George Bernard Shaw is commonly considered the greatest playwright of the English language since William Shakespeare. Shaw’s works have been admired not only for their artistry and literary merit, but also for their exceptionally perspicacious social and political commentary. Shaw’s lifetime spanned a seminal period in world history: from his birth in 1856 to his death in 1950, he witnessed the rise of European nationalism and imperialism, two world wars, the inception of socialism as a practical governing philosophy, and the rising and ebbing of societal undercurrents reflective of the shifting zeitgeist. Shaw was deeply ingrained in the intellectual fabric of his era, and wrote into his plays his deepest convictions. His literary works, including but not limited to Pygmalion, Saint Joan, Man and Superman, and Arms and the Man, serve beyond their superficial entertainment purpose as powerful vehicles for Shaw’s criticism of class structure and other social artifacts, his feminism, and his complex views regarding religion.
Shaw’s plays are unique in that they are often accompanied by lengthy prefaces and epilogues that are distinct in content from the plot of the plays. These extended essays serve as exposition for Shaw’s social messages and run the gamut of human intellectual production; they are not dry platitudes but intellectually original pieces reflective of a tremendous philosophical élan. Although each preface and epilogue is ultimately rooted in the content of its central play, Shaw almost always extends his discussion into the general humanities and sciences, commenting more directly upon the human condition than would be possible in the body of his plays. It is in these dissertations that Shaw achieves a connection with the reader that is otherwise not present in mere literature, and is thus able to disseminate his most radical and nuanced conceptions.
Understanding Shaw’s work fully requires knowledge of his historical environment, particularly that of his home of Great Britain. The late nineteenth century saw the momentous rise of Europe to the apex of world power and importance. Industrialization begot a population boom that also stirred nationalist sentiments throughout the globe: Germany and Italy organized as concrete nation-states from fragmented principalities under the power of Prussia and Piedmont-Sardinia, respectively. Europeans in consolidated countries, moreover, became more aware of themselves in the context of national identity, spurring an outward thrust for reasons of both economic prerogative and political compulsion.
The Industrial Revolution both demanded colonialism and provided the tools necessary for its maintenance. Shorn of almost all colonial territories in the Americas through earlier revolutions, the great powers of Europe looked to Africa for raw materials and labor. The Scramble for Africa, abetted by new technologies like the Maxim gun, established European control over almost all of Africa by 1914 (in addition to much of Asia and Oceania), integrating many diverse peoples into the European empire. The addition of so many non-Christians contradicted the religious sensibilities of some; the mistreatment and authoritarian governance associated with imperialism and resource extraction tickled the consciences of others, like Shaw.
While the industrialists and royalty profited from their foreign exploits, the rising home population generated substantial domestic problems. Workers crowded into factory cities like Manchester and Liverpool in Britain, and London expanded into the most populous city worldwide by 1900. This resulted in the formation of vast slum districts, an indication of growing income inequality and hardened class distinctions. The ownership classes reaped unprecedented revenues from their ventures, but the urban underclass benefited little from the manufacturing advances of the day, and many laborers became unemployed when the new colonialism introduced a cheap source of overseas labor. The British government, furthermore, did little to rectify the yawning inequity, inspiring a reputation for aloofness and producing class tensions and resentment. The bifurcation of British society, however, often appeared to be an artificial, meaningless social construct.
World War I, or the Great War, as it was then called, catalyzed the development of both the major social movements of the early twentieth century and the maturation of Shaw’s intellect. The war shattered the naïve worldviews of the generation when it descended into vicious attrition and futile death. Clearly, the conception of the prewar system as benevolent and workable was untenable; thus, citizens worldwide started to search for new alternatives, proposing and scrapping myriad ideas, some feasible and some absurd.
