Bernard Shaw - Dramatist

An ardent socialist, the showman, controversialist, satirist, critic, pundit and T he dramatist.

Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities was brought by commentators into english language. (new adjective)

He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938).

February 27, 1913.
To ‘Stella’ Beatrice Campbell

I want my rapscallionly fellow vagabond.
I want my dark lady. I want my angel -
I want my tempter.
I want my Freia with her apples.
I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour,
laughter, music, love, life and immortality ... I want
my inspiration, my folly, my happiness,
my divinity, my madness, my selfishness,
my final sanity and sanctification,
my transfiguration, my purification,
my light across the sea,
my palm across the desert,
my garden of lovely flowers,
my million nameless joys,
my day’s wage,
my night’s dream,
my darling and
my star...

Bernard Shaw

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 the Saturday Review, where his reviews appeared over the infamous initials “GBS.”

In 1898, after a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic.

Over the next ten years, Barker an actor, director and playwright twenty years younger than Shaw produced ten plays by Shaw. Shaw was actually directing his own plays and began writing new plays with Barker’s management specifically in mind.

The outbreak of war in 1914 changed Shaw’s life and changed his public stature. his articles "Common Sense About the War" proved to be a disaster.

After the war, Shaw found his dramatic voice again and rebuilt his reputation, first with a series of five plays about “creative evolution,” Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with Saint Joan.

Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, travelling the world, continually involved in local and international politics.And he continued to write thousands of letters and over a dozen more plays.

In 1950, Shaw fell off a ladder while trimming a tree on his property and died a few days later of complications from the injury, at age 94.