107-415: George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw , was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With
214-452: A republican , castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award . His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by
321-461: A saint by Pope Benedict XV ; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It
428-582: A " namer-dot " ( · ) is placed before a name. Sentences are typically not started with a namer-dot, unless it is otherwise called for. All other punctuation and word spacing is similar to conventional orthography. Each character in the Shavian alphabet requires only a single stroke to be written on paper. The writing utensil needs to be lifted up only once when writing each character, thus enabling faster overall writing than Latin script. Spelling in Androcles follows
535-536: A comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII , who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre , for fear of the affront it might provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats , who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for ... It
642-471: A contributor, mostly anonymously. He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor, Clifford Sharp , who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions—"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw. "I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as
749-568: A deep letter, representing the corresponding voiced consonants (except Haha 𐑣 ). These rotation pairs, with the exception of the heng consonants, are the same letters that are paired in Pitman shorthand . Affricates , several diphthongs , and rhotic vowels are ligatures. The alphabet is therefore to some extent featural . There are no separate uppercase or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark proper nouns ,
856-474: A dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara , The Doctor's Dilemma , and Caesar and Cleopatra . Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform , and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not
963-516: A federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. Holroyd records that by this time the separatist party Sinn Féin was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were forgotten. In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland, and joined his fellow-writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to
1070-667: A fine orator. "The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other" From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association ; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education". This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism . When in 1886–87
1177-448: A flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this. The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in
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#17332021488711284-695: A genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917. Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the British Empire (which he thought should become the British Commonwealth). In April 1916 he wrote scathingly in The New York Times about militant Irish nationalism: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these fellow-patriots of mine leave
1391-464: A house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden . The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In the view of the biographer and critic St John Ervine , "their life together was entirely felicitous". There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed
1498-463: A lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know ... We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it". Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French, Un Petit Drame , written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime. In the same year the critic William Archer suggested a collaboration, with
1605-411: A ligature of the letters Egg "𐑧" and Roar "𐑮", it is treated as a ligature of Up "𐑳" and Roar "𐑮". Based on their appearance, one would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the top and free at the bottom resulting in such a letter having to be written by going over pre-penned lines or by lifting your pen, yet once again, the opposite is true. Some years after the initial publication of
1712-514: A n d ( 𐑯 ), t o ( 𐑑 ), and often f or ( 𐑓 ) are written with the single letters indicated. George Bernard Shaw , the writer, critic and playwright, was a vocal critic of English spelling because it often deviates from the alphabetic principle . Shaw had served from 1926 to 1939 on the BBC 's Advisory Committee on Spoken English , which included several exponents of phonetic writing. He also knew Henry Sweet , creator of Current Shorthand (and
1819-466: A negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a vegetarian . In the same year he suffered an attack of smallpox ; eventually he grew a beard to hide the resultant facial scar. In rapid succession he wrote two more novels: The Irrational Knot (1880) and Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither found
1926-572: A new alphabet. All of his interest in spelling and alphabet reform was made clear in Shaw's will of June 1950, in which provision was made for (Isaac) James Pitman , with a grant in aid from the Public Trustee, to establish a Shaw Alphabet. Following Shaw's death in November 1950, and after some legal dispute, the Trustee announced a worldwide competition to design such an alphabet, with the aim of producing
2033-682: A nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the Labour Representation Committee —precursor of the modern Labour Party . By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished". Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in
2140-526: A perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions". The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic. He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there
2247-474: A plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw. The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career. On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon , addressed by the political economist Henry George . Shaw then read George's book Progress and Poverty , which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of
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#17332021488712354-550: A polemic against Eugen Dühring , and Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme against Ferdinand Lasalle . Vladimir Lenin published polemics against political opponents. The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky was notably directed against Karl Kautsky , and other works such as The State and Revolution attacked figures including Eduard Bernstein . In the 20th century, George Orwell 's Animal Farm
2461-487: A political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen , he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as
