英美文学选读学习笔记 George Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), a brilliant dramatist, was born in Dublin, Ireland, of English parentage. With an unhappy childhood, Shaw did not do well at school but he showed much interest in literature. He left school at the age of 14 and started to work in a land-agent's office. His job was to collect rents in the local districts. Through his work he had much contact with the poor people in Dublin and came to know their miserable life. This experience surely enriched his understanding of the society and the sufferings of the people.

In 1876 Shaw gave up his job and went to London, where he devoted much of his time to self-education by widely reading' in the libraries. Between 1879 and 1883, he wrote 5 novels, but none of them brought him profit or fame.

Later Shaw came under the influence of Henry George and William Morris and took an interest in socialist theories. He started to attend all kinds of public meetings and to read Karl Marx in the British Museum. In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society and became one of its most influential members. Together with his fellow Fabians, he regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from inspanidual and class owner, ship as the final goal. But on how to achieve it, he differed greatly from the Marxists. He was against the means of violent revolution or armed struggle in achieving the goal of socialism; he also had a distrust of the uneducated working class in fighting against capitalists. He held that only those superior intellects could have the ability to shoulder this task. And it was his ideal to bring about evolutionary socialism by legal and democratic means, by revealing the evil capitalists and by educating the common people. This reformist view of his caused him a painful, often conscious, inner conflict between his sincere desire for the new world and his inability to break out of the snobbish intellectual isolation throughout his life and work.

Shaw began his literary career by writing novels soon after his settling down in London. With great efforts, he wrote five novels in all. The best known is Cashel Byron's Profession (1886), which is about a world-famous prize fighter marrying a priggishly refined lady of property. But on the whole the novel proved not to be his medium, though his efforts in the form were apnticeship for his later dramatic writing.

In a period of ten years from 1885, Shaw served as a critic of music and drama for a number of magazines and newspapers. Being a drama critic, Shaw directed his attacks on the Neo-Romantic tradition and the fashionable drawing-room drama. His criticism was witty, biting, and often brilliant. Those articles were later published in a collection end Our Theaters in the Nineties (1931). Shaw was strongly against the credo of "art for art's sake" held by those decadent aesthetic artists. In his critical essays, he vehemently condemned the "well made" but cheap, hollow plays which filled the English theater of the late 19th century to meet the low taste of the middle class. Shaw held that art should serve social purposes by reflecting human life, revealing social contradictions and educating the common people.

His career as a dramatist began in 1892, when his first play Widowers' Houses (1892) was put on by the Independent Theater Society. Following this success, his wonderful plays came out one after another. Shaw's play, Candida (1895), was produced in New York in 1903; and since then, Shaw's position as the leading playwright of his time was established.

In his long dramatic career, Shaw wrote more than 50 plays, touching upon a variety of subjects. His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the criticism of the contemporary social, economic, moral and religious evils. As he wrote in his face to the "Plays Pleasant", he could "no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding fictitious glory on robbery, starvation, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, and all the other commonplaces of civilization which drive men to the theater to make foolish tenses that such things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial sumacy, national greatness and all the other names the newspaper calls them." The mission of his drama was to reveal the moral, political and economic truth from a radical reformist point of view. Widowers' House is a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism; Mrs. Warren's Profession, written in 1893 but published 5 years later, is a play about the economic opssion of women. These two can be regarded as the typical resentatives of Shaw's early plays. Shaw wrote quite a few history plays, in which he kept an eye on the contemporary society. The important plays of this group are Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and St. Joan (1923). Shaw also produced several plays, exploring his idea of "Life Force," the power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the social, moral, and metaphysical problems of human society. The typical examples of this group are Man and Superman (1904) and Back to Methuselah (1921). Besides, Shaw wrote plays on miscellaneous subjects: for instance, The Apple Cart (1929) is about politics; John Bull's Other Island (1904) is about racial problems; Pygmalion (1912) is about culture and art; Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910) and Fanny's First Play(1911) are about the problem of family and marriage; and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) is about the ignorance, incompetence, arrogance and bigotry of the medical  profession. In the 1930s, Shaw continued his dramatic career and wrote several plays, but his satire became weaker and less effectual. Too True to Be Good (1932) is a better play of the later period, with the author's almost nihilistic bitterness on the subjects of the cruelty and madness of World War I and the aimlessness and disillusion of the young.

Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, moral, or religious problems, and, thus, can be termed as problem plays. And his plays have one passion, and one only, i.e. indignation, "indignation against opssion and exploitation, against hypocrisy and lying, against prostitution and slavery, against poverty, dirt and disorder."

One feature of Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. Usually he would take an unconventional character, a person with the gift of insight and freedom, and impinge it upon a group of conventional social animals, so as to reveal at every turn stock notions, judices and dishonesties. Another feature is that Shaw's characters are the resentatives of ideas, points of view, that shift and alter during the play, for Mr. Shaw is primarily interested in doctrines.

Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventional theatrical situation. The inversion, a device found in Shaw from beginning to end, is an integral part of an intertation of life. In Widowers' Houses, the hero who has nobly refused to live on his fiancee's tainted dowry only discovers that his own income is equally tainted. One of the most typical inversions is in How He Lied to Her Husband, where the "deceived" husband is not outraged by his wife's extra-curricular friendship with a youthful poet, but is outraged instead by the poet's feigned indifference to the charms of his wife, thus producing a strong effect of irony. Inversion is also used in character portrayal to achieve comic effects. By senting a conventional hero as a villain, or a conventional villain as a hero, Shaw intends to give a shocking imssion to his audience and challenge the conventional way of thinking.

Shaw's plays have plots, but they do not work by plots. The plot is usually the disregarded backbone to one long, unbroken conversation. It is the vitality of the talk that takes primacy over mere story. Action is reduced to a minimum, while the dialogue and the interplay of the minds of the characters maintain the interest of the audience. The forward motion consists not in the unrolling of plot but in the operation of the spirit of discourse.