GEORGE BERNARD SHAW - A NOBEL LAUREATE

 

George Bernard Shaw, the greatest of the many Irishmen who have written fine plays in the English language, was born in Dublin on 26 July 1856.

In his early years as a socialist Bernard Shaw believed that if the condition of civilised societies was to be improved, it must be done by legislation aiming at equality, reducing in various ways the fortunes of the rich in order to help and uplift the poor. Later he came round to the opinion that the first thing required in the making of  Good society is not so much good laws as good men and women- men and women, “that is, who are righteous in spirit and not merely well intentioned and kind-hearted. Good people will make good laws, but good laws passed by a few do not necessarily make a good society.

He became a vegetarian when he was twenty –five. His reading of the work of the English poet Shelley had some influence in leading him to refrain from eating meat, but the stronger motive was his deep feeling that “animals are our fellow creatures”, not to be slain for human food.

Shaw was always deeply interested in the sound of words as well as in their sense and meaning. As a young man he learned shorthand and always wrote his plays in it for his secretary to type out in longhand. This choice of shorthand as a working language was due both to its time- saving advantage and to its being based on phonetics, which always uses the same symbol for the same spoken sound. Shaw spent a good deal of time trying to persuade English people to adopt an enlarged alphabet. He also wrote one of his most popular plays “Pygmalion”, on the subject of correct pronunciation.

From 1905 when “Man and Superman”, his first great play, was performed, Shaw was the world’s most famous living playwright though he long remained unpopular with those who disliked his advanced views and his wish to reform society. Nevertheless it was at length widely recognised that he stood second only to Shakespeare among all the British playwrights, and his writings were known and valued in all countries long before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.