George Bernard Shaw Analysis

George Bernard Shaw came to an English theater settled into the well-made play, a theater that had not known a first-rate dramatist for more than a century. The pap on which its audiences had been fed, not very different from television fare today, provided a soothing escape from the realities of the working world. Instead of fitting himself to this unreal mold, Shaw offered reality in all its forms: social, political, economic, and religious. He was a didact, a preacher who readily acknowledged that the stage was his pulpit. In startling contrast to his contemporary Oscar Wilde and Wilde’s fellow aesthetes, Shaw asserted that he would not commit a single sentence to paper for art’s sake alone; yet he beat the aesthetes at their own artistic game. Though he preached socialism, creative evolution, the abolition of prisons, and real equality for women, and railed against the insincerity of motives for war, he did so as a jester in some of the finest comedy ever written. He had no desire to be a martyr and insisted that, though his contemporaries might merely laugh at his plays, “a joke is an earnest in the womb of time.” The next generation would get his point, even if the current generation was only entertained.

Many of the next generations have gotten his point, and Shaw’s argument—that he who writes for all time will discover that he writes for no time—seems to have been borne out. Only by saying something to the age can one say something...

Davis, Tracy C. George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Davis examines Shaw’s belief in socialism and how it affected and was demonstrated in his dramatic works. Includes bibliography and index.

Dukore, Bernard Frank. Shaw’s Theater. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Explores the production of Shaw’s dramatic works. Includes bibliography and index.

Holroyd, Michael. The Search for Love: 1856-1898. Vol. 1 inBernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1988. In this superb beginning to his authoritative biography, Holroyd describes Shaw’s Irish origins and trials of following his mother to London. His journalistic and musical career is interwoven with various love affairs, culminating in marriage in 1898. Sensitive analyses of political and aesthetic ideas are balanced with insights into early drama. Includes illustrations, a bibliographic note, and an index.

Holroyd, Michael. The Pursuit of Power: 1898-1918. Vol. 2 in Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1989. (See Magill’s Literary Annual review) Describes the complicated interrelationships of Shaw’s middle plays (from Caesar and Cleopatra to Heartbreak House) with ethics, politics, economics, medicine, religion, and war. The popularity of his drama is explained and analyzed, while the sophistication of his personality is narrated through his...