Politically, the most impactful product of World War I was the advent of a Marxist socialist state, the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution was enthusiastically supported by socialists worldwide, including by Shaw’s own Fabian Society, who were infuriated by the distorted distribution of income toward the upper classes. It also held great appeal to the oppressed working class through its promise of an egalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat, without the domineering, distant aristocracy. Although the prosperity of the Soviet system during the Great Depression seemed to confirm socialist superiority, the evolution of Stalinist repression dampened its popularity by the 1950s.
A proliferation of sociopolitical liberalism meanwhile occurred in Britain. The advancement of the women’s rights movement, which had gradually gained support prior to the war, quickened due to public recognition of the competent contributions of female workers during the conflict, and women gained the franchise in 1918, a goal the ardently feminist Shaw had long cherished. Contemporaneously, the Irish, also a long-marginalized group in the British Isles, achieved their demands for independence. Following the failure of the Easter Rising in 1916, the Irish had elected a Sinn Féin government that negotiated, sometimes violently, a partition of a free Ireland. This objective was long sought by Shaw and his eighteenth century analogue, Jonathan Swift; both writers had lambasted the insensitivity of British domination.
The skeptical postwar populace also challenged the absolutism of organized religion with an impunity long forbidden. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution fomented additional questions about the accuracy of Biblical literalism, which expanded into consideration of the actions and motives of the Christian churches. Irreverence was no longer a severe sin disqualifying one from the public arena; indeed, such important intellectuals as Bertrand Russell discarded the dogmas of religion from their philosophy. The disestablishmentarian movement even sought to remove Anglicanism from state sponsorship in Britain.
All of these historical events factored deeply into Shaw’s style and ideology. A socialist even before the Bolshevik Revolution boosted public awareness and support of socialism, he was basically committed to the equality of all mankind. Like his contemporaries, Shaw was disillusioned by the destruction wrought by World War I, but this hardened his convictions of the necessity of reform. Never averse to controversy, he commented incisively in many disparate fields, often so radically or in such a sarcastic style that debate continues as to his true intentions.
Shaw is sharply critical of the British class structure, which in his time was segregated between the well-to-do aristocracy and the poor urban working class. In Pygmalion, one of his more jocular works, written at the pinnacle of the British Empire’s power in 1912, Shaw lampoons the emptiness of class distinctions, those characteristics that separate the prosperous upper class from the languishing working class and alienate the middle class from both, arguing that the difference between a princess and an impoverished flower girl is merely a question of acting. He first paints a portrayal of Eliza Doolittle, an uneducated, poorly-spoken working girl whose father is inattentive and who must labor for sustenance. Eliza even speaks in a nearly incomprehensible dialect, like when she exclaims in frustration after her flowers are trampled, “There's menners f' yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad” (Shaw, Pygmalion). She is thus rendered as virtually the antithesis of civilized high culture, and yet Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, decides to acquiesce to her request to learn Standard English.
Although Eliza only wants to become “a lady in a shop” (Shaw, Pygmalion), Higgins turns his lessons into an experiment, in which he attempts to transform Eliza so she would fit without notice into high-class society. Higgins succeeds in his endeavor when Eliza attends the diplomats’ ball. The scene evolves from the mildly implausible to the outright absurd, as the other, legitimately high-class attendees hypothesize about Eliza’s origins; their theories ultimately converge upon Hungarian princess. When Higgins knowingly suggests that she is merely a London street girl, and when Eliza protests the same, the other attendees flippantly dismiss the possibility.
Here, Shaw smashingly demonstrates the vacuity of British social pretensions. Eliza remains “fundamentally the same person” (Busier) throughout Pygmalion, but her mastery of Standard English transforms her from a gutter girl to a princess in the view of society ladies and gentlemen. Pygmalion depicts a society so mired in concern about social status and its markers that it cannot comprehend the ability of a simple flower girl to assimilate into the upper class. Shaw ridicules the preoccupation with social class particularly through his illustration of the dialogue between Nepommuck, a translator, and Higgins in which Nepommuck’s wild theories about Eliza’s origins become preposterous as to approach self-parody. The more fervently Eliza correctly denies Nepommuck’s increasingly extravagant postulates, the more fervently Nepommuck believes in the rectitude of his assertions.
Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father, also serves one of Shaw’s comments on society. Originally, Doolittle is a penniless drunkard who actively refuses to manage his daughter’s welfare. He openly states as much: he is a sinner, but a proud sinner. Higgins is amused by Alfred’s unorthodox morals and recommends him for the Moral Reform Society’s sizable pension. However, when Doolittle starts to receive the money, he feels compelled to fall in with societal expectations, particularly matrimony; ironically, the money he receives for his unusually direct morals cause him to betray those very values.
Contrary to “the sense of innate inequality which dominated British society” (Busier), Shaw believes intensely that all people are essentially born equal, and that inequality derives from differences in upbringing. Pygmalion comments that there is no intrinsic difference between Eliza and a princess; both are products of their environments. Therefore, Shaw satirizes Social Darwinist attitudes, which had provided justification for not only colonial imperialism in Africa and Asia but also neglect of the poor in Britain. He also skewers the sensitivity of the upper class to its own respectability and provides Alfred Doolittle as a foil, in a manner best expressed in Man and Superman: “The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is” (Shaw, Man and Superman). Above all, most dear to Shaw is the ability of anyone to have the opportunity to strive for social advancement; “the right to an income” is “sacred and equal” to “the right to life” (Shaw, Androcles and the Lion).
Through this lens, it is easier to understand Shaw’s affinity for socialism, which in its ideal form dictates a completely egalitarian society unmarked by class distinctions. Shaw supported the socialist movement for most of his adult life, writing many essays for the Fabian Society in support of democratic socialism. Although he recognized that the Stalinist regime had significant problems and was far from the socialist ideal, Shaw gave qualified approval. His hope for the elimination of social barriers against the less fortunately born resonates in his works, into which he writes his consciousness.
Pygmalion is also a play about language at a more basic level than “as a determiner… of social acceptability” (Mugglestone). Shaw is intensely critical of the state of the English language in his prologue and afterword, where he decries it as illogical and badly conceived. His contempt seeps into the body of the play; Nepommuck comments that “only foreigners who have been taught to speak [English] speak it well” (Shaw, Pygmalion). Shaw was in fact so irritated by the deficiencies of English and the differences within it that he contrived of his own Shavian alphabet and attempted to establish his own language. In fact, the character of Henry Higgins is influenced by Henry Sweet, a major Germanic phonetician of Shaw’s acquaintance.
In contrast to Shaw’s commentary on social class and language, which are localized to Pygmalion among his major works, his treatment of feminism is extremely widespread. He most directly tackles the issue in Saint Joan, which is arguably his most celebrated work. Written in 1920, the year of Joan of Arc’s canonization, St. Joan revives an ancient controversy born from the interplay of church, state, and attitudes toward women. Joan of Arc, the French military leader who defeated the British but was then captured and burnt at the stake, serves as an exemplar of a strong-willed, assertive woman, in the mold of Shaw’s earlier female protagonists in Arms and the Man and Man and Superman.
Shaw had always held “antipathy toward the ‘womanly woman’” (Shatzky), the docile, domestic stereotype so common in other literature of the early twentieth century. His sympathies were always with the women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements, and he had years earlier expressed anger against the British government’s forceful suppression of suffragette protests. Even though by Saint Joan’s publication women over the age of thirty had achieved the franchise in Britain, there was certainly considerable distance still before the attainment of comprehensive equality.
While Shaw clearly favors Joan as the heroine in Saint Joan, he is not condemnatory of her inquisitors, deeming them within the socially acceptable behavior of their fifteenth century time. He prefers to focus on Joan’s own characteristics and their effects, rather than speculate about the motives of her captors. Notably, Shaw assumes good faith on both sides, noting that “the mud that was thrown at her has dropped off by this time so completely that there is no need for any modern writer to wash up after it; what is far more difficult to get rid of is the mud that is being thrown at her judges, and the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition” (Shaw, Saint Joan).