2568-418: A prototype for the character of Henry Higgins ), although Shaw himself for years wrote his literary works in Pitman shorthand . However, he found its limitations frustrating as well and realized that it was not a suitable replacement for traditional orthography, making the production of printed material difficult and impossible to type. Shaw desired and advocated a phonetic spelling reform , and this called for
2675-522: A publisher; each was serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine Our Corner . In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met Sidney Webb , a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed
2782-538: A range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory , Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature . Born in Dublin, in 1876 Shaw moved to London, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following
2889-445: A schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents , where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped
2996-420: A sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature. Between 1865 and 1871 Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. His experiences as
3103-457: A system that would be an economical way of writing and of printing the English language. A contest for the design of the new alphabet was won by four people, including Ronald Kingsley Read who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding such an alphabet. Read was then appointed to amalgamate the four designs to produce the new alphabet. Due to the contestation of Shaw's will,
3210-406: A teenage ambition to become a painter, and had not yet thought of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him, ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet . Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London. Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer. Eventually Shaw
3317-466: A tract, Why Are The Many Poor? , issued by the recently formed Fabian Society , Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also Annie Besant ,
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3424-402: A tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty". By the time of Shaw's birth his mother had become close to George John Lee,
3531-606: A venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in the summer of 1895. By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. In 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" ( parish councillor ) in London's St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously; when London government
3638-560: Is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons. The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: Cashel Byron's Profession written in 1882–83, and An Unsocial Socialist , begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in To-Day magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form in 1886. In 1884 and 1885, through
3745-502: Is a guide. There is no ability to indicate word stress ; however, in most cases the reduction of unstressed vowels is sufficient to distinguish word pairs that are distinguished only by stress in spoken discourse. For instance, the noun convict /ˈkɒnvɪkt/ and the verb convict /kənˈvɪkt/ can be spelled 𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 ˈkɒnvɪkt and 𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑝𐑦𐑒𐑑 kənvɪkt , respectively. Additionally, five common words are abbreviated as single letters. The words th e ( 𐑞 ), o f ( 𐑝 ),
3852-439: Is already spelled phonemically, direct conversion between Latin and Shavian letters can be performed, though several ligatures are added for the common combinations of vowels with n and s and some common short words. Vowels use the letters of the orthographically equivalent short vowels in English (i.e. ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ ), except that o and u are reversed, as are j and w . The oo -vowel letters are reassigned to m and n , and
3959-489: Is called polemics , which are seen in arguments on controversial topics. A person who writes polemics, or speaks polemically, is called a polemicist . The word derives from Ancient Greek πολεμικός ( polemikos ) 'warlike, hostile', from πόλεμος ( polemos ) 'war'. Polemics often concern questions in religion or politics. A polemical style of writing was common in Ancient Greece , as in
4066-671: Is in the names of the letters: the unvoiced letter Haha is deep, while the voiced Hung, which suggests a lower position, is tall. This is often assumed to be a clerical error introduced in the rushed printing of the Shavian edition of Androcles and the Lion . This reversal obscures the system of tall letters as voiceless consonants and deep letters as voiced consonants. Proponents of traditional Shavian, however, have suggested that Kingsley Read may not have intended for this system to be all-encompassing, though it seems that vertical placement alone served this purpose in an earlier version of Shavian, before
4173-434: Is usually taken as evidence for this reversal. One of the beliefs that leads to such allegations is that while Air "𐑺" appears to be a ligature of the letters Ado "𐑩" and Roar "𐑮", it is treated as a ligature of the letters Egg "𐑧" and Roar "𐑮". One would expect the ligature of these letters to be joined at the bottom and free at the top, yet the opposite is true. Another such belief is that while Err "𐑻" appears to be
4280-583: The Irish Literary Revival , including George Russell and James Joyce , and was a close friend of Seán O'Casey , who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island . Man and Superman , completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in Robert Loraine 's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), depicting
4387-522: The London County Council elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as "[making] absolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics. Nationally, the 1906 general election produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman , and saw
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4494-597: The Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx , and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital . He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman , whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join it—he preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals. After reading
4601-585: The partition of Ireland between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw. In 1922 civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the Irish Free State . Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met Michael Collins , then head of the Free State's Provisional Government . Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later,
4708-434: The "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw". In June 1873 Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her. Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play
