George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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Life
| [vars. Bernard Shaw; G. B. Shaw; fam. known as “Sonny”] b. Coombe Hospital. 26 July, son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly (“Bessie”, m. 1852 - aetat. 22) of 3 Upr. Synge St., Dublin [now 33 Synge St.], the former owning an ailing flour mill at Dolphin’s Barn and the latter (wrongly assumed by him to possess the money to save it); GBS ed. by Rev. Carroll, rector of St. Bride’s, an uncle by marriage; later at the Wesley Connexional [now Wesley College], Dublin; Mrs. Shaw, a mezzo-soprano, goes to George John Vandaleur Lee for voice-training; the Shaws move to 1, Hatch St., the house of Lee’s recently dead br. with whom he had shared it; |
| attends Lee’s concerts and grow familiar with works of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi; buys of house for Mrs Shaw on Dalkey Hill; Mrs. Shaw follows Lee to London, allegedly earning only £6 by writing in his first 9 years; GBS spends long hours in National Gallery of Ireland, recently opened, with schoolfriend Matthew Edward McNulty, late 1860s and early 1870s; Shaws move to 61 Harcourt St., 1871; a sis. Agnes goes to the Isle of Wight for TB cure, and dies there; another, Lucy, moves to Fulham Rd. to live with her mother; GBS leaves school and commences working for Charles Uniake Townsend, estate-agents, of Molesworth St.; |
| publishes letter in Public Opinion, signed “S”, commenting on the influence of the evangelists Moody and Sankey during their Dublin tour, 1875 [‘... Respecting the effect of the revival on individuals I may mention that it has a tendency to make them highly objectionable ... it remains doubtful if the change is not merely in the nature of the excitement rather than in the moral nature of the individual ...’]; moves to London, April 1876; joins Zetetical Society; publishes Immaturity (1879), a novel; also Love Among the Artists (1881), Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882-83) and An Unsocial Socialist (1883); joins the Webbs’ Fabian Society at its foundation, in 1884, reporting that reading Marx ‘made a man of me’; contribs. book-reviews to Pall Mall Gazette (ed. William Archer) , 1885-88; |
| his play Widowers’ Houses suggested by Archer as a means of promoting Ibsenism, 1885; reworked for J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Co. and produced at Royal Theatre, 9 Dec. 1892; acts as art critic, The World, 1886-89; acts as music critic to Star, under pseud. ‘Corno di Bassetto’, 1888-90; ditto to World, 1890-95; issues The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891); his play Arms and the Man, performed Avenue Theatre, London, 21 April 1894, with subvention from Annie Horniman, with Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire acting as a curtain-raiser; later transferred to the Court Theatre, and produced there by Vedrenne and Barker; enjoys success with Arms and the Man (April 1894), transferring to New York (Sept. 1894); becomes dram. critic on Saturday Review (ed. Frank Harris), 1895-98; |
| stays at Beachy Head with Fabians, and passes time ‘diligently trying to ride bicycle for the first time in my life’, Easter 1895; works for St Pancras Local Govt. Councillor as ‘vestryman’, 1897-1903; corresponds with Ellen Terry for whom he afterwards writes Captain Brassbound’s Conversion; m. Charlotte Payne-Townsend (d.1943), 1898, and moves with her to Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, where he remains thereafter; issues Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 2 Vols. (1898), containing Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Candida, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, The Philanderer, &c.; refuses invitation to participate in centenary commemoration of the 1798 Rebellion [‘Until Irishmen apply themselves to what the condition of Ireland will be in 1998, they will get very little patriotism out of Yours sincerely’]; |
| hears Elgar’s Enigma Variations [‘... took your breath. Whew! I knew we had got it at last’], and established friendship with the composer, championing him as the greatest English composer since Purcell; Mary Chavelita Bright (1859-1945) became his drama agent, 1901; issues Three Plays for Puritans (1901), being Caesar and Cleopatra; Captain Brassbound’s Conversion and The Devil’s Disciple; writes Man and Superman, 1901-03, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre (23 May, 1905) and withdrawn in printed copy from New York Public Libraries; further plays produced at the Royal Court by Harley Granville-Barker, actor-director, under John Vedrenne and Barker’s brilliant partnership there, 1904-07, including John Bull’s Other Island, commissioned by W. B. Yeats for the Abbey [‘Mr. Yeats got more than he bargained for’] and premiered at the Royal Court (1 Nov. 1904); |
