|
FOCUS ON: Shaw, George Bernard
Irish dramatist, who wrote more plays than Shakesperare, literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th century theater. Shaw was a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights, advocate of equality of income. He supported abolition of private property, radical change in the voting system, campaigned for the simplification of spelling and the reform of the English alphabet. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw accepted the honour but refused the money.
A visionary and mystic, inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions. Leavening even his most serious works for the stage with a comic texture, he turned what might have been treatises in other hands into plays animated by epigrams and lively dialogue.
Shaw was born in Dublin as the son of George Carr Shaw, who was in the wholesale grain trade, and Lucinda Elisabeth (Gurly) Shaw, the daughter of an impoverished landowner, who was 16-years younger than her husband. "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire," he once said. Shaw had a troubled childhood. His father was a drunkard, which made his son a teetotaller. When he died in 1885, his children and wife did not attend his funeral. Young Shaw and his two sisters grew up in something close to genteel poverty in an unfashionable part of Dublin. They were brought up mostly by servants. Shaw's mother eventually left the family home to teach music in London.
|
Shaw, George Bernard
|