According to Shaw, the belief prevailing at his time that Joan was an angelic paragon is misleading and unfair to both her and her prosecutors; to truly appreciate Joan’s genius, she must “be allowed a fatal flaw” (Gribben). Critical is his explanation of why Joan is actually disliked by her contemporaries, both French and British, and why she is not ransomed and instead burned at the stake. She has a unique capacity to discomfit the men around her through her assertiveness and her dogmatism, but she is too young and naïve to realize that this will lead to her demise.
Shaw compares Joan to Socrates, the Greek philosopher who infuriated the Athenian citizenry with his persistent questioning so much that he was eventually put on trial and executed. Like Socrates, Joan is perspicacious and observant, but is unable to imagine the annoyance that she causes for “the men whom she humiliated by being right when they were wrong” (Shaw, Saint Joan). Even though her intellect is superior to those of the men she leads, her insensitivity to her own effect combines with the inveterate attitudes of masculine superiority for a pernicious result. The men cannot reconcile Joan’s position of military, political, and moral leadership with her status as a woman, and so their only available resolution is to kill her.
At various points, Shaw remarks on the British preoccupation with social and gender roles. According to Shaw, the reason that Joan is so politically isolated in the time leading up to her burning at the stake is primarily that she was a lower-class teenage woman who had the pretense to “[order] everyone about, from her uncle to the king” (Shaw, Saint Joan). Even though Joan is responsible for France’s salvation against the British, she is not celebrated; in fact, when the British capture and try her, the French king attempts nothing on her behalf. Shaw claims that this remarkable and surprising nonchalance derives from masculine, upper-class resentment against Joan.
Dissatisfaction with Joan exists not only in the temporal but also in the ecclesiastical realm: she is tried by the British not for anything related to the conduct of war but for the crime of heresy. Some critics have suggested that her execution is the simple product of her “male clothing, and her insistence that God told her to wear it” (Warren), but as always in a Shavian play, the reasons are much more complex. Joan is fiercely dogmatic, a true believer in her own interpretation of Catholic theodicy, whose directives are never in the form of “I say so” but “God says so” (Shaw, Saint Joan). This is intolerable to the church, which sincerely regards such sayings, particularly from a woman, as heretical. Shaw’s ultimate portrait of the inquisition does not mark it as a villainous conspiracy, but as an authentic commission acting for perceived good.
The story of Joan as presented by Shaw is an allegory for the state of affairs in Britain. The women of the suffragette movement were derided by contemporary men as stepping outside the boundaries of civilized society at the time, but were savagely suppressed by imprisonment and even worse measures. Like the military men of Saint Joan, many British men were uncomfortable with the assertiveness and energy of the female protestors, and were unwilling to admit the possibility of equality between the genders.
In contrast to Saint Joan, Pygmalion was written prior to any tangible success by the women’s suffrage movement, but the concept of an independent woman remains. The entire plot of Pygmalion up to the fourth act appears to gradually nudge the reader to an inevitable marriage between Eliza and Higgins; this sequence is common in the universe of English literature. The expected events happen: Higgins initially disregards Eliza as merely an experimental subject, but he gradually grows fond of her. Even when Eliza and Higgins confront each other, it is clear that Higgins harbors feelings of some sort for Eliza. However, no romance emerges between the two. Eliza becomes increasingly aware of her subordinate position and rebels against Higgins’s consideration of her as a disposable subject, declaring her independence in a way that would have been shocking to early twentieth century audiences. Instead, she chooses to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill, of lower middle class description.