| Major Barbara (28 Nov. 1905) and The Doctor’s Dilemma (20 Nov. 1906); served as a witness before the Parliamentary Committee on Censorship, 1909, declaring the untrammelled power of Lord Chamberlain in such matters to be ‘grossly unfair’ to authors; Shaw visits Coole Park, summer 1910; John Bull’s Other Island viewed four times by Arthur Balfour with cabinet colleagues but rejected by the Abbey for want of an actor to play Broadbent, though revived in Dublin (Sept. 1916); regarded by Shaw as an ‘uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland’; the leasing of Savoy Theatre, 1907-08 and the production of Shavian revivals resulted in financial loss and the termination of the partnership with Granville-Barker; GBS’s play The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet produced in Dublin, at the end of Horse Show Week, 25 Aug. 1909 , and reviewed by Joyce; death of GBS’s mother, 1913; |
| first production of Pygmalion at Lessing Theatre, Berlin, Nov. 1913, and first played in London, April 1914; Androcles and the Lion (Berlin 25 Nov. 1912; St James, 1 Sept. 1913); GBS falls in love with Mrs. Campbell, who played Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion; declared public enemy and pro-Kaiser in England; six plays staged at the Abbey, 25 Sept. 1916–26 May 1917, dir. J. Augustus Keogh; GBS protested against execution of 1916 leaders [‘an Irishman resorting to arms to achieve the independence of his country is doing only what Englishmen will do if it is their misfortune to be invaded and conquered by the Germans in the course of the present war’], warning that the executions would make martyrs of them; discarded a defence of Roger Casement considering it a lost cause (though 25 copies were afterwards published in 1922); |
| his letter “Shall Roger Casement Hang?” rejected by The Times but printed in Manchester Guardian, 22 July 1916, and eleventh-hour appeal from his hand also appearing in The Daily News (2 Aug. 1916); contribs. ‘The Betrayal of Ulster’, a letter, to The Irish Statesman (10 Jan. 1920); Heartbreak House first performed at Theatre Guild, New York (10 Nov. 1920) and later in London (Court Theatre, 18 Oct. 1921); Back to Methuselah, premiered at Theatre Guild, New York (27 Feb. 1922), and after played at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (9 Oct. 1923); St. Joan partly written at Eccles Hotel, Glengarriff, Summer 1923, Shaw reading it aloud to Fr. Leonard and Fr. Sheehy; premiered at the Garrick, New York (1923), and played in London (New Theatre, March 1924); receives the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1925; |
| issues The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928); visits Russia and reported that he had ‘seen the future’, 1928; contrib. ‘The Irish Censorship’ to Irish Statesman, 11 (19 Nov. 1928); The Applecart (1929), first played at the Polish Theatre, Warsaw (29 June 1929) and later at the Malvern Festival (Aug. 1929), estab. in that year by Sir Barry Jackson; publication of Collected Plays (1931); issues The Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) with ills. by Sir John Farleigh; issues The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home (1933), published in the US as American Boobs (1934); further Malvern Fest. plays incl. The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934); The Millionairess (1934); called for a representative commission of enquiry into the Casement diaries (Irish Press, 15 March 1937); |
| issues In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939); Buoyant Billions (1947); issues Sixteen Self-Sketches (1949) and Shakes versus Shav (1949); wrote a letter to The Times about a peformance of Handel’s Messiah; engaged in correspondence with Terence Rattigan about drama and ideas (New Statesman & Nation, 4 March & 6 May 1950); fnd., with others, the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation for trans. of Swedish literature; obtained new universal fame and fortune through filming of plays, notably Pygmalion and Major Barbara; d. 2 Nov; ‘Shaw’s Corner’, his house at Ayot St Lawrence became property of National Trust; testament left residue of estate to institute a new British alphabet of at least 40 letters; the standard biography is by Michael Holroyd; an Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies is edited by Stanley Weintraub; papers are held in the National Library of Ireland; The Shaw Room of the National Gallery lately used for concerts, incl. regular Thursday evening performances of the National Chamber Choir; there is an annual Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontaria Canada; there is a bust by Rodin (which Shaw kept in his London home at Whitehall Court); also portrayed by Augustus John. NCBE JMC ODNB DIB DIW DIH DIL OCEL KUN ODQ SUTH FDA OCIL |
