Drama
68 Major Barbara by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Biography
G. Bernard Shaw (he hated the “George” and never used it, either personally or professionally) was born in 1856 in Dublin, Ireland, in a lower-middle-class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry. His father was a failed corn merchant, with a drinking problem and a squint (which Oscar Wilde’s father, a leading Dublin surgeon, tried unsuccessfully to correct); his mother was a professional singer, the sole disciple of Vandeleur Lee, a voice teacher claiming to have a unique and original approach to singing.
When Shaw was just short of his 16th birthday, his mother left her husband and son and moved with Vandeleur Lee to London, where the two set up a household, along with Shaw’s older sister, Lucy (who later became a successful music hall singer). Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completing his schooling (which he hated passionately), and working as a clerk for an estate office (which he hated just as much as school).
It may not be accidental, then, that Shaw’s plays, including Misalliance, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents; with foundlings, orphans, and adopted heirs; and with parents who wrongly presume that they are entitled to their children’s obedience and affection.
In 1876, Shaw left Dublin and his father and moved to London, moving in with his mother’s menage. There he lived off his mother and sister while pursuing a career in journalism and writing. The first medium he tried as a creative writer was prose, completing five novels (the first one appropriately titled Immaturity) before any of them were published. He read voraciously, in public libraries and in the British Museum reading room. He also became involved in progressive politics. Standing on a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and at socialist rallies, he learned to overcome his stagefright and his stammer. And, to hold the attention of the crowd, he developed an energetic and aggressive speaking style that is evident in all of his writing.
With Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw founded the Fabian Society, a socialist political organization dedicated to transforming Britain into a socialist state, not by revolution but by systematic progressive legislation, bolstered by persuasion and mass education. The Fabian Society would later be instrumental in founding the London School of Economics and the Labour Party. Shaw lectured for the Fabian Society and wrote pamphlets on the progressive arts, including The Perfect Wagnerite, an interpretation of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, and The Quintessence of Ibsenism, based on a series of lectures about the progressive Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Shaw worked as an art critic, then as a music critic (writing under the pseudonym “Corno di Bassetto”), and finally, from 1895 to 1898, as theatre critic for Saturday Review, where his reviews appeared over th