George Bernard Shaw was a frustrated critic of Victorian theater, before he tried writing his own plays. Plus, a poem by Sara Teasdale.
The date is July 26th, Friday, and today I’m coming to you from Portland, Oregon.
Today is the birthday of George Bernard Shaw, Irish-born English writer. He was a noted critic of music, plays, and art during his lifetime, but its his own plays that live on today.
Born the youngest of three in 1856 in Dublin, his parents were already drifting apart. His father had married his mother hoping to see some of her family’s wealth; and his mother married his father to escape her overbearing family. It seems neither got what they wanted.
When George was 6, his mother and her new beau, a man named George Lee, decided to move in together. Mrs. Shaw, Mr. Lee, and the three Shaw children shared two homes: one in an upper-class neighborhood in Dublin, and a cottage outside of town with a view of Killiney Bay.
George preferred the cottage. Lee was a popular vocal teacher and conductor and it seemed, particularly in the city, there were always singers and players and music in the home. When his mother and/or sisters put George off in favor of practice or rehearsals, George took comfort in the music.
A perk to living with such a popular maestro was an abundance of gifts from pupils. Mr. Lee, not particularly interested in reading, gave any books he received to George. George was delighted by this and read each book, getting to know a variety of genres.
The reading proved a useful habit since George abhorred school. He said “Schools and schoolmasters are prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents.” To a child accustomed to much independence, formal schooling with lots of rules and regulations must certainly have seemed jail-like.
In 1873, when George was 17, his mother and sisters followed Mr. Lee to London. A few years later, when George was 20, he also followed, leaving behind a steady but boring job.
Shaw who said, “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing” did for a time, do nothing. When he first moved to London, he did not seek work, living with his mother rent free, perhaps spending most of his days reading and walking about.
Work was finally hand-delivered to him. Mr. Lee had George ghost-write a music column for him.
Shaw dabbled with writing his own novels and plays, but they weren’t very good. It wasn’t until the mid-1880s that two of his novels were published in serial form.
In fact finally, in 1884 and 1885, Shaw found steady work as a critic of music and the theater. It seemed that being a critic ultimately drove Shaw to write seriously. He became frustrated with the Victorian theater’s “artificiality” and sought to create art that included a lesson or some teaching. He believed “all great art must be didactic.”
The turn of the century became a fertile period for Shaw and his output solidified him in the theater world. In 1926 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.”
By the time of Shaw’s passing at age 95, he had produced 62 plays of various length, including titles such as Pygmalion, Candida, and Saint Joan.
There Will Come Soft Rains
Sara Teasdale
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.