4815-593: The 18th century include Jonathan Swift , with pamphlets such as his A Modest Proposal , Alexander Hamilton , with pieces such as A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and A Farmer Refuted , and Edmund Burke , with his attack on the Duke of Bedford . In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 's 1848 Communist Manifesto was extremely polemical. Both Marx and Engels would publish further polemical works, with Engels's work Anti-Dühring serving as
4922-544: The 2016 version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability." Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950. From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review , edited by his friend Frank Harris . As at The World , he used
5029-595: The Bourbons nowhere." Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential. The Dublin Easter Rising later that month took him by surprise. After its suppression by British forces, he expressed horror at the summary execution of the rebel leaders, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish union. In How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), he envisaged
5136-530: The British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by Field Marshal Haig to visit the Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism ". Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during
5243-514: The Fabians debated whether to embrace anarchism , as advocated by Charlotte Wilson , Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in Trafalgar Square addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on 13 November 1887 ( "Bloody Sunday" ), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted
5350-475: The Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces. In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death". Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934. Shaw's first major work to appear after
5457-609: The Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body". In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells , who had joined the society in February 1903. Wells's ideas for reform—particularly his proposals for closer cooperation with the Independent Labour Party—placed him at odds with
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#17332021488715564-474: The Lion , had Shavian side-by-side with the Latin equivalent and the other was a Shavian-only edition. The second, released in 2013, was an edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , transcribed into Shavian by Thomas Thurman. This was published as a Shaw-only edition with no side-by-side Latin equivalent. The Shavian fonts were designed by Michael Everson. In 2019, a print version of Pride and Prejudice
5671-570: The London premiere it had ended. The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured with the piece in the US. In 1899, when the Boer War began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like Home Rule , to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald , wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from
5778-516: The Man was not immediately replicated. Candida , which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in South Shields in 1895; in 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny had a single staging at Croydon . In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of
5885-640: The Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it". Although less active—he blamed his advancing years—Shaw remained a Fabian. In 1912 Shaw invested £1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called The New Statesman , which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course
5992-616: The Shavian alphabet was added to Unicode 4.0 in 2003, Unicode Shavian fonts are still quite rare. Before it was standardized, fonts were made that include Shavian letters in the places of Roman letters, and/or in an agreed-upon location in the Unicode private use area, allocated from the ConScript Unicode Registry and now superseded by the official Unicode standard. The following fonts contain full Unicode support for Shavian. Windows/Mac/Linux systems need fonts such as these to display
6099-584: The Shaw alphabet, Read expanded it to create Quikscript , also known as the Read Alphabet. Quikscript is intended to be more useful for handwriting, and to that end is more cursive and uses more ligatures. Many letter forms are roughly the same in both alphabets; see the separate article for more details. An adaptation of Shavian to another language, Esperanto , was developed by John Wesley Starling ; though not widely used, at least one booklet has been published with transliterated sample texts. As that language
6206-401: The allegiance of the working class from sport to politics. He persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing indirect taxation , and taxing unearned income "to extinction". Back in London, Shaw produced what Margaret Cole , in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892. To Your Tents, O Israel! excoriated
6313-592: The ancient historian Polybius practiced "quite bitter self-righteous polemic" against some twenty philosophers, orators, and historians. Polemical writings were common in medieval and early modern times. During the Middle Ages, polemic had a religious dimension, as in Jewish texts written to protect and dissuade Jewish communities from converting to other religions . Medieval Christian writings were also often polemical; for example in their disagreements on Islam or in
6420-487: The by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence". After using the plot of the aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer to complete Widowers' Houses (it
6527-413: The consonant–vowel ligature yew are short. Among consonants, the short letters are liquids (r, l) and nasals (m, n); these, the semivowels (y, w) and the heng letters (h, ng) are derived from each other through rotation or reflection. Tall letters are voiceless consonants , excepting Yea 𐑘 and Hung 𐑙 . A tall letter rotated 180°, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes
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#17332021488716634-434: The content was submitted by Shaw enthusiasts. In more recent years, there have been several published works of classical literature transliterated into Shavian. The first, released in 2012, was the works of Edgar Allan Poe entitled Poe Meets Shaw: The Shaw Alphabet Edition of Edgar Allan Poe , by Tim Browne. This book was published via Shaw Alphabet Books and had two editions in its original release. One, like Androcles and
6741-769: The contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army ; The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra , Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra , seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year. Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce ". These plays included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet
