The Style and Imagination of George Bernard Shaw
by Janice Paran
"It was clear from the start that Bernard Shaw was a man of ideas. Later it turned out that he was a fabulous entertainer. But few have granted that the two Shaws were one." - Eric Bentley
In the course of his 94 years, the Irish-born critic, dramatist and polemicist George Bernard Shaw took up a variety of causes and careers, achieving notoriety in most of them, excellence in some, and genius - albeit gradually and never less than controversially - in the one he modestly referred to as his "trade." Shaw the playwright, simultaneously smitten with the stage and incensed by the "tomfoolery" that passed for dramatic writing in his age, undertook its reform, creating an astonishingly diverse body of work (more than 30 major plays) whose intellectual rigor, comic sophistication, moral complexity, toothsome language and sheer theatrical savvy gave rise to a new word, Shavian, to describe the writer, his work, or anyone who ardently admires the same.
Shaw brought to his plays the same feistiness, drollery, and love of contrariness that marked his critical writing (he was an art, music and theater critic before he was a playwright), his public speaking career (he was famous the world over for his oratorical skills), and even his letter writing (by some estimates, he wrote ten letters every day of his adult life). He was a socialist, a teetotaler, a vegetarian, and a freethinker who approached all forms of received wisdom with the utmost skepticism. He cultivated his reputation as a high-profile punster and pundit, referring in the third-person to "G.B.S.," the celebrated reformer and gadfly who could be counted on to rail wittily against a variety of social, economic, political and cultural ills.
Among those ills, in his view, was the state of the English stage at the end of the 19th century. Shaw deplored two of its tendencies: its appetite for "well-made plays," the formulaic trifles popularized by the French playwright Eugene Sardou and his English imitators, and its over-reverence for anything written by Shakespeare (a practice Shaw dubbed "Bardolatry"). Inspired by revolutionary theatrical developments elsewhere in Europe - particularly Ibsen's daring decision to represent social ills in a newly realistic fashion in plays such as A Doll House and Ghosts, and the integrated stagecraft that galvanized audiences at Wagner's operas - Shaw embarked on his own playwriting career in 1892.
A dozen years and as many plays later, Shaw was still forced to describe himself as "an unperformed playwright in London," despite a resumé that included 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 and Man and Superman. His penchant for social analysis, coupled with a healthy irreverence for conventional dramatic values and bourgeois morality, kept theater producers at bay, and Shaw turned to readings, private productions and publication of his plays to cultivate an audience for his work. The tide finally began to turn in 1904, when the actor, director and playwright Harley Granville Barker, along with his business partner J.E. Verdrenne, took over London's Court Theatre in a deliberate challenge to the commercial West End. Under their management, eleven of Shaw's plays - including Candida (with Granville Barker in the role of Marchbanks) and such new efforts as Major Barbara and The Doctor's Dilemma- were produced over the next three years. Shaw's reputation as a major new dramatist was finally secured, and given added luster by the 1914 commercial success of Pygmalion (which later inspired the musical My Fair Lady). Shaw maintained his international celebrity for the rest of his long life - though his popularity in England plummeted for a time following his criticism of England's entry into World War I - and he contributed at least two more masterpieces (Heartbreak House and Saint Joan) to an already daunting oeuvre. He continued to write, provocatively and prodigiously, until his death in 1950.
Shaw's stature today as a "classic playwright" tends to obscure the essentially revolutionary nature of his writing, which is as seditious as it is entertaining. A dab hand at drawing room dialogue that is ebullient, surprising, literate, and lethal, Shaw enjoyed having his cake and eating it too: seducing audiences with his cleverness and craft while assailing their habits of mind. He was often charged with didacticism, with wearing his various reformist agendas on his sleeve, but he was less interested in promulgating a particular point of view than he was in putting a variety of viewpoints through their paces, rigorously and argumentatively and with a good deal of humor. Antitheses, naturally, abound: in Major Barbara, a munitions manufacturer outpaces his do-gooder daughter when it comes to helping the poor; in Pygmalion, a flower-seller demonstrates better manners than her university-educated mentor; in Candida, an immature poet proves more than a match for a charismatic clergyman in matters of the heart.
Shaw's purpose, always, as the critic Eric Bentley has pointed out, was to investigate the relation between ideas and reality, or, more accurately, between idealism and realism. Exposing hypocrisy was not his goal; rather, he hoped to demonstrate how human beings are hoodwinked by their own unconsidered actions and the beliefs they profess to hold. An enemy of second-hand thinking in all its guises, Shaw deployed his chastening fierce wit in retaliation, as his speeches and pamphlets and prefaces attest. But it is on the stage that Shaw's passionate intelligence lives most fully, and the pleasure of his plays, still, is the pleasure of watching his characters discover who they really are, not through the agency of the plot, but through the exercise of their minds and the movement of their souls.