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Plays (premières)
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Complete Works (Plays & Prefaces)
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There is an internet edition of Shaw’s pamphlet “O’Flaherty, V.C.”, at the Gutenberg Project [online]; see copy in RICORSO, Library, Irish Classic [attached]. Note also children’s life as Hugh O’Flaherty: His Wartime Adventures (Cork: Collins 2010), 128pp |
Bibliographical details
Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (Odhams Press Ltd. 1934) [with a “Warning from the Author”; “and 42 titles; 1219pp.; contains the plays, “Widowers’ Houses”; “The Philanderer”; “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”; “Arms and the Man”; “Candida”; “The Man of Destiny”; “You Never Can Tell”; “The Devil’s Disciple”; “Caesar and Cleopatra”; “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion”; “Man and Superman”; “John Bull’s Other Island”; “How he Lied to Her Husband”; “Major Barbara”; “The Doctor’s Dilemma”; “Getting Married”; “The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet”; “Misalliance”; “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”; “Fanny’s First Play”; “Androcles and the Lion”; “Over-Ruled”; “Pygmalion”; “ Heartbreak House”; “Great Catherine”; “O’Flaherty V.C.”; “The Inca of Perusalem”; “Augustus Does His Bit”; “Annajaska, The Bolsehevik Empress”; “Back to Methuselah”; “Saint Joan”; “The Applecart”; “Jitta’s Atonement”; “The Admirable Bashville, or The Fatal Gazogene”; “The Fascinating Foundling”; “The Music-Cure”; “Too True to Be Good”; “Village Wooing”; “On the Rocks’]; Dan H. Laurence, ed., Selected Short Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1988).
Complete Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable; OUP: Bombay; Toronto: Macmillan 1934), 802pp., with the author’s “Introduction’, signed 4 Dec. 1933. SOCIOLOGICAL: “Getting Married”; “Parents and Children (Misalliance)”; “Overruled”; “Majora Barbara”; “Killing for Sport”; “Man and Superman”; “Three Plays by Brieux”; “The Doctor’s Dillemma”; “Imprisonment (English Local Govt., by S & B Webb)”. POLITICAL: “The Apple Cart”; “Too Good to be True”; “On the Rocks”; “Heartbreak House”; “The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet”; “John Bull’s Other Island”; “Family Life in Germany under the Blockade”. RELIGIOUS: “Back to Methusalah”; “Androcles and the Lion”; “Saint Joan”; “The Adventure of the Black Girl in her Search for God’. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL & PROFESSIONAL: “Immaturity”; “The Irrational Knot”; “Cashel Byron’s Profession”; “Widowers’ Houses (1893 edn.)”; “Plays Unpleasant”; “Plays Pleasant”; “Three Plays for Puritans”; “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”; “The Admirable Bashville”; “Our Theatre in the Nineties”; “Ellen Terry and George Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence”; “The Autobiography of a Supertramp”; “The Sanity of Art’. MISCELLANEOUS: “Pygmalion”; “Great Catherine’. Index]. Other Edns. incl. H. G. Earnshaw, ed. [intro. and notes], A Selection from Shaw’s Prefaces (London: Longman Educ. 1977).
Three Plays (London: Constable 1936) [containing The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles; The Six of Calais].
Index of publications available at Internet Archive with inks supplied by Clare County Library Three plays for Puritans,
by George Bernard Shaw
The Devil’s Disciple; Cæsar and Cleopatra, & Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.
Published in 1901, G. Richards (London)
Pagination: xxxvii p., 2 L., [3]-308pp.
Available at Internet ArchiveC
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Criticism
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Note: [Dan H. Laurence,] ‘A Continuing Checklist of Shaviana’, Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies [q.d.]. |
Bibliographical details
Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality [St James’s Library] (London: Collins 1942, 1950), 424pp.; Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Reprint Soc. 1946), 448pp., and Do. [US edn.], as G. B. S.: A full Length Portrait (NY: NY: Harper); Do. (London: Methuen 1961), 480pp., ill. [ports.]; Do., (London: Four Square Books 1964), 508pp.; and Do. [rep. of Methuen 1961 edn.] (London: Macdonald & Jane’s 1975), [4],520p., ill. [8pp. pls., facs., ports]; another edn. (London: House of Stratus, 2001), vii, 551pp.
