SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD. — Irish playwright, born in Dublin on 26 July 1856, died at Ayot Saint Lawrence (London) on 2 November 1950. He began his career in London as a music and theatre critic, and was initially influenced by Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen and, among the English, Samuel Butler (the author of Erewhon). At the same time he engaged in intense activity as a critical and social polemicist, having given his adherence to Fabianism (1889), for which he drafted the Manifesto.
He also wrote several novels in his youth, but his vocation was for the theatre, to which he devoted himself without interruption until his death, achieving acclaim and success known to few writers. S. used the theatre as a means and pretext for instilling his social and political principles in a well-disposed public. As has been observed, he preaches from the stage, and the long introductions to his comedies are likewise so many secular sermons. But the secret of his success lies in the brilliant structure of his dialogue and the felicity of his whimsical paradox, which won over audiences throughout the world. Apart from his activity as a socialist, the most mature theory he developed and most fiercely defended throughout his theatre, which is always a theatre of ideas, is that of the life-force, a theory that first appears in Man and Superman (1913). According to S., there is an energy inherent in man that guarantees his evolution, an evolution different from the mechanical one proposed by Darwin, whose opponent S. professes himself to be. Woman is more than man the custodian of this energy, since the function of woman is understood to be directed toward procreation. The theory, partly derived from the Bergsonian principle of Man vital, was upheld by S. throughout his long life, and his hygienic principles, his vegetarianism, and so forth should be related to II. S. and Wells were called the champions of «modernism» and opposed to the champions of «medievalism»: Chesterton and Belloc. It was Chesterton himself, who advocated ideas opposed to those of S., who wrote the most interesting of the Irishman’s biographies. S.’s audacity, combativeness and flair do not prevent him from appearing today in our eyes as deeply bound to a positivistic age that is no longer ours.