6848-520: The decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield 's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties. In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the Independent Labour Party . He was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch
6955-411: The demand. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. It earned him £341 in royalties in its first year, a sufficient sum to enable him to give up his salaried post as a music critic. Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr , with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson. The success of Arms and
7062-412: The dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland; George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly; in the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd she married to escape
7169-609: The dominant military power of the world." After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War , which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "[h]is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present." Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by
7276-725: The effect of letter-height on the coastlines of words, but whether Read considered any of these is uncertain. Since the letter representing the same sound in Read's Quikscript appears identical to "Hung", it is doubtful that Read reversed the letter twice by mistake—he may have thought it best to leave things as they were, mistake or not, especially as a corrected /ng/ might in hasty or careless writing be confused with his new letter for /n/ in Quikscript. Two other letters that are often alleged to have been reversed—intentionally or not—are Air and Err. Both are ligatures , and their relation to other letters
7383-428: The essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is , a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in
7490-502: The government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on Irish Home Rule , a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism. In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt Hutchinson—Holroyd mentions £10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such
7597-487: The house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. In 1862 Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill , overlooking Killiney Bay . Shaw,
7704-450: The idea of art for art's sake , and insisted that all great art must be didactic . Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known. After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto. In May 1890 he moved back to The World , where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In
7811-470: The inefficiencies and difficulties of conventional spelling using the Latin alphabet . It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and designed by Ronald Kingsley Read . Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet. It should be: The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall (with an ascender), deep (with a descender) and short. All vowels but
7918-424: The influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886, he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were William Morris and John Ruskin , and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected
8025-456: The language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them. Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello , a lower-middle-class part of Dublin . He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw ( née Gurly). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances and Elinor Agnes. The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to
8132-766: The late 1920s, he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism, and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left—he expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin . In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946. Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare ; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word Shavian has entered
8239-456: The monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs". Polemic Polemic ( / p ə ˈ l ɛ m ɪ k / pə- LEHM -ick , US also /- ˈ l i m ɪ k / -LEEM-ick ) is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation
8346-407: The part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first." The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of
8453-519: The phonemic distinctions of British Received Pronunciation except for explicitly indicating vocalic "r" with the above ligatures. Most dialectal variations of English pronunciation can be regularly produced from this spelling, but those who do not make certain distinctions, particularly in the vowels, find it difficult to produce the canonical spellings spontaneously. For instance, most North American dialects merge 𐑭 /ɑː/ and 𐑪 /ɒ/ (the father–bother merger ), though standard English orthography
8560-596: The piano. Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of tuberculosis . He resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years. Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in South Kensington , but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned
8667-468: The play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword. Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah , written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'". This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to
8774-515: The polemic tradition. In 2008 the humanist philosopher A. C. Grayling published a book, Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness . Shavian The Shavian alphabet ( / ˈ ʃ eɪ v i ə n / SHAY -vee-ən ; also known as the Shaw alphabet ) is a constructed alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonemic orthography for the English language to replace
8881-480: The principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties. Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism , edited by Shaw who also provided two of
8988-631: The rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the Adelphi and later at Whitehall Court . During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square , Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, John Bull's Other Island ,
9095-406: The rotations were introduced. Also, Read may have intentionally reversed these letters, perhaps to emphasize that these letters represent unrelated sounds, which happen to occur in complementary distribution . Both sides of the debate have suggested other reasons, including associations with various styles of Latin letters (namely, the /g/ in /-ing/, often written with a bottom-loop in script) and
9202-566: The society when it followed Shaw. In the Fabians' war manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it". As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics. Thus, although
