Abstract
Born in 1856, George Bernard Shaw grew up during the apex of the British Empire, the Victorian Age. English industry was at that time the most advanced in Europe; the government’s censorship laws were the most liberal of their kind; and the overtaking of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie was well underway. In this politically liberal and intellectually rich milieu, Shaw created a life for himself based on his strongest assets: his quick wit, his keen insight into both cultural and political affairs, and his ability to express himself in both written and spoken form. Born into an aristocratic family on the verge of poverty, Shaw became quickly aware of the importance of social class and its related hazards: Though his parents could have made money by turning to speculation or trade, they refused to do so on the grounds that such activities were below their dignity as members of the aristocracy. Their decision to value social status over material stability—and the fact that these were two separate features of modern society—always struck Shaw as bizarre and contributed to his awareness of the power of social norms to constrain common sense. Unlike his parents, Shaw saw through the veneer of aristocratic superiority and embraced the modernizing world even as he criticized it. 1
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Notes
For Shaw’s biography, I draw here primarily on Arthur Ganz, George Bernard Shaw (New York: Grove Press, 1983);
Michael Holyrod, Bernard Shaw: Volume 1, The Search for Love (New York: Random House, 1988).
See Eric Hobsbawm’s three-volume history of the nineteenth century: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1962);
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975);
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987).
See also Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962).
See also, Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990);
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983);
Charles Tilly, European Revolutions: 1492–1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993);
Roderick Phillips, Society, State, and Nation in Twentieth-Century Europe (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996).
Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, [ 1966 ] 1993).
See also Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
See J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan and Company, 1920).
See also Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971);
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 2nd Edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994);
George G. Iggers, “The Idea of Progress: A Critical Assessment,” The American Historical Review 71, no. 1 (October 1965): 1–17;
Morris Ginsberg, The Idea of Progress: A Revaluation (London: Methuen, 1953).
See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On the “dark side” of nineteenth-century “progress,” see also Hannah Arendt, “Imperialism,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [ 1951 ] 1973).
Bernard Shaw, Agitations: Letters to the Press, 1875–1950, Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau, eds. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985), xi.
See also Vanessa L. Ryan, “‘Considering the Alternatives…’: Shaw and the Death of the Intellectual,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 27 (2007): 175–189.
See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Charles Grimes, “Bernard Shaw’s Theory of Political Theater: Difficulties from the Vantages of Postmodern and Modern Types of the Self,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 22 (2001): 118.
On Fabianism, and especially Shaw’s, see Gareth Griffith, On Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw (New York: Routledge, 1995).
George Bernard Shaw, An Autobiography: 1898–1950, The Playwright Years, selected from his writings by Stanley Weintraub (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 181.
Quoted in A. M. Gibbs, “G.B.S. and ‘The Law of Change,’” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 27 (2007): 30.
Lisa Wilde, “Shaw’s Epic Theater,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 136. The previous block quote is from p. 136 as well. For a full discussion of the theatrical tropes of the time
see also, Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
For a discussion of the Courtesan play, see Maurice Valency, The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 93–95.
Christa Zorn, “Cosmopolitan Shaw and the Transformation of the Public Sphere,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 28 (2008): 189.
George Bernard Shaw, What I Really Wrote About the War. The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, vol. XXI. (New York: WM. H. Wise and Company, 1931), 26.
See Daniel O’Leary, “Censored and Embedded Shaw: Print Culture and Shavian Analysis of Wartime Media,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 28 (2008): 181–185.
Tracy Davis, George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 104.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound, 2nd Edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 108.
George Bernard Shaw, preface to Heartbreak House, in Selected Plays (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1981), 614.
As quoted in Sonya Freeman Loftis, “Shakespeare, Shotover, Surrogation: ‘Blaming the Bard’ in Heartbreak House,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 29 (2009): 55.
Alfred Turco, quoted in Desmond Harding, “Bearing Witness: Heartbreak House and the Poetics of Trauma.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 6.
Margery M. Morgan, “Back to Methuselah: The Poet and the City,” in G.B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. J. Kaufmann (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1965), 130–142.
Kenneth Tynan, Curtains: Selections from the Drama Criticism and Related Writings (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 151.
Shaw, “Postscript: After Twenty-five Years,” in Collected Plays with their Prefaces 5 (1972): 696.
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© 2013 Margot Morgan
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Morgan, M. (2013). George Bernard Shaw: The Theatre of Bourgeois Radicalism. In: Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370389_2
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