Marrying Higgins would not only have conformed to societal expectations, but would also assure Eliza of an easier life. However, Higgins is for the entirety of the play a cerebral character unsuited for romance, and for Shaw to have transformed him abruptly would have cheapened Pygmalion’s literary and social merit. Owing to her new education, Eliza is acutely aware that her choice will involve substantial toil and possibly suffering; she is even more aware, though, that she can only in this manner achieve fulfillment. Eliza prefers honest hardship to a cloistered life bound by societal strictures that she does not recognize as legitimate, to a plastic existence in the shadow of her husband.
Shaw’s opinions regarding religion are immensely complex and nuanced, more debatable than those concerning any other subjects he discusses. He clearly favors equality for men and women, and clearly opposes the segmentation of society based on birth. However, Shaw neither completely favors nor entirely opposes religion. He critiques the organizational structure of large religious entities like the Catholic Church, a popular line among intellectuals, but veers from condemnation, and suggests that Christian clergy interpret the religion improperly. In Shaw’s view, Jesus Christ is an example of great moral virtue, but not so his followers.
Saint Joan is the Shavian play most connected to the topic of religion and organized religion. Generally, public sympathy lies with Joan, who is seen as a pure figure persecuted by a group of military and ecclesiastical authorities with bungalow mentalities and a political motive. Shaw’s treatment of Joan’s inquisitors is so moderate, though, that some critics have suggested that Shaw in fact sympathizes with the tribunal (Solomon). At the very least, he charges the commission of doing nothing more than its appointed duty, without inflicting excessive cruelty upon its charge. “He [debunks] his targets without stripping away their dignity” (Evans).
Shaw is less charitable to the modern Catholic Church, accusing it of self-righteousness and dogmatism that is off-putting to conscious thinkers. He mentions examples of persons like Galileo who were harmed by the excessive enthusiasm of the church in maintaining ideological conformity and derides the church for its outdated lines of thought and conversion. The church that does not adapt to the changing times does not “[have] a future in modern culture” (Shaw, Saint Joan) and is doomed to obsolescence. Furthermore, Shaw counters the argument that Catholicism necessary involves complete submission to clerical supremacy, noting that many of the great institutions of the church were founded out of frustration with lack of clerical responsiveness.
The modern church is also described as compulsive and overbearing; not only does it maintain anachronistic customs, but it also forces those customs upon its constituents whenever it has the power to do so. Shaw compares the church to the field of medicine, which he argues has largely subsumed the credulity previously reserved for religion. The priest prescribes spiritual quackery in the form of remedies to an unsuspecting public just like the doctor does physical cures. Unlike the objections against medicine, the objections against religion strike against religion’s essence and not its methodology, against the Vatican’s self-consuming quest for temporal supremacy through ecclesiastical power. Joan’s confidence in the authority of her own faith is thus immensely disturbing to the clerical aristocracy. Believing herself to have received instructions directly from God, Joan’s “notion of a Catholic Church was one in which the Pope was Pope Joan” (30). Though she is herself unaware of it, Joan’s innocent aloofness is interpreted as arrogance, the part of itself that the church sees and hates in her.
While Shaw demonstrates great respect for the teachings of Jesus Christ, he professes that the Christianity extant in the twentieth century is not based on Christ’s original doctrine. He is therefore able to eviscerate the condition of the Catholic Church without intellectual contradiction. The Shavian description of Jesus is that of a proto-communist who believes that not only should “the people have life, but they should have it ‘more abundantly’” (Shaw, Androcles and the Lion). There are differing degrees of living, but all people are entitled to the opportunity of living in the most fulfilling way. This Jesus’s theology is uplifting, a testament to the perpetual vivacity of the human spirit, but it disappears with Jesus’s crucifixion.