9309-408: The society's "Old Gang", led by Shaw. According to Cole, Wells "had minimal capacity for putting [his ideas] across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity". In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself". Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later wondered whether
9416-627: The trust charged with developing the new alphabet could afford to publish only one book: a version of Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion , in a bi-alphabetic edition with both conventional and Shavian spellings. (1962 Penguin Books, London). Copies were sent to major libraries in English-speaking countries. Between 1963 and 1965, 8 issues of the journal, Shaw-script , were published by Read in Worcester , U.K. The journal used Shaw's Alphabet, and much of
9523-582: The unneeded letters for th and ng are assigned to c and ĥ . Pronunciations that differ from their English values are marked in bold blue . Shavian was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0. Esperanto ligatures are not supported. The Unicode block for Shavian is U+10450–U+1047F and is in Plane 1 (the Supplementary Multilingual Plane). While
9630-666: The vast corpus aimed at converting the Jews. Martin Luther 's 95 Theses was a polemic launched against the Catholic Church. Robert Carliell 's 1619 defence of the new Church of England and diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church – Britaine's glorie, or An allegoricall dreame with the exposition thereof: containing The Heathens infidelitie in religion ... – took the form of a 250-line poem. Major political polemicists of
9737-680: The war was Heartbreak House , written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway in November, and was coolly received; according to The Times : "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it". After the London premiere in October 1921 The Times concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection". Ervine in The Observer thought
9844-581: The war. The Inca of Perusalem , written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre . O'Flaherty V.C. , satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917. Augustus Does His Bit ,
9951-719: The writings of the historian Polybius . Polemic again became common in medieval and early modern times. Since then, famous polemicists have included satirist Jonathan Swift , Italian physicist and mathematician Galileo , French theologian Jean Calvin , French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire , Russian author Leo Tolstoy , socialist philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , novelist George Orwell , playwright George Bernard Shaw , communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin , linguist Noam Chomsky , social critics H.L.Mencken Christopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens , and existential philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche . Polemical journalism
10058-402: The year 31,920 AD. Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention. The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays. This mood was short-lived. In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed
10165-404: Was Arms and the Man (1894), a mock- Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of mediocrity, sneering at heroism and patriotism, heartless cleverness, and copying W. S. Gilbert 's style. The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matinée performances to meet
10272-504: Was a polemic against totalitarianism , in particular of Stalinism in the Soviet Union . According to McClinton, other prominent polemicists of the same century include such diverse figures as Herbert Marcuse , Noam Chomsky , John Pilger , and Michael Moore . In 2007 Brian McClinton argued in Humani that anti-religious books such as Richard Dawkins 's The God Delusion are part of
10379-630: Was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. Fanny's First Play , a comedy about suffragettes , had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances. Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than Blanco Posnet , ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It
10486-559: Was common in continental Europe when libel laws were not as stringent as they are now. To support study of 17th to 19th century controversies, a British research project has placed online thousands of polemical pamphlets from that period. Discussions of atheism, humanism, and Christianity have remained open to polemic into the 21st century. In Ancient Greece , writing was characterised by what Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin called "strident adversariality" and "rationalistic aggressiveness", summed up by McClinton as polemic. For example,
10593-550: Was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library ) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879),
10700-462: Was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan". The citation for the literature prize for 1925 praised his work as "... marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". He accepted the award, but rejected
10807-498: Was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, Pygmalion , written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a play—that it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful. ... Hence arose an urgent demand on
10914-485: Was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. In the early weeks of the marriage Shaw was much occupied writing his Marxist analysis of Wagner 's Ring cycle , published as The Perfect Wagnerite late in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence , Hertfordshire; they renamed the house " Shaw's Corner ", and lived there for
11021-535: Was published in Shaw-only form by the website Shavian.info. Some disagreement has arisen among the Shavian community in regard to sound–symbol assignments, which have been the topic of frequent arguments. Primarily, this has concerned the alleged reversal of two pairs of letters. The most frequent disagreement of the letter reversals has been over the Haha–Hung pair. The most convincing evidence suggesting this reversal
11128-554: Was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras , he was elected to the newly formed borough council. In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend , a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in
11235-403: Was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer , written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage. Shaw's first play to bring him financial success
11342-474: Was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80 and, as in Dublin, achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author. For the next four years Shaw made
11449-440: Was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge 's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in
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