Pygmalion: Popular Penguins

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856. Though essentially shy, he cultivated the persona of G. B. S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon, and dramatist. His multifaceted qualities were so distinctive that a new adjective entered the English language: “Shavian.”

Upon his arrival in London in 1876, Shaw became an active Socialist and a formidable platform speaker. He addressed many pressing social issues of his time, authoring works such as Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928).

Shaw educated himself at the British Museum, developing a profound interest in cultural subjects. His extensive writings encompassed music, art, and theatre criticism, later collected in volumes like Music in London 1890-1894 (3 vols, 1931), Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931), and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols, 1931). He also penned five novels and various shorter works of fiction, including The Black Girl in Search of God, Some Lesser Tales, and Cashel Byron’s Profession.

A vocal critic of the London theatre scene, Shaw was instrumental in the intellectual revitalization of British drama. His plays are often categorized as ‘Plays Pleasant,’ ‘Plays Unpleasant,’ comedies, chronicle-plays, his ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ (Back to Methuselah), and ‘political extravaganzas.’

George Bernard Shaw died in 1950. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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