In contrast, Shaw decries the modern church as a choking institution founded upon a malleable set of principles continually altered for political advantage, overwhelmed by the hypocrisy that he finds so abhorrent. Androcles and the Lion portrays a canvas of various different Christian believers, ranging from the genuine to the intellectually dishonest. The favored character is, in distinct Shavian fashion, a free-thinking woman, Lavinia, whose earnest faith and unswerving devotion even before potential destruction garners an implicit accolade. Opposite Lavinia is the Roman imperial order, whose prosecutorial style is comparable to that of the Catholic Church through the millennia: the Roman persecutions, like the inquisition of Galileo and the inquisition of Joan, is not “ the conflict of a false theology with a true”, since the establishment cares little for ideological consistency anyway, but “an attempt to suppress a propaganda that seemed to threaten the interests involved in the established law and order” (Shaw, Androcles and the Lion).
The primate principle for Shaw appears to be unrelated to the details of Christian orthodoxy; Shaw challenges the validity of institutionalized orthodoxy itself as unnecessarily constraining epistemic closure. He warns, “Beware of the man whose God is in the skies” (Shaw, Man and Superman), for this frequently produces an unfortunate combination of conviction and determination that fuels otherwise completely irrational actions. The world according to Shaw is occupied by those who do not “think more than two or three times a year”, explaining his reservations about democracy and irritation at cultural conservatives seeking to obstruct the feminist movement and to artificially prop up the ancien régime of convenient alliance between government and clergy. The members of the populace not in positions of influence are unwilling to think outside the comfortable familiarity to which they have been accustomed; in the conclusion of Saint Joan, the commoners do not even recognize the reincarnated saint, much less accept her, leading Shaw to cry out, through Joan, “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” (Shaw, Saint Joan).
Shaw’s legendary array of literature, including his plays, his essays, and his literary criticism, all reveal the influence of a Weltanschauung colored simultaneously by cynicism and hope for humanity; although he excoriates many aspects of society he deems ridiculous or superfluous and laments the weakness of the human consciousness to such temptations, Shaw never abandons his faith in the ability of mankind to eventually understand and improve. The dramatic historical changes through Shaw’s life greatly disturbed the complacent world, but as Shaw himself, a man keenly attuned to his times, would argue, it is only in turbulence that progress occurs. His liberal conscience is written into his plays, directing toward a rational, open, and humane pathway, and through his harsh pen he betrays an extraordinary compassion for people of all descriptions: young, old, rich, poor, male, female. He variably adapts his rage for a better world toward feminism, socialism, antinomianism of the highest degree, and many other of the progressive –isms of his period. Never lapsing into Weltschmerz, this iconic and iconoclastic playwright continued to fight for his deep-seated tenet of universal human equality despite setback and through victories, leaving a legacy of both inimitable literary accomplishment and unparalleled social perceptiveness at once incredible and incredibly human.
Citations:
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Evans, Lloyd. "Shaw thing." Spectator 19 Nov. 2005: 72. Print.
Gribben, John L. "Shaw's Saint Joan: A Tragic Heroine." Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea 40.159 (Winter 1965): 549-566. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Ed. Timothy J. Sisler. Vol. 23.
Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, Samuel Moore, and David McLellan. The Communist Manifesto. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Mugglestone, Lynda. "Shaw, subjective inequality, and the social meanings of language in 'Pygmalion.'." The Review of English Studies 44.175 (1993): 373+. Print.
Shatzky, Joel. "Saint Joan: Overview." Reference Guide to English Literature. Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick. 2nd ed. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. Print.
Shaw, George Bernard. Androcles and the Lion. Wikisource. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.
Shaw, George Bernard. Arms and the Man. Wikisource. Web. 22 Apr. 2011.
Shaw, George Bernard. Man and Superman. Wikisource. Web. 11 Apr. 2011.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Wikisource. Web. 21 Mar. 2011.
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Solomon, Stanley J. "Saint Joan as Epic Tragedy." Modern Drama 6.4 (Feb. 1964): 437-449. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Ed. Timothy J. Sisler. Vol. 23. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 8 May 2011.
Warren, Patricia Nell. "Was Joan of Arc genetically male?" The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 16.1 (2009): 24+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 22 Apr. 2011.
