SHAW, George Bernard

“a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”

 Born in Dublin, Ireland in the middle of the 19^th century, Shaw followed his mother to London in 1876 where she supported him financially while he tried to establish himself as a writer.  During the 1880s and 90s he became a leading music and theatre critic, and a prominent member of the left wing Fabian Society, for which he wrote many pamphlets.  It was also at this time that he began writing plays, which were full of wit and social criticism, both of which were to become Shaw’s signature style.  In 1903 he wrote, Man & Superman, which is purportedly a light comedy but its underlying theme is a reflection on Nietzsche’s  philosophical ideas about the Ubermensch. His most famous play, Pygmalion, was published in 1912, and he won an Academy Award for the screenplay when the play transferred to the big screen in 1938.  Shaw wrote five novels, the best known of which was Cashel Byron’s Profession, and many philosophical and political essays, but his largest legacy is the more than 50 plays which address contemporary moral problems with his trademark irony and “Shavian” wit.

 In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty".

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