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Major Works: Arms and the Man (1894), Mrs. Warren's Profession (1898), Man and Superman (1903), John Bull's Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1913), Heartbreak House (1917), Saint Joan (1923), The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism (non-fiction, 1928).
Biographical Notes: Born and raised in Dublin by English parents, Bernard Shaw moved to London when he was twenty to pursue his dream of being a writer. He started by writing five unsuccessful novels, and he estimated that in his first nine years of writing he earned less than £10. Shaw had much firsthand experience with poverty and strife. He first achieved notice as a music critic in his late twenties, and he was a regular contributor to several prominent journals with reviews and criticism of art, drama and a variety of books. Shaw became involved with a number of political causes, women's rights and the abolition of private property among them, and he was an eminent member of the Fabian Society, who recommended a program of gradual socialism. He worked hard at becoming an effective public speaker on a variety of social issues, and eventually Shaw became a highly successful playwright, publishing more than 50 plays in his 94 years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. Shaw's long life may be attributable to his being a vegetarian and his lifelong abstention from alcohol, tea, and coffee.
"Discussion plays"
As a critic, Shaw condemned the theater before
and after the turn of the twentieth century for "artificiality": he felt
that plays should deal with contemporary social and moral problems.
Following his interpretation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Shaw
wrote plays addressing a number of specific social problems. Most
of Shaw's plays have a specific moral, political, or social agenda--his
method was typically to bring intelligent attention to such problems as
slums, government corruption, ideals of military "romanticism," contemporary
politics (Irish mostly), war, war-profiteering, poverty as the worst of
crimes, class snobbery (Pygmalion).
Through what he called "debated dramas" or "discussion plays", Shaw's stated aim in his work was to "force the public to reconsider its morals," especially in gender issues and economic matters. Though his plays address specific social or moral issues, Shaw typically refrains from delivering a pointedly didactic theme or "message." Rather, he hoped that through "discussion" or "debate" his plays would embody and engender, he would cause the issues to be debated and discussed after the performance: he wanted his work to foster discussion that would lead to important social reform.
The typical Shavian "discussion" raises the basic question: what is wrong with society? Like the Victorians before him, and unlike the majority of "moderns" after, Shaw was more concerned with society as a whole than with the individual.
There are no real "villains" in Shaw's plays--rather, society itself is the villain: as he put it, "Until Society is reformed, no man can reform himself except in the most insignificant small ways." His aim was usually not to tell a story but to convey ideas. Shaw permits the characters, who are sometimes mere burlesques, to illustrate and comment upon the author's theses: he called his work "Debated drama--the discussion of the mental and spiritual states and changes in the characters of men and women who are involved in a situation rather than an action."