Early years Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in
Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (
née Gurly). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances and Elinor Agnes. The Shaw family was of
English descent and belonged to the dominant
Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland; George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a
sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly; in the view of Shaw's biographer
Michael Holroyd she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty". By the time of Shaw's birth his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among
Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this. The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine
mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. In 1862 Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on
Dalkey Hill, overlooking
Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature. Between 1865 and 1871 Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of
land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw". In June 1873 Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her. Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.
London Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of
tuberculosis. He resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years. Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in
South Kensington, but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had not yet thought of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him,
ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly,
The Hornet. Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London. Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer. Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the
British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the
British Library) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a
blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel,
Immaturity (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80 and, as in Dublin, achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the
Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author. For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a
vegetarian. In the same year he suffered an attack of
smallpox; eventually he grew a beard to hide the resultant facial scar. In rapid succession he wrote two more novels:
The Irrational Knot (1880) and
Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither found a publisher; each was
serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine
Our Corner. In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met
Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know ... We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it". , colleague and benefactor of Shaw Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French,
Un Petit Drame, written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime. In the same year the critic
William Archer suggested a collaboration, with a plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw. The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of ''
Widowers' Houses'' in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career.
Political awakening: Marxism, socialism, Fabian Society On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the
Memorial Hall in
Farringdon, addressed by the political economist
Henry George. Shaw then read George's book
Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of
Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading
Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder,
H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join it—he preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals. After reading a tract,
Why Are The Many Poor?, issued by the recently formed
Fabian Society, Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also
Annie Besant, a fine orator. From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the
British Economic Association; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education". This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of
gradualism. When in 1886–87 the Fabians debated whether to embrace
anarchism, as advocated by
Charlotte Wilson, Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in
Trafalgar Square addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on 13 November 1887 (
"Bloody Sunday"), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties. Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of
Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13,
What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".
Novelist and critic The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic. He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons. The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: ''Cashel Byron's Profession
written in 1882–83, and An Unsocial Socialist
, begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in To-Day
magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron'' appeared in magazine and book form in 1886. (left) and
John Ruskin: important influences on Shaw's aesthetic views In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of
The World in 1886, he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were
William Morris and
John Ruskin, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of
art for art's sake, and insisted that all great art must be
didactic. Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known. After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of
The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto. In May 1890 he moved back to
The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability." Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950. From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for
The Saturday Review, edited by his friend
Frank Harris. As at
The World, he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the
Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".
Playwright and politician: 1890s After using the plot of the aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer to complete ''Widowers' Houses
(it was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession'' (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage. '' Shaw's first play to bring him financial success was
Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-
Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of mediocrity, sneering at heroism and patriotism, heartless cleverness, and copying
W.S.Gilbert's style. The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matinée performances to meet the demand. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. It earned him £341 in royalties in its first year, a sufficient sum to enable him to give up his salaried post as a music critic. Among the cast of the London production was
Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson. The success of
Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated.
Candida, which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in
South Shields in 1895; in 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called
The Man of Destiny had a single staging at
Croydon. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the
West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when
Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama ''
The Devil's Disciple'' earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties. In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the
Independent Labour Party. He was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics. He persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing
indirect taxation, and taxing
unearned income "to extinction". Back in London, Shaw produced what
Margaret Cole, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority
Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892.
To Your Tents, O Israel! excoriated the government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on
Irish Home Rule, a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism. In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt Hutchinson—Holroyd mentions £10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in the summer of 1895. By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. In 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" (
parish councillor) in London's
St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously; when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the
Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly formed borough council. In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by
Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the
register office in
Covent Garden. The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In the view of the biographer and critic
St John Ervine, "their life together was entirely felicitous". There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. In the early weeks of the marriage Shaw was much occupied writing his Marxist analysis of
Wagner's
Ring cycle, published as
The Perfect Wagnerite late in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in
Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "
Shaw's Corner", and lived there for the rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the
Adelphi and later at
Whitehall Court.
