Ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic of uzbekistan university of languages 2nd faculty of foreign language and literature 2nd year 2010 group o’rozaliyeva marjona

George Bernard Shaw – his life and work.
The Irish legend, George Bernard Shaw was a dramatist and a literary critic in addition to being a socialist spokesman. His valuable contributions to literature won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. While Shaw accepted the honor, he refused the money. George Bernard Shaw was a free spirit and a freethinker who advocated women’s rights and equality on income. George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856. His father, George Carr Shaw was in the wholesale grain trading business and his mother, Lucinda Elisabeth Shaw was the daughter of an impoverished landowner. A young George led a distressed childhood. His alcoholic father remained drunk most of the time. It was due to this that Shaw abstained from alcohol throughout his lifetime. During the course of schooling Shaw attended Wesleyan Connexional School, Dublin’s Central Model School and Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School where he ended his education. He first began working as a junior clerk at the age of 15. In 1876, Shaw went to live with his mother and sister in London. He did not return to Ireland for almost 30 years. Shaw turned to literature and began his career by writing theatre, criticism, music and novels one of which was the semi-autobiographical, Immaturity. However, his early efforts gained neither recognition nor success. From 1885 to 1911, Shaw served on the executive committee of the Fabian Society, a middle class socialist group. 1895 onwards, Shaw’s work began appearing in significant publications. He wrote drama criticism for the Saturday Review. These pieces were later compiled in the collection Our Theatres In The Nineties published in 1932. In addition to being a drama critic, George Bernard Shaw also wrote criticism on music, drama and art in various publications such as Dramatic Review (1885-1886), Our Corner (1885-1886), The Pall Mall Gazette (1885-1888), The World (1886-1894), and The Star (1888-1890). His criticism on music has been compiled in a number of collections such as Shaw’s Music appearing in 1981, The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) and Caesar And Cleopatra published in 1901. George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1898. Charlotte was a wealthy woman from an upper class background. The couple settled in Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence in 1906. Although Shaw was occasionally linked with other women, he remained with Charlotte until her death. One of Shaw’s known linkage to other women include a series of passionate correspondences with the widowed actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Most of Shaw’s early plays described the problems of capitalism and explored existing moral and social problems. One of these plays is the Widower’s Houses (1892). Unfortunately, these early efforts were not very well received. Some later following works such as Candida and John Bull’s Other Island (1904) and Major Barbara proved to be in better interest of Shaw. His much famous work, Pygmalion was originally written for Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Pygmalion was later adapted into two films and a musical. In 1914, Shaw’s popularity declined significantly when he wrote the essay Common Sense about The War which was considered unpatriotic. However, he was accepted once again with the publication of Saint Joan in 1924. An author to more than 50 plays, George Bernard Shaw died on November 2, 1950 in Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire. George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26 1856 in Dublin Ireland the son of a civil servant. Although he was best known for drama, he was also proficient in the areas of journalism, music and literary criticism. He began his literary career as a novelist. Shaw’s works concerned themselves mostly with prevailing social problems, specifically with what he saw as the exploitation of the working middle class. Shaw attended various schools throughout his youth but always harboured an animosity towards schools and teachers. He is quoted as saying that “Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents”. In his personal life, Shaw was an avid Socialist and a member of the Fabian society. In 1898 he married fellow Fabian member and Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townsend. He was the first person to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature as well as an Oscar (for his work on Pygmalion, which was an adaptation of his play of the same name). He wrote 60 plays, most of which deal with social themes such as marriage, religion, class government and health care. Two of his greatest influences were Henrik Ibsen and Henry Fielding. Ibsen’s plays and Fielding’s expulsion from playwriting inspired him to write his own plays on the social injustices of the world around him, including the late nineteenth century censorship of plays, continued from Prime Minister Walpole’s rein in the mid 1740s. The Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays especially irked him:
