Shaw, George Bernard

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 music and theater critic, and he was initially influenced by Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen and, among the English, Samuel Butler

(the author of Erewhon). At the same time he carried on an intense activity as a critical and social polemicist, having given his adherence to Fabianism (1889), whose Manifesto he drafted.

He also wrote some novels in his youth, but his vocation was for the theater, on which he worked uninterruptedly until his death, obtaining approvals and successes such as few writers have known. S. used the theater as a means and pretext for instilling his own social and political principles in a well-disposed audience. As has been observed, he preaches from the stage, and the long introductions to his comedies are also so many lay sermons. But the secret of his success is due to the brilliant structure of his dialogue and to the felicity of his whimsical paradox, which won over audiences throughout the world. Setting aside his activity as a socialist, the most mature theory he elaborated and most tenaciously defended throughout his theater, which is always a theater of thesis, is that of the life-force, a theory that appears for the first time in Man and Superman (1913). There is, according to S., an energy inherent in man which guarantees his evolution, an evolution different from the mechanical one envisaged by Darwin, of whom S. professes himself an opponent. Woman is the depositary of it more than man, insofar as the function of woman is directed to procreation. The theory, partly derived from the Bergsonian principle of the élan vital, was upheld by S. throughout his long life, and his hygienic principles, his vegetarianism, etc. must be placed in relation to it. S. and Wells were called the champions of "modernism" and contrasted with the champions of "medievalism": Chesterton and Belloc. It was precisely Chesterton, who advocated ideas opposed to those of S., who wrote the most interesting among the biographies of the Irishman. S.'s audacity, combativeness and whimsy do not prevent him from appearing today in our eyes as very tied to a positivist era that is no longer ours.

Augusto Guidi