Stage success: 1900–1914 and
Johnston Forbes-Robertson in
Caesar and Cleopatra, New York, 1906 During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904
J. E. Vedrenne and
Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the
Royal Court Theatre in
Sloane Square,
Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, ''
John Bull's Other Island'', a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by
Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's
Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that
William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and
Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after
J. M. Synge's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in the
Irish Literary Revival, including
George Russell and
James Joyce, and was a close friend of
Seán O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading ''John Bull's Other Island''.
Man and Superman, completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in
Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were
Major Barbara (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the
Salvation Army; ''
The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra'', Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year. Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer
Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious
farce". These plays included
Getting Married (premiered 1908),
The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909),
Misalliance (1910), and ''
Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet
was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. Fanny's First Play'', a comedy about
suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances.
Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than
Blanco Posnet, ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays,
Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a play—that it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful. ... Hence arose an urgent demand on the part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first." The British production opened in April 1914, starring
Sir Herbert Tree and
Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a
cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended. The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured with the piece in the US.
Fabian years: 1900–1913 In 1899, when the
Boer War began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like
Home Rule, to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister
Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from the society when it followed Shaw. In the Fabians' war manifesto,
Fabianism and the Empire (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it". As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics. Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the
Labour Representation Committee—precursor of the modern
Labour Party. By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished". Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in the
London County Council elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as "[making] absolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics. Nationally, the
1906 general election produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister,
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body". In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer
H. G. Wells, who had joined the society in February 1903. Wells's ideas for reform—particularly his proposals for closer cooperation with the Independent Labour Party—placed him at odds with the society's "Old Gang", led by Shaw. According to Cole, Wells "had minimal capacity for putting [his ideas] across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity". In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself". Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later wondered whether the Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it". Although less active—he blamed his advancing years—Shaw remained a Fabian. In 1912 Shaw invested £1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called
The New Statesman, which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously. He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor,
Clifford Sharp, who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions—"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw.
First World War After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract
Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "[h]is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present." Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by the British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by
Field Marshal Haig to visit the
Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming
America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against
junkerism". Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war.
The Inca of Perusalem, written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 at the
Birmingham Repertory Theatre. ''
O'Flaherty V.C.'', satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a
Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917.
Augustus Does His Bit, a genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917.
Ireland Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the
British Empire (which he thought should become the British Commonwealth). In April 1916 he wrote scathingly in
The New York Times about militant Irish nationalism: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these fellow-patriots of mine leave the Bourbons nowhere." Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential. The Dublin
Easter Rising later that month took him by surprise. After its suppression by British forces, he expressed horror at the
summary execution of the rebel leaders, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish union. In
How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), he envisaged a federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. Holroyd records that by this time the separatist party
Sinn Féin was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were forgotten. In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland, and joined his fellow-writers
Hilaire Belloc and
G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions. The
Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to the
partition of Ireland between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw. In 1922
civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the
Irish Free State. Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met
Michael Collins, then head of the Free State's
Provisional Government. Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, the Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces. In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death". Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.
1920s , where Shaw wrote most of his works after 1906 Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was
Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on
Broadway in November, and was coolly received; according to
The Times: "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it". After the London premiere in October 1921
The Times concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection". Ervine in
The Observer thought the play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for
Edith Evans as Lady Utterword. Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was
Back to Methuselah, written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'". This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD. Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention. The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays. This mood was short-lived. In 1920
Joan of Arc was proclaimed a
saint by
Pope Benedict XV; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the
canonisation prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote
Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan". The citation for the
literature prize for 1925 praised his work as "... marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs". After
Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled ''
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism''. The book was published in 1928 and sold well. At the end of the decade Shaw produced his final Fabian tract, a commentary on the
League of Nations. He described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World". Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza",
The Apple Cart, written in late 1928. It was, in Ervine's view, unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist, anti-democratic line that appealed to contemporary audiences. The premiere was in Warsaw in June 1928, and the first British production was two months later, at
Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural
Malvern Festival. The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was
Sir Edward Elgar, with whom Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard. He described
The Apple Cart to Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude". During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. In 1922 he had welcomed
Mussolini's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the "indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock", Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant". Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his
ODNB biographical sketch comments that Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade, and
Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.