“A gentleman who robs, insults, and suppresses me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects… But I must submit [my play] in order to obtain from him an insolent and insufferable document, which I cannot read without boiling of the blood, certifying that in his opinion — his opinion!– my play ‘does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage,’ and that the Lord Chamberlain therefore ‘allows’ its performance (confound his impudence!).” (Mainly xv) George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, literary critic and a fervent socialist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. Born into a lower-middle class family in Dublin to an alcoholic father, George Bernard Shaw had a an irregular education and started working at the age of 15. After serving as a junior clerk for a while, Shaw moved to London to live with his mother and began writing plays and novels.to pursue a career in literature. Later, he established himself as an art and theatre critic, and also became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, a highly dominant British socialist organization. Most of his early plays focused on existing social problems and were not well-received by the audience but from 1895 onwards, Shaw’s work started gaining public recognition due to its comic relief. Some of his plays during this period such as ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’, ‘Major Barbara’, ‘The Doctor's Dilemma’, ‘Saint Joan’ and ‘Pygmalion’ received much appreciation and proved to be some of his greatest successes on the stage. Being an outright socialist, Shaw openly expressed his disapproval regarding the First World War, facing criticism for his opinions but after the war, he returned as a dramatist and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature for his outstanding contribution. He lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, continually involved in dramatics until his death. Shaw still remains one of the most significant playwrights in the English language who helped shape the theatre of his time. Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), playwright and polemicist, was born on 26 July 1856 at 3 Upper Synge Street (later 33 Synge Street), Dublin. He was the third and youngest child, and only son, of George Carr Shaw (1815–1885), a pensioned law-court clerk and failing corn merchant, and Lucinda Elizabeth, née Gurly (1830–1913), daughter of Walter Bagnall Gurly, an impoverished country gentleman of co. Carlow. On his father's side Sonny, as Shaw was known as a child, came from the fading protestant ascendancy, landed gentry who had crossed the Irish Sea, after Cromwell, from Scotland and England. His grandfather, an earlier Bernard Shaw, had eleven children who survived into maturity, most of them what his grandson called ‘downstarts’. The 'Shaw family of dipsomaniacs', as Shaw described them in a note in his diary in 1882, were on the male side 'unconvivial dramdrinkers'. His father was a furtive drinker when he married the much younger Bessie Gurly on 17 June 1852. Eager to escape her dour, hunchbacked aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, who had brought her up, Bessie chanced life with an unpleasant, quirky Dubliner who had squandered his income; by marriage Bessie lost her own assets to her widowed father, who had remarried a month earlier to legalize a natural infant daughter. On Bessie's honeymoon with George Shaw in Liverpool she discovered that he was an advanced alcoholic. She had nowhere to go, remaining in what her son described as the 'hell' of 'shabby-genteel poverty with a drunken husband' (Autobiography, 22). With his sisters Lucinda Frances (b. 1853) and (Elinor) Agnes (b. 1855), George Bernard (he dropped the George when he left home) endured a middle-class impecuniosity which seemed even more humiliating than to have been born poor and to have pretensions to nothing more. After being tutored by an 'ill-tempered, but quite sober' clerical uncle (Diaries, 1.29), he attended, briefly, Dublin day schools. His first was the Wesleyan connexional, nearby at 79 St Stephen's Green, which he entered at nine in the summer term of 1865, and where he was taught—badly, he later thought—Homer, Caesar, Virgil, and scripture. After three months he was removed, returning in August 1867 for another three months; in February 1868 he was readmitted. In one of the interstices he attended, briefly, a lower-class school at 23–4 Sandycove Road, near Dalkey. Bessie Shaw, who had an attractive mezzo-soprano voice and some talent at the piano, had begun offering lessons in her home to eke out her husband's diminishing income, and she was already a member of George John Lee's Amateur Musical Society. A mesmeric figure in Dublin musical circles, Lee proposed, after the death of his invalid younger brother in 1862, a joint household in which he and Mrs Shaw could share larger rooms for lessons and rehearsals. When George Carr Shaw, a cipher in the arrangement, ignored by his increasingly cold and independent wife, offered no objections, the move to the more upscale 1 Hatch Street house created a ménage à trois that gave Sonny, in effect, an additional and more admirable father figure.
Whether Lee was also Shaw's biological father—he had been close to Bessie long enough for that possibility—obsessed Shaw all his life. Mrs Shaw had turned to music, and to Lee, for consolation. Lee's former residence in Harrington Street, a short stroll from Synge Street, had been a magnet for women eager to acquire the ‘method’ ministered by the Svengali-like voice coach who turned modest voices like Bessie's into concert-quality, conducted female choruses, and basked in the attentions of the fair sex. Yet Shaw noted in later years that Lee, who was his mother's age, seemed at the time to have had no dalliances with women, and he characterized his mother as a fiercely chaste dragon. Shaw also defensively maintained that he resembled the bearded George Carr Shaw, pointing to Lee's socially impossible Roman Catholicism, his lame leg, and his puny stature. It may be an index to his anxieties, however, that he peopled his plays from the start with orphans, natural children, children with multiple parents, children who did not know the identities of their parents, and other genetic mysteries not far removed from the plot staples of Victorian fiction and melodrama. None the less he was legally George Shaw's son, and Lee's ‘method’ appears to have been limited to the larynx.
