George Bernard Shaw

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Standard Name: Shaw, George Bernard
Used Form: G. B. Shaw
GBS was a drama critic who called for reform of theatrical practice, and a dramatist who attached to his plays on publication, lengthy prefaces expounding the social and dramatic issues opened by the play itself. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him a polemicist, and says that much of the drama of his time and after was indirectly in his debt for his creation of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Sepia head-and-shoulders photograph of George Bernard Shaw by Bains News Service, 8 November 1909. He is seen full-face, with a neat beard, gazing a little to the right with a faint smile. He wears a wool jacket and waistcoat with thin stripes, and a bowler hat slightly tilted.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Helen Waddell
Two Dublin actors, HW 's brother Sam and Lennox Robinson , praised the play for the opportunities it offered to performers, and Waddell was very excited when George Bernard Shaw read and liked it.
Blackett, Monica. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable, 1973.
90-2
Literary responses Lady Colin Campbell
Widely read and highly praised, LCC was described as among the best art critics of her time, doing for the visual arts what her colleague George Bernard Shaw was doing for music.
Fleming, G. H. Lady Colin Campbell: Victorian ’Sex Goddess’. The Windrush Press, 1989.
243
Literary responses Edith Somerville
He , however, comprehensively condemned it.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
208
Another attempt to sell the manuscript, in 1935, was also a failure.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
255-6
Literary responses Ethel Wilson
Negative reviews seemed to repeat Macmillan 's original worry that the collection was half-cooked. Aunt Topaz was characterized by the Canadian Forum as a terrible bore, whom the reviewer found almost as tiresome to...
Literary responses Henrik Ibsen
In The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), George Bernard Shaw catalogues some of the extreme reactions of English theatre critics to the play: Absolutely loathsome and fetid. . . . Unutterably offensive. . . . Most...
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
Call Me Jacky was, as EB 's biographer Anne Sebba put it, her most disastrous failure yet.
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
240
As EB saw it, audiences and critics considered her anti-black, anti-left, a sorry old bitch sitting in...
Literary responses Sarah Grand
Feminists, social reformers, and literary men, such as Mark Twain , George Meredith , and George Bernard Shaw , greeted this novel with excitement and appreciation.
Mitchell, Sally, and Sarah Grand. “Introduction”. The Beth Book, Thoemmes, 1994, p. v - xxiv.
vi
SG wrote a caustic letter to the Daily...
Literary responses Elizabeth Baker
Critic Sheila Stowell , contrasting Baker's heroine with Bernard Shaw 's more ambivalent characterizations of the New Woman, sees the role of Edith as a clear and positive alternative for women.
Stowell, Sheila. A Stage of Their Own. University of Michigan Press, 1992.
103
Weiss, Rudolf. “Versions of Emancipation: The Dramatic World of Elizabeth Baker”. Sprachkunst, Vol.
20
, No. 2, 1989, pp. 305-16.
311
Literary responses Oscar Wilde
Shaw 's review for The Saturday Review welcomed its modern note.
qtd. in
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Knopf, 1988.
428-9
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
The play was very well received, drawing large and enthusiastic audiences. From the beginning, critics recognized its hypnotic effect and its potential to stir audiences to violence. One reviewer, Stephen Gwynn , questioned whether such...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
Bernard Shaw thought this was one of AG 's best plays, subtler and finer
Shaw, George Bernard. “Note on Lady Gregory’s Plays”. Lady Gregory, Fifty Years After, edited by Dan H. Laurence et al., Colin Smythe, 1987, pp. 274-6.
275
than her early works. He particularly admired her presentation of a group of Irish people to whom absolutely nothing at...
Literary responses Josephine Tey
The play garnered high praise from contemporary theatre critics, and was immensely popular with audiences, some of whom reputedly went to see it thirty or forty times.
Gielgud, Sir John. Early Stages. Rev. ed., Falcon, 1948.
178
It brought its author fame and recognition...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
Bernard Shaw thought that AG 's playwriting skills were particularly suited to the task: that in her double command of the world of fancy, and the world of the vividest, funniest fact, Lady Gregory's genius...
Literary responses Harriett Jay
While the play achieved popular success, its literary merits were attacked. The reviewer for The Stage declared it a sub-par adaptation of George Bernard Shaw 's Pygmalion and Galatea, claiming that the authors have...

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