Michael Holroyd, Life of G. B. Shaw, Vol. 1: 1856-1898 - “The Search for Love” (London: Chatto & Windus; NY: Random House 1988), x, 486pp. [see contents]; Vol. 2: 1898-1918 - “The Pursuit of Power” (London: Chatto & Windus; NY: Random House 1989) [see contents]; Vol. 3: 1918-1950: “The Lure of Fantasy” (London: Chatto & Windus ; NY: Random House 1991), ix, 544, ill. [32pp. of pls., facs., ports.; see contents]; Vol. 4: 1950-1991 - “The Last Laugh” (London: Chatto & Windus; NY: Random House 1992) [ltd. edn. dealing with posthum. affairs and called author’s epilogue]. Also a fourth vol. comprising the third vol. with a bibliography and index (1993). [uniform 24cm.].
Note: all the foregoing reissued as Bernard Shaw: The One-volume Definitive Edition (London: Chatto & Windus 1997), xiv, 834pp., ill. [20pp. of pls., ports.; 25cm].
Michael Holroyd, The Shaw Companion (London: Chatto & Windus 1992), viii, 490pp. [containing over 10,000 researched source notes and cumulative index to the first three volumes; also text of Vol. 4: The Last Laugh 1950-1991 [being Holroyd’s epilogue].
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (London: Chatto & Windus 1992), being Vols. 3, 4 & 5 [Vol. 3: The Lure of Fantasy; Vol. 4: incls. The Last Laugh; Vol. 5: The Shaw Companion [coll. styled the final volume in a set of three comprising The Life and Work of George Bernard Shaw].
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PENGUIN EDNS [being reprints of the Chatto & Windus 1st edns., as supra].
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw - Vol. 1, 1856-1898: “The Search for Love” (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990), x, 486pp. [20cm.], ill. [ports.; 20cm. CONTENTS. Part 1: An end and a beginning; a fermenting genealogy; How his parents met and were married; A devil of a childhood; Vandeleur Lee appears, leaving a trail of uncertainties; “Menage à trois”, Catholic and Protestant; The shame of education; Music in Dublin and how Mrs Shaw celebrated her 21st wedding anniversary; In which Shaw advances as an estate agent, marks time as a lover, and moves to London. Part 2: The ghosting and death of Vandeleur Lee; How Shaw experimented with the telephone and began writing novels in London; In which his history continues unsuccessfully; Whe trained and what he ate and drank; He grows a beard; Containing a sparring friendship with Pakenham Beatty and a sparring flirtation with Alice Lockett; Death of a novelist; Death of a father. Part 3: in which Shaw finds a new family among the Fabians; the moral and aesthetic influences of William Archer and William Morris; Showing how he went walkabout with Edith, spent his evenings with Eleanor and passed the night of his 29th birthday with Jenny; Introducing Sidney Webb, describing how the Fabian musketeers conducted themselves in Trafalgar square and showing in what way they turned defeat into victory with Fabian Essays. Part 4: A live red socialist from the streets comes in with The Quintessence of Ibsenism; A crust for the critics: Shaw as a literary reviewer; The mystical betrothal with May Morris - a story from another world; Corno di Bassetto in unison with G.B.S.; A section which begins with the entrance of Florence Farr and ends with the exit of Jenny Patterson. Part 5: The courtship of Sidney and Beatrice Webb; In which Shaw starts his career as an unpleasant playwright; In which he writes his first pleasant play, Arms and the Man; Pursuing the story of the playwright and his actresses; He writes Candida; how Candida fared with Janet Achurch and Richard Mansfield in North America. Part 6: Concerning the editorial versatility of Frank Harris; Containing some dramatic opinions; In which Shaw jousts with Henry Irving over Ellen Terry; Continuing the story of “Candida” and Janet Achurch; In which Shaw writes his last pleasant play and his first play for Puritans and relinquishes his dramatic criticism. Part 7: How Shaw performed at the Vestry; He is courted by Bertha Newcombe and courts Charlotte Payne-Townshend; The courtship persists and reaches its climax.
