SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD. - Irish playwright, b. in Dublin on 26 July 1856, d. at Ayot Saint Lawrence (London) on 2 Nov. 1950. He began his career in London as a musical and theatrical critic, and was initially influenced by Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and among the English, Samuel Butler (author of Erewhon). He simultaneously engaged in intense activity as a polemical critic and social commentator, having adhered to Fabianism (1889), for which he drafted the Manifesto.
He wrote a few novels in his youth, but his vocation lay in the theatre, to which he devoted himself unceasingly until his death, achieving a degree of success and acclaim few writers have known. He used the theatre as a means and pretext to instill his social and political principles in a receptive public. As has been observed, he preaches from the stage, and the lengthy introductions to his plays are also lay sermons. Yet the secret of his success lay in the brilliance of his dialogue and the felicity of his paradoxes, which captivated audiences worldwide. Apart from his socialist activity, the most mature theory he developed and most vehemently defended throughout his theatre—which is always thesis-driven—was that of the life-force, first appearing in *Man and Superman* (1913). According to Shaw, there is an energy inherent in man that guarantees his evolution, an evolution distinct from the mechanical one posited by Darwin, of which Shaw professed himself an opponent. This energy is held more by women than by men, insofar as woman’s function is understood in terms of procreation. The theory, partly derived from Bergson’s principle of *élan vital*, was championed by Shaw throughout his long life, and his hygienic principles, vegetarianism, etc., are to be understood in relation to II. Shaw and H.G. Wells were hailed as champions of “modernism” and set against the champions of “medievalism”: Chesterton and Belloc. It was Chesterton himself, who advocated ideas opposed to Shaw’s, who wrote the most interesting biography of the Irishman. Shaw’s boldness, combativeness, and wit do not prevent him from appearing today as very much a man of a positivistic era that is no longer our own.
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Shanghai, diocese of
The Seminary for Indigenous Clergy.
It was erected as an apostolic vicariate on 13 Dec. 1933, with territory taken from the apostolic vicariate of Nanjing (v.) and divided into two parts, one to the south and the other AMIENS (v.) mission; on 9 June 1949 the northern part