Shaw finally obtained regular work as a journalist with the help of William Archer. From 1888 to 1890, he wrote as a music critic, under the name of "Corno di Bassetto," for The Star, the evening paper of London. Shaw also served as a drama critic for The Saturday Review for several years. His insightful articles on theater are collected in Our Theatre in the Nineties, published in three volumes in 1932.

William Archer suggested to Shaw that they collaborate in writing a play. Although the effort was begun, it was never completed. However, their frequent discussions on Ibsen resulted in Shaw's, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891); it was the first book published in English on the playwright. The significance of the book lies in the fact that Shaw's attention was turned to drama. He soon began to write plays that explored the serious issues and concerns of the common people, creating dramas of "ideas".

Shaw's first effort at a play was to complete the one begun by Archer and him in 1885; called Widowers' Houses, it was originally performed in London in December of 1892 at the Royalty Theatre. A savage attack on slum landlordism, it was considered too radical for its time and met with no success. In 1893, he wrote Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play about prostitution; it was denied performance by the Examiner of Plays, who considered it immoral. The Philanderer was also written in 1893, but not produced until 1905. Shaw's next play, Arms and the Man, (1894) was a bitter attack on the romanticism of war and met with great popularity. This success was followed by Candida (1897), The Devil's Disciple (1897), The Man of Destiny (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), You Never Can Tell (1899), and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900). John Bulls' Other Island (1904), which tackled the Irish-English conflict, was very popular. How He Lied to Her Husband (1904) was an anti-romantic treatment of the familiar triangular situation of husband, wife, and lover.

Shaw's golden period as a dramatist was from 1905-1925, the time in which he wrote his best and most popular plays. Shaw's first great play was Man and Superman (1905), a comedy about two battling lovers. Shaw's next play, Major Barbara (1905) dealt with the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) contained an expose against the medical profession. Getting Married (1908) was a single conversation about marriage. The Shewing - up of Blanco Posnet (1909), a one-act religious tract in dramatic form, was censored for blasphemy. Misalliance (1910) contained a long debate about the relationship between parents and children. Fanny's First Play (1911) was a "pot - boiler". Androcles and the Lion (1911-1912) depicted Shaw's belief that a religious foundation is essential for human existence. The famous Pygmalion followed in 1913.

Shaw contributed four of his most serious and intellectual plays to the new theatre movement of the 1920s: Heartbreak House (1920) condemned the leisure of Europeans before the war; Back to Methuselah (1922) was an anti-Darwinian drama on Creative Evolution; Saint Joan (1923) chronicled the life and death of the famous French maid; and The Apple Cart (1929) criticized both democracy and royalty. Shaw's last plays include, Too True to be Good (1932), The Millionairess (1936), and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939).

Shaw died in 1950, at the age of ninety-five. At the time, he was one of the best known and most respected dramatists in the world. He was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, which he first refused and later accepted.

Table of Contents | Printable Version