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Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw - Vol. 2, 1898-1918: The Pursuit of Power (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1991), ix, 420pp. [20cm.], CONTENTS. Part 1: The happy accidents of marriage, two views of sea air, and Shaw repairs to Adelphi Terrace; On heroes and hero-worship - an essay on “The Perfect Wagnerite” and “Caesar and Cleopatra”. Shaw writes “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion” and Ellen Terry, who stars in it, marries one of the actors; “Three Plays for Puritans” versus the pornography in Victorian values; Fabian manoeuvres in the Boer war; Shaw drafts “Fabianism and the Empire” and fails to influence the general election. Part 2: Shaw takes up with some unexpected characters and is translated; In which Max Beerbohm begins his caricatures and Charlotte Shaw persists with her holidays; A short section upstaging Shakespeare with The Admirable Bashville; The comedy and philosophy of Man and Superman; The dreams and realities of John Bull’s Other Island; Granville Barker comes to court; The curtain goes up on Major Barbara; “The alleluias will get me yet”. Part 3: Fabian bedfellows at the turn of the century and the difficult birth of “Fabianism and the Fiscal Question”; H. G. Wells joins the Fabian cast and becomes Shaw’s protagonist; A revolution at the court unites Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy; Concerning the medical ethics of The Doctor’s Dilemma; An invasion of the West End and some dreams of a national theatre. Part 4: An exhibition of portraits; Shaw sits to Rodin in Paris and floats up in a balloon above Wandsworth gas works; A hectic section that begins with a look into the rectory at Ayot St Lawrence and a glance through numerous postcards, continues with a visit to the Fabian Summer School and a career round the continent, and ends with a strange encounter with a Swedish playwright; An interesting discourse on a disquisitory play, Getting Married, and staying married; Which takes us outdoors for some alarming road-adventures; a treatise on how to handle biographers and another on how to quarrel properly demonstrated by G.K. Chesterton; The attractions of censorship and how to resist them as revealed by the stage histories of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and Press Cuttings, with ith assistance from Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. Part 5: Shaw’s invocations to the God of Tolstoy and the Muse of Henry James followed by an analysis of Misalliance and the case re-emphasised for a national theatre; Further particulars in the shocking history of Mr Wells; Beatrice Webb produces her minority report and Shaw resigns from the Fabian Executive; A diversion of skits and farces; A jaunt to Jamaica and some misadventures in company with a chauffeur and a secretary; The success of Fanny’s First Play and the autobiographical impulses in Androcles and the Lion; What the playwright said to the actress - Mrs Patrick Campbell, Pygmalion, and the nature of love and comedy. Part 6: concerning fame and anonymity - the origins and early days of the New Statesman; the history and rehearsals of Pygmalion.
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw - Vol. 3, 1918-1950: “The Lure of Fantasy”. (London: Penguin 1993), ix, 544p., ill. [32pp. of pls., facsims., ports.; 20cm.] (London: Chatto & Windus 1991). CONTENTS. Part 1: Some hints and consequences of peace; Shaw’s heartbreak; Working with Miss Cross Patch and travelling with Fred Day; The tragedy of an elderly gentleman; Home rule for England; Free will in translation. Part 2: Collaborating with a saint; I which Archer takes his leave, Lawrence of Arabia advances into the Shaws’ lives and the story is taken up by explorers and adventurers; An island of romance; Intelligent women and the body politic. Part 3: The Shaws move to Whitehall Court and meet Nancy Astor; G.B.S. performs at Cliveden and pronounces on Mussolini; In which G.B.S. upsets The Apple Cart over Stella Campbell and the socialist movement, starts up the Malvern festival, and establishes his friendship with Elgar; How Shaw became the author of himself, wrote his way into the lives of Ellen Terry’s children, and finally signed off from Stella Campbell; Positive capability and the great Celtic-Hibernian school - Wilde and Yeats, O’Casey, Joyce; Old friends make way for new romances - G.B.S. meets the boxer and the nun. Part 4: The elopement to Russia; Shaw’s pilgrim’s progress; Visions and judgments from his missionary travels; Prefaces to death. Part 5: Some domestic privacies and the demands of the political theatre; Which contains a sea change and a treasure hunt; spontaneous resurrection and a new life; New worlds of paperback and celluloid; Three plays for historians; Trebitsch uber alles. Part 6: Cease fire! turn up the lights! uncommon sense and careless talk; How G.B.S. managed a happy end for Charlotte; Containing several new characters and plots that are introduced rather late into the story; Two fatal attachments; Continuation of the story; In which the conclusion of the story is spelt out.
