126 Facts About George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist.

George Bernard Shaw wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan.

George Bernard Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894.

George Bernard Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion.

George Bernard Shaw courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period.

George Bernard Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin.

George Bernard Shaw was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw's relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant.

If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George Bernard Shaw's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money.

George Bernard Shaw came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty".

George Bernard Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this.

The young George Bernard Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply.

George Bernard Shaw found solace in the music that abounded in the house.

Lee's students often gave him books, which the young George Bernard Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature.

Between 1865 and 1871, George Bernard Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated.

Early in 1876 George Bernard Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of tuberculosis.

George Bernard Shaw's mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in South Kensington, but he nevertheless needed an income.

George Bernard Shaw had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had not yet thought of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him, ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet.

George Bernard Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer.

George Bernard Shaw's first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme.

George Bernard Shaw's first completed novel, Immaturity, was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s.

Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, George Bernard Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation.

George Bernard Shaw grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.

In 1880 George Bernard Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race".

George Bernard Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French, Un Petit Drame, written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime.

The project foundered, but George Bernard Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to George Bernard Shaw's career.

On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George.

George Bernard Shaw began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital.

George Bernard Shaw joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and Annie Besant, a fine orator.

From 1885 to 1889 George Bernard Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest George Bernard Shaw had ever come to university education".

In 1890 George Bernard Shaw produced Tract No 13, What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms.

George Bernard Shaw had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane Patterson, a widow some years his senior.

In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, George Bernard Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers.

From 1895 to 1898, George Bernard Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris.

In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, George Bernard Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the Independent Labour Party.

George Bernard Shaw was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics.

George Bernard Shaw persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing indirect taxation, and taxing unearned income "to extinction".

Back in London, George Bernard Shaw produced what Margaret Cole, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892.

George Bernard Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy.

George Bernard Shaw was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the London School of Economics and Political Science opened in the summer of 1895.

At least initially, George Bernard Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously; when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly formed borough council.

In 1898, as a result of overwork, George Bernard Shaw's health broke down.

George Bernard Shaw was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs.

George Bernard Shaw had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage.

Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell and James Joyce, and was a close friend of Sean O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island.

Now prosperous and established, George Bernard Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce".

In 1899, when the Boer War began, George Bernard Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like Home Rule, to be a "non-Socialist" issue.

George Bernard Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body".

Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; George Bernard Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911.

George Bernard Shaw later wondered whether the Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it".

George Bernard Shaw became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously.

Three short plays by George Bernard Shaw were premiered during the war.

George Bernard Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the British Empire.

George Bernard Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, the Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces.

George Bernard Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.

George Bernard Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch".

George Bernard Shaw was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays.

In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; George Bernard Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity".

George Bernard Shaw had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject.

George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December.

George Bernard Shaw accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs".

George Bernard Shaw described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World".

George Bernard Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", The Apple Cart, written in late 1928.

The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was Sir Edward Elgar, with whom George Bernard Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard.

George Bernard Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his ODNB biographical sketch comments that George Bernard Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade, and Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.

The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom George Bernard Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him.

At a dinner given in his honour, George Bernard Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them".

Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times commenting that George Bernard Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation".

George Bernard Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome in South Africa in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country.

In March 1933 they arrived at San Francisco, to begin George Bernard Shaw's first visit to the US.

George Bernard Shaw visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House.

Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, George Bernard Shaw was glad when his ship sailed from New York harbour.

The latter was never made, but George Bernard Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938.

George Bernard Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to prevent it from winning one Academy Award ; he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source.

George Bernard Shaw became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.

George Bernard Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished, Geneva and In Good King Charles's Golden Days.

George Bernard Shaw's treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.

In 1944 nine George Bernard Shaw plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles.

The revival in his popularity did not tempt George Bernard Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism.

George Bernard Shaw disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all potential criminals".

George Bernard Shaw declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history.

George Bernard Shaw's last plays were Buoyant Billions, his final full-length work; Farfetched Fables a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets, Shakes versus Shav, a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and Why She Would Not, which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday.

George Bernard Shaw died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree.

George Bernard Shaw was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950.

George Bernard Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works.

George Bernard Shaw wrote a further twelve in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly one-act pieces.

George Bernard Shaw followed the first trilogy with a second, published as "Plays Pleasant".

George Bernard Shaw's major plays of the first decade of the twentieth century address individual social, political or ethical issues.

George Bernard Shaw wrote seven short plays during the decade; they are all comedies, ranging from the deliberately absurd Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction to the satirical Press Cuttings.