1930s Shaw's enthusiasm for the
Soviet Union dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed
Lenin as "the one really interesting statesman in Europe". Having turned down several chances to visit, in 1931 he joined a party led by
Nancy Astor. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with
Stalin, whom Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him. At a dinner given in his honour, Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them". In March 1933, he was a co-signatory to a letter in
The Manchester Guardian protesting at the continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too fantastic, no slander is too stale ... for employment by the more reckless elements of the British press." Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement. When the
Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described
Hitler as "a very remarkable man, a very able man", and professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was "scrupulously polite and just to Hitler"; though his principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb. Shaw's first play of the decade was
Too True to Be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in
Boston in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic.
Brooks Atkinson of
The New York Times commenting that Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation". The correspondent of the
New York Herald Tribune said that most of the play was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that although the audience enjoyed the play it was bewildered by it. During the decade Shaw travelled widely and frequently. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea. Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome in
South Africa in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country. In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise. In March 1933 they arrived at
San Francisco, to begin Shaw's first visit to the US. He had earlier refused to go to "that awful country, that uncivilized place", "unfit to govern itself... illiberal, superstitious, crude, violent, anarchic and arbitrary". He visited
Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the
Metropolitan Opera House. Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, Shaw was glad when his ship sailed from
New York harbour. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he urged its people to be more confident and loosen their dependence on trade with Britain. He used the weeks at sea to complete two plays—
The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and
The Six of Calais—and begin work on a third,
The Millionairess. Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of
Pygmalion and
Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown
Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at
Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to keep it from winning one
Academy Award ("Oscar"); he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source. He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study of the Oscars,
Anthony Holden observes that
Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy". Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were
Cymbeline Refinished (1936),
Geneva (1936) and ''
In Good King Charles's Golden Days'' (1939). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a satire on European dictators, attracted more notice, much of it unfavourable. In particular, Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was considered mild, almost sympathetic. The third play, an historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London in May 1940.
James Agate commented that the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences could take exception, and though it was long and lacking in dramatic action only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object. After their first runs none of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime. Towards the end of the decade, both Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by
Paget's disease of bone, and he developed
pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.
Second World War and final years Although Shaw's works since
The Apple Cart had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans,
John Gielgud,
Deborah Kerr and
Robert Donat. In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including
Arms and the Man with
Ralph Richardson,
Laurence Olivier,
Sybil Thorndike and
Margaret Leighton in the leading roles. Two touring companies took his plays all round Britain. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal,
Major Barbara (1941), was less successful both artistically and commercially than
Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited. Following the
outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid
conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism when, in a
New Statesman article, he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference. Nevertheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated peace was impossible, he publicly urged the neutral United States to join the fight. The
London blitz of 1940–41 led the Shaws, both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house,
Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September. Shaw's final political treatise, ''Everybody's Political What's What'', was published in 1944. Holroyd describes this as "a rambling narrative ... that repeats ideas he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself". The book sold well—85,000 copies by the end of the year. After Hitler's suicide, in May 1945 Shaw approved of the formal condolences offered by the Irish
Taoiseach,
Éamon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin. Shaw disapproved of the postwar
trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all potential criminals". Pascal was given a third opportunity to film Shaw's work with
Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times its original budget and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema". The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film "a poor imitation of
Cecil B. de Mille". In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the British government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the
Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history. 1946 saw the publication, as
The Crime of Imprisonment, of the preface Shaw had written 20 years previously to a study of prison conditions. It was widely praised; a reviewer in the
American Journal of Public Health considered it essential reading for any student of the American criminal justice system. Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were
Buoyant Billions (1947), his final full-length work;
Farfetched Fables (1948) a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets,
Shakes versus Shav (1949), a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and
Why She Would Not (1950), which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday. During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of 94 of
renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was
cremated at
Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden. ==Works==