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: Vol. 4 - The Last Laugh: 1950-1991 [new edn.] (London: Penguin 1993), 160pp. [20cm.] CONTENTS: The Shaw alphabet reading key; Androcles and the Lion - Prologue. The Last Laugh: Two Old Testaments; some authorized revisions; the National Trust and the Shaw Society; posthumous appearances forty years on. Appendices: Charlotte Shaw’s will; Bernard Shaw’s will; principal purchases from the Shaw Fund by the National Gallery of Ireland; list of films made from Shaw’s works.
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Commentary
See separate file [infra].
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Quotations
See separate file [infra].
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References| Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee: 1946), lists: | |
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Shell Guide to Ireland (1967), under ‘Glengarriff’: Shaw’s St. Joan was partly written at Ilnacullin, with its Italian garden and Martello tower.
Helena Sheehan, Irish Television Drama, A Society and Its Stories (RTE 1987); RTE Film, Candida, Shaw/Christopher FitzSimon; Dear Liar, Shaw and Mrs Campbell/Chloe Gibson, adpt. Jerome Kilty (1966); Man of Destiny, Shaw/Shelah Richards (1964); O’Flaherty V.C., 91, 108, Shaw/Christopher Fitzsimon (1968); Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, The, 91, Shaw/Chloe Gibson (1962); You Never Can Tell, Shaw/Chloe Gibson.
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1988); lists Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886), ser. in To-Day, April 1885-March 1886), about a pugilist; Shaw later wrote, ‘I never think of [it] without a shudder at the narrowness of my escape from being a successful novelist.’ His plays first successful in New York in the late 1897s, and then in London under direction of Harley Granville-Barker after 1904; John Bull’s Other Island written for Yeats’s Irish Dramatic Movement, but not staged there; Nobel Prize in 1925. FOR Shaw’s abortive attempts to fund Irish film and correspondence with De Valera, see Kevin Rockett, et al., eds, Cinema & Ireland (1988), 96-7, 108.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 selects John Bull’s Other Island, with Preface to Politicians from same; Composite Autobiography; The Protestants of Ireland; A Note on Aggressive Nationalism; How to Settle the Irish Question; O’Flaherty VC, A Recruiting Pamphlet; War Issues for Irishmen; [423-514]; Commentary pp.514-15; Vol 3 selects ‘The Censorship’, in The Irish Statesman, 1928 [96-98], and ‘Preface to Immaturity’ [426-34], with other notes additional references.
Berg Collection (New York Public Library) holds Shaw Papers, chiefly consisting of letters, postcards and telegrams, among them an extended series addressed to Siegfried Treebitsch, 1902-1949.
Booksellers
Hyland Catalogue (No. 214) lists The Legal Eight Hours Question: A Public Debate [with] Mr G. W. Foote (1st edn. 1891), 77pp.; ‘The Commonsense of Municipal Trading (1st edn. 1904), vii+120pp.; The Arts League of Service Annual, 1921-22, contains Shaw, ‘The Art of Rehearsal’ [6 out of 32pp.]; C. L. & V. M. Broad, eds., Dictionary to the Plays and Novels of Bernard Shaw with a Bibliography (1st edn. 1929). [Hyland 219; 1995]. The Sanity of Art (1908); How to Settle the Irish Question (Dublin 1817), 32pp.; bernard Shaw and Karl Marx, A Symposium 1884-1889 (NY 1930) [ltd. edn., 575]; Fabian Essays in Socialism (1899; 1908); Three Plays by Brieux with a Pref. by Bernard Shaw ... English version by Mrs Bernard Shaw et al. (1911), port.
Hyland Catalague (No. 224) lists Henderson, Is Bernard Shaw a Dramatist? (1st edn. 1929) [ltd. edn. 1000]; R. J. Minney, The Bogus Image of Bernard Shaw (1969), ills.; Maurice Holmes, Some Bibliographical Notes on the Novels of Shaw with some Comments by Shaw (1928) [ltd. edn. 5000], 20pp.; Selected Passages from the Works of Bernard Shaw, chosen by Charlotte F. Shaw (1912).
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Notes
William Archer wrote of Shaw’s music criticism that ‘he had a peculiar genius for bringing day-by day musical criticism into vital relation with aesthetics at large, and even with ethics and politics - in a word with life’.
