonetician
Professor Henry Higgins (modelled in part on H. Sweet, and played by
Beerbohm Tree), who undertakes this task in order to win a bet and to
prove his own points about English speech and the class system: he
teaches her to speak standard English and introduces her successfully to
social life, thus wining his bet, but hse rebels against his
dictatorial and thoughtless behaviour, and 'bolts' from his tyranny. The
play ends with a truce between the two of them, as Higgins acknowledges
that she has achieved freedom and independence, and emerged from his
treatment as a 'tower of strength: a consort battleship': in his
postscript Shaw tells us that she marries the docile and devoted Freddy
Eynsford Hill. My Fair Lady, the 1957 musical version, makes the relationship between Eliza and Higgins significantly more romantic.
Pygmalion,
in classical legend, was the king of Cyprus, who fell in love with his
own sculpture; Aphrodite endowed the statue with life and transformeed
it into the flesh and blood of Galathea.
Heartbreak House:A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes, a
play by Bernard Shaw, first performed in New York 1920, published there
1919; probably written 1916-17, despite Shaw's claims that he began it
before the war.
It deescribes the impact of Ellie Dunn, daughter
of the idealistic and undworldly Mazzini Dunn, upon the eccentric,
complacent, and 'horribly Bohemian' household of 88-year-old Captain
Shotover, with whom she strikes up an alliance: the inmates include
energetic, beautiful, dominating Hesione Hushabye (determined Ellie
shall not marry the ageing business magnate Boss Mangan); her husband,
the romantic liar and fantasist Hector Hushabye; her sister, the
apparently conventional, newly returned Lady Utterword; and Lady
Utterword's devoted brother-in-law Randall, prototype of the useless
artist. Shaw appears to be portraying in 'this silly house, this
strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without
foundations', an aspect of British (or European) civilization (suggested
in part by the Bloomsbury Group, in part by the society portrayed by
Chekhov), about to run on the rocks or blow itself up through lack of
direction and lack of grasp of economic reality, but, after various
Shavian debates on money, marriage, and morality, the play ends in deep
ambiguity: an air raid destroys Boss Mangan, the practical man (who
takes refuge in a gravel pit where the captain stores dynamite), and is
greeted with exhilarated rapture by Hesione and Elie ('It's splendid:
it's like an orchestra: it's like Beethoven'), who with the rest of the
household refuse to take shelter, and survive.
Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1918-20)
is an infrequently performed cycle of five plays by Bernard Shaw,
beginning in the Garden of Eden and reaching the year AD 31,920, which
examines the metaphysical implications of longevity. Shaw revised the
text and its preface, and added a postscript, in the mid-1940s when
choosing Back to Methuselah to represent his work in the Oxford University Press World's Classics series.
Too True to Be Good, (1931),
a three-act political extravaganza by Bernard Shaw which opens in one
of the richest cities in England, in a patient's bedroom inhabited by a
'poor innocent microbe' made of luminous jelly, and then moves to a sea
beach in a mountainous country patrolled by the omnipresent Private
Meek, Shaw's imaginative portrait of T. E. Lawrence. The surreal plot,
which progresses by means of a series of fantastical illusions and
proliferating identities, contains echoes from The Pilgrim's Progress and The Tempest, and reaches its climax in a long peroration on the place of human beings in the evolution of the world.
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928),
G. B. Shaw's answer, 200,000 words long, to a request for 'a few ideas
on socialism' from his sister-in-law, to whom the book is dedicated.
This closely argued and passionately felt political testament treats
women as the have-nots of a male culture and traces specific social
evils to inequality of income. A new edition, with two additional
chapters and retitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, was published in 1937 as the first two Pelican Books.
_____
Humane Fabian Socialism—
Blessed with both an Oscar and Nobel Prize.
Bernard Shaw, premio Nobel de literatura, dramaturgo, político, socialista, miembro de la Sociedad Fabiana precursora del partido laborista británico.
— MatarAlpelicano (@MAlpelicano) December 13, 2022
Esto decía, el angelito, sobre el valor de la vida de cada persona. pic.twitter.com/RuLLPft3Y4
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