Lee not only made music with Mrs Shaw at Hatch Street but for the months of milder weather leased Torca Cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay from the steeply sloped front garden. At seventy-five Shaw recalled his days there as a ten-year-old as the happiest of his life, where, under the 'canopied skies', he could be 'a prince in a world of my own imagination' (Holroyd, 1.28). Resorting to his inner self was essential, as his father, having no occupation beyond the unrewarding mill but his bibulousness, had even less interest in Sonny than did Bessie. Inexperienced with children, Lee offered him, on occasion, some of the rudiments of music, especially opera. The boy was enchanted. Later Shaw claimed the boon of three fathers, as dramatized in Misalliance (1909) in the experience of Joey Percival, who has 'the regulation natural chap', 'a tame philosopher', and 'an Italian priest' (Plays, 4.166):
In Sonny's own case the philosophical father figure was his ‘Rabelaisian’ uncle, Walter Gurly, a ship's doctor who visited between voyages. Uncle Walter destroyed, Shaw recalled, 'all my inculcated childish reverence for the verbiage of religion, for its legends and personifications and parables' (Autobiography, 1.37). The non-believing priest suggests Lee, who ministered to his special flock with his ‘method’, its holy book, and professed a nominal Catholicism. In February 1869 Shaw was withdrawn from the Wesleyan connexional school for failure to learn, and transferred to the Central Model School in Marlborough Street, a less genteel, non-denominational institution that included Roman Catholic boys. Shaw, who attended this school for seven months, at ninety recalled his 'shame and wounded snobbery' (Shaw, Self Sketches, 39). At thirteen he was enrolled in the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School, a protestant academy in Aungier and Whitefriars streets that substituted business training for Latin and Greek. He remained for two years, accepting his incarceration as a final prison term. Shaw claimed to have learned little there, waiting out each day until he and a friend, Matthew Edward McNulty, could go off to afternoon classes at the Royal Dublin Society's Schools of Art, or visit the National Gallery. Shaw's employment began on 26 October 1871, when he was fifteen, as a junior clerk in a Dublin estate agency run by two brothers, Charles Uniacke and Thomas Courtney Townshend, at a salary of £18 a year. From nine to six, as Shaw relived the experience through the character of Julius Baker in Misalliance, he sat in 'a stuffy little den counting another man's money. … I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and give change, and fill cheques and stamp receipts'. He also copied business letters and filed them, and ran petty errands which at the least released him into the outside world. It was, he thought, a 'damnable waste of human life' (Plays, 4.214–15). While he performed his drudgery so conscientiously over fifteen months that his wages rose to £24, his family situation had altered. His musical ‘father’, who had intimated grander aspirations by renaming himself G. J. Vandeleur Lee, had begun producing Italian opera, exploiting the talents of his flock. In January 1872 he also founded a New Philharmonic Society as a rival to the existing Dublin orchestra. At Hatch Street Bessie Shaw was his adjutant. By early 1873 Lee was conductor of the annual Dublin Musical Festival, but his ambitions now could not be contained by Ireland. At the beginning of June, cancelling his next advertised concert, Lee embarked for London.
On 17 June 1873, in a move planned well in advance, Mrs Shaw, with Agnes (Lucy followed later) also left for London. Whether or not she intended the symbolism, it was her twenty-first wedding anniversary. George Carr Shaw remained behind with their son. Abandoned with the furniture was the piano. With the music stopped, young Shaw purchased a manual, began teaching himself the keyboard, and laboriously learned the fingering for his mother's vocal score of Don Giovanni.
In February 1873, just before the Hatch Street ménage broke up, the head cashier at Townshends abruptly departed. Shaw substituted so efficiently that he was given the job at double his wages. At £48 a year he could even afford the necessary uniform of a tailcoat. Tabulating rental payments, especially those of the poor, and going out each Tuesday to collect some of them, was an early confrontation with economic injustice and inequality of opportunity. Books as well as music—after working hours—compensated for office tedium. There were few books at home because no adult at Hatch Street valued reading; however, most protestant families displayed Bunyan and the Bible, and such periodicals as Household Words. Shaw discovered Blake, Byron, and Shelley—all rebels to be read somewhat furtively. Although Dublin productions were largely adaptations of French melodrama and watered-down Shakespeare, theatre was an affordable joy.