Androcles and the Lion, which George Bernard Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice.

George Bernard Shaw named Shakespeare and Chekhov as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on Congreve and Ibsen.

George Bernard Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages.

George Bernard Shaw was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of Brahms and those British composers such as Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian.

George Bernard Shaw campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of Handel oratorios with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists".

George Bernard Shaw railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.

George Bernard Shaw campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, stereotypes and worn-out conventions".

West writes that George Bernard Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique".

George Bernard Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for The Saturday Review, in which he assessed more than 212 productions.

George Bernard Shaw championed Ibsen's plays when many theatregoers regarded them as outrageous, and his 1891 book Quintessence of Ibsenism remained a classic throughout the twentieth century.

George Bernard Shaw's collected criticisms were published as Our Theatres in the Nineties in 1932.

George Bernard Shaw maintained a provocative and frequently self-contradictory attitude to Shakespeare.

George Bernard Shaw had two regular targets for his more extreme comments about Shakespeare: undiscriminating "Bardolaters", and actors and directors who presented insensitively cut texts in over-elaborate productions.

George Bernard Shaw was continually drawn back to Shakespeare, and wrote three plays with Shakespearean themes: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Cymbeline Refinished and Shakes versus Shav.

An early critic, writing in 1904, observed that George Bernard Shaw's dramas provided "a pleasant means" of proselytising his socialism, adding that "Mr George Bernard Shaw's views are to be sought especially in the prefaces to his plays".

George Bernard Shaw's increasing flirtation with dictatorial methods is evident in many of his subsequent pronouncements.

George Bernard Shaw introduced his theories in The Revolutionist's Handbook, an appendix to Man and Superman, and developed them further during the 1920s in Back to Methuselah.

George Bernard Shaw was pleased with his third novel, Love Among the Artists, feeling that it marked a turning point in his development as a thinker, although he had no more success with it than with its predecessors.

George Bernard Shaw later explained that he had intended An Unsocial Socialist as the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism.

Gareth Griffith, in a study of George Bernard Shaw's political thought, sees the novel as an interesting record of conditions, both in society at large and in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s.

George Bernard Shaw's letters, edited by Dan H Laurence, were published between 1965 and 1988.

George Bernard Shaw once estimated his letters would occupy twenty volumes; Laurence commented that, unedited, they would fill many more.

George Bernard Shaw wrote more than a quarter of a million letters, of which about ten per cent have survived; 2,653 letters are printed in Laurence's four volumes.

In 1939 George Bernard Shaw drew on these materials to produce George Bernard Shaw Gives Himself Away, a miscellany which, a year before his death, he revised and republished as Sixteen Self Sketches.

George Bernard Shaw made it clear to his publishers that this slim book was in no sense a full autobiography.

George Bernard Shaw was a poseur and a puritan; he was similarly a bourgeois and an antibourgeois writer, working for Hearst and posterity; his didacticism is entertaining and his pranks are purposeful; he supports socialism and is tempted by fascism.

In one area at least George Bernard Shaw was constant: in his lifelong refusal to follow normal English forms of spelling and punctuation.

In 1913 George Bernard Shaw declared that he was not religious "in the sectarian sense", aligning himself with Jesus as "a person of no religion".

George Bernard Shaw requested that no one should imply that he accepted the beliefs of any specific religious organisation, and that no memorial to him should "take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice".

George Bernard Shaw espoused racial equality, and inter-marriage between people of different races.

In 1903 George Bernard Shaw joined in a controversy about vaccination against smallpox.

George Bernard Shaw called vaccination "a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft"; in his view immunisation campaigns were a cheap and inadequate substitute for a decent programme of housing for the poor, which would, he declared, be the means of eradicating smallpox and other infectious diseases.

Less contentiously, George Bernard Shaw was keenly interested in transport; Laurence observed in 1992 a need for a published study of George Bernard Shaw's interest in "bicycling, motorbikes, automobiles, and planes, climaxing in his joining the Interplanetary Society in his nineties".

George Bernard Shaw published articles on travel, took photographs of his journeys, and submitted notes to the Royal Automobile Club.

George Bernard Shaw left instructions in his will that his executor was to license publication of his works only under the name Bernard Shaw.

Besides his collected music criticism, George Bernard Shaw has left a varied musical legacy, not all of it of his choosing.

George Bernard Shaw was an insatiable adopter and adapter, an incomparable prestidigitator with the thoughts of the forerunners.