Sean O’Casey on Shaw’s humanism: ‘Man must be his own saviour; man must be his own god. Man must learn, not by prayer but by experience. Advice from God was within ourselves, and nowhere else. Social sense and social development was the fulfilment of the law and the prophets. A happy people made happy by themselves. There is no other name given among men by which we can be saved, but by the mighty name of Man.’ (Sunset and the Evening Star, p.250.)
The Devil’s Disciple, though written in 1896 , did not have a West End production until 1907, though it was a hit in America. This time-lapse spanned Shaw’s own development as a writer as well as changing theatrical tastes, and by the time it reached a large London audience the meydey of melodrama was very remote ... by now, if to succeed at any level, melodramatic convention has to be signalled with some considerable sophisticaltion. [See John Stokes’ review of 1994 performance at Olivier Theatre, in Times Literary Supplement, 23 Sept. 1994.]
Heartbreak House: the title refers to the cultivated rich of Europe who brought heartbreak on themselves by disdaining political responsibility. ‘Power and culture’, Shaw’s preface asserts, ‘were in separate compartments’. Power is represented by Boss Mangan.
Blanco Posnet dramatises the conversion of a thief who gives his stolen horse to the mother of a dying child.’ (See Lucy McDiarmid, ‘Augusta Gregory, Bernard Shaw, and the Shewing Up of Dublin Castle’, in PMLA, Vol. 109, No.1 (Jan. 1994), pp.26-44.
Letters from Margaret: Correspondence between G. B. Shaw and Margaret Wheeler (Chatto & Windus 1992) [a woman who believed - justifiably - that she had left nursing-home with the wrong baby and contacted Shaw; the letters have formed the basis of a stag-play and two tele-programmes]. Reviewed, Times Literary Supplement (25 Dec. 1992).
Lady Gregory regarded Shaw and his wife as very easy guests to entertain at Coole Parke since they had their own car to get about; Shaw’s O’Flaherty VC was composed at Coole, and set in the porch of the house (information from interpretative centre at Coole Park).
La Musica: Shaw attended the concerts held by George Vandeleur Lee in Dublin in the 1870s and learned the music of Mozart, Hadyn, Beethoven, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi; as a critic he praised the then unpopular works of Bach, but regarded Mozart as his favourite; championed Elgar; described Mozart as ‘the master of the masters’ and wrote that he ‘taught me how to say profound things and at the same time remain flippant and lively’; wrote of Handel: ‘It was from Handel I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke unanswerably you have style ... Handel had this power’; called Rossini ‘one fo teh greatest masters of claptrap that ever lived’ and detested Brahms for his ‘heavy, all-pervading, unintelligent German sentimentality’, in particular ‘the collossally stupid Requiem, which has made so many of us wish ourselves dead’; said that when you listen to music you do with your ears what you do with your ears when you stare. See notice on the National Chamber Choir’s concerts in the Shaw Room of the NGI, in “Irishman’s Diary”, Irish Times [q.d.].)
Plays in Ireland: While Shaw wrote only one play set wholly in Ireland - John Bull’s Other Island - Act 1 of Pt. 4 of Back to Methusaleh (1921) is set in the Burren. (See TLS review, 1992.)
Portraits: full length figure outside National Gallery of Ireland (q. sculpt.); Augustus John, portrait in oil; also oil portrait by John Collier, signed 1927 [NGI]; also black and red chalk portrait by William Rothenstein [Abbey Theatre]. A bronze head by Jacob Epstein held in the Glasgow Art Museum, was presented by John McNaughton in 1961.
Carlow Library (HQ) devotes room to G. B. Shaw, where the writer passed one day in connection with the will of Dr. Walter John Gurly which devolved on him; Shaw gifted the Old Assemby Rooms on Dublin St., to the Technical Instruction Comm., 1919, which opened a two-room technical school there in 1923, later becoming the County Library. (See The Irish Times, 25 Oct. 2000).
Gay Shaw? John Sutherland, reviewing Sally Peters, Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman [Yale UP 1995], indicates that she has no evidence for her assertion that he was gay, his supposed homosexuality explaining his curtailed sexual appetite. (‘The Wilder loves of Shaw’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 1996, p.26.) Stanley Weintraub adds that Shaw, when being sculpted by Kathleen (Lady) Scott, the widow of the explorer, who wore mannish garb as she worked, remarked: ‘No woman born ever had a narrower escape from being a man. My affection for you is the nearest I ever came to homosexuality.’ ( Times Literary Supplement, 31 May 1995, p.17.)
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