George Bernard Shaw

At 94 years old, George Bernard Shaw has this physical status:

George Bernard Shaw (born 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 spanned the 1880s to his death and beyond.

He wrote more than 60 plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912), and Saint Joan (1923).

Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation after incorporating both modern satire and historical allegory, and was named the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. Shaw, a native of Dublin, migrated to London in 1876, where he failed to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education.

He had become a well-known theatre and music critic by the mid-1880s.

Following a political awakening, he joined the Fabian Society and became the country's most popular pamphleteer.

Life

Shaw was born in Portobello, a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Dublin, on the third floor. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814-1885), as well as Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (née Gurly, 1830-1913). Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (1853-1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855-1866) were his elder brothers. The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to Ireland's most influential Protestant Ascendancy; George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was one of the family's less influential members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service from which he was sacked in the early 1850s; thereafter, he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852, he married Bessie Gurly; in the opinion of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd, she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If George's motives were mercenary, as Bessie told him little of her family's money, she would be dissatisfied. She came to despise her ineffectual and often inebriated husband, with whom she later described what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty."

By the time Shaw's birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well-known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong apprehension that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no agreement among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this happening. The young Shaw received no harshness from his mother, but he later revealed that her indifference and lack of love had harmed him greatly. He found solace in the music that had dominated the house. Lee was a conductor and tutor of singing; Bessie had a refined mezzo-soprano voice and was heavily influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often jammed with music, with regular gatherings of singers and players.

Lee and the Shaws also agreed to divide a house in 1862, No. 1. 1 Hatch Street, in an upscale part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive child, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students used to giving him books, which the young Shaw loved avidly; as a result of his growing musical knowledge of choral and operatic literature, he became familiar with a diverse range of literature.

Shaw attended four colleges between 1865 and 1871, none of whom he detested. "Schoolmasters and schoolmasters," he later wrote, "weren't censorship and chaperoning their parents," his schoolboy experiences disillusioned with formal education. He left school in October 1871 to work as a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard and quickly became head cashier. Shaw used to be "George Shaw" in this period, but after 1876, he dropped the "George" and renamed himself "Bernard Shaw."

Lee left Dublin for London in June 1873 and never returned. Bessie followed him for a fortnight; the two girls joined her. Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial support, the joint household would have to be broken up. Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself how to play the piano.

Agnes died of tuberculosis early in 1876, according to Shaw's mother. He resigned from the land agents and moved to England in March to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes' funeral. He never returned to Ireland again, and did not return for twenty-nine years.

Shaw refused to apply for clerical service in London right away. His mother allowed him to live free in her South Kensington home, but he still needed an income. Lee had abandoned a teenage ambition to be a painter and hadn't considered writing for a living, but he did find some work for him, including ghost-writing a musical column published under Lee's name in a satirical weekly called The Hornet. After Lee and Bessie's relocation to London, their friendships with Bessie deteriorated. Shaw retained contact with Lee, who discovered him as a concert pianist and occasional performer.

Shaw eventually had to seek office jobs. He obtained a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library) in the interim and spent the majority of the week there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, which began in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical work on a religious theme. As was his first attempt at a novel, it was unfinished. Immaturity (1879), his first complete book, was too bleak to be published by publishers, and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed by the newly established Edison Telephone Company in 1879-80, and Dublin saw rapid growth. Nonetheless, Shaw declined to apply for a role in the new company when the Edison company acquired with the Bell Telephone Company. He then embarked on a full-time authorship.

Shaw earned no money from writing and was subsidized by his mother for the next four years. He became a vegetarian in 1881 for the sake of economy and later as a matter of principle. To hide a facial scar left by smallpox, he grew a beard. He wrote two more books, The Irrational Knot (1880) and Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither were published in the socialist journal Our Corner, which appeared a few years later.

Shaw began attending Zetetic Society meetings in 1880, whose aim was to "search for truth in all aspects that concern the human race." Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself, was here. Despite their differences in style and temperament, the two quickly recognized their unique qualities in each other and formed a lifelong friendship. "You knew everything I didn't know, and I knew everything you didn't know," Shaw said later.

Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French called Un Petit Drame, which was published in 1884 but not in his lifetime. William Archer, a scholar, suggested a collaboration in the same year, with Archer's plan and Shaw's dialogue. The idea was completed, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892, and Archer's relationship with Archer was of utmost importance to Shaw's career.

On September 5, 1882, Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon, addressing political economist Henry George. Shaw then read George's book Progress and Poverty, which reaffirmed his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered Karl Marx's writings, and later spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman, who discovered autocratic, ill-tempered, and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the SDF's ability to turn the working classes into a revolutionary movement but did not sign up; he said he preferred to work with his intellectual peers rather than participate.

Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting on May 1684 after reading a tract titled "Why Are The Many Poor?" released by the newly formed Fabian Society. He became a member in September and had produced the society with its first manifesto, titled Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year, he recruited Webb and also Annie Besant, a fine orator.

Shaw attended the British Economic Association's fortnightly meetings; "the nearest Shaw had ever come to university education," Holroyd says. This experience changed his political views; he shifted away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism. Shaw, who had been campaigned by Charlotte Wilson, Besant, and others, joined the majority in rejecting anarchism in 1886-87. Shaw became aware of the futility of seeking to challenge police power after Besant's rally in Trafalgar Square was violently broken up by the authorities on November 13th, 1887 ("Bloody Sunday" says the narrator). As Webb's argument, he mainly accepted the concept of "permeation": the belief that socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into established political parties.

The Fabian Society remained small in the 1880s, its message of moderation being unhearded among more militant voices. Its reputation was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also contributed two of the essays. "Transition," the second installment of the series, delves into the matter of gradualism and permeation, arguing that "the need for gradual and gradual change must be apparent to everyone." Tract No. 1 was produced in 1890 by Shaw. What Socialism Is A New Trace, a reversion of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had characterized socialism in anarchical sense. "Society can be brought about in a very constitutional manner by democratic institutions," readers were told in Shaw's latest version.

Shaw's mid-1980s marked a turning point in his life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, two books were published, and began working as a critic. He hadn't been celibate until his twentieth birthday, when Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow who lived for many years, defeated him. Their affair lasted, but not always smoothly for eight years. Shaw's sex life has sparked a lot of rumors and discussion among his biographers, but there is a consensus that Patterson was one of his few non-platonic intimate relationships.

Cashel Byron's Profession, published in 1882-1983, and An Unsocial Socialist published in 1883. The latter appeared in Today magazine in 1884 as a serial, but it did not appear in book form until 1887. In 1886, Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form.

Shaw was hired in 1884 and 1885 to write book and music analysis for London newspapers, thanks to Archer's influence. In 1886, Archer, a young art critic of The World, obtained Shaw's succession. William Morris and John Ruskin were two figures in the modern art world whose views Shaw most admired, and he attempted to emulate their precepts in his critiques. Shaw, who rejected the notion of art for art's sake, argued that all great art must be didactic.

Shaw's many publishing ventures in the 1880s and 1890s, it was as a music critic that he was best known. He became a musical critic of The Star in 1888, writing under the pen name Corno di Bassett. In May 1890, he returned to The World, where he wrote a weekly column titled "G.B.S." For more than four years, I have served in office. "Shaw's collected essays on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability," Robert Anderson writes in the latest edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Shaw dropped out of being a salaried music critic in August 1894, but he did publish occasional papers on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950.

Shaw, a theatre critic who worked for The Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898, was edited by his colleague Frank Harris. He used the word "G.B.S" as a by-line at The World. He protested the Victorian theatre's artificial constraints and hypocrisies and called for plays of authentic concepts and authentic characters. "I had rashly taken up the lawsuit, and rather than allowing it to deteriorate, I collected the evidence."

Shaw continued writing plays after using the plan of the aborted 1884 friendship with Archer to complete Widowers' Houses (it was staged twice in London, in December 1892). He made slow progress at first; the Philanderer, who wrote in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage performance. Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was published five years before publication and nine years before it was published.

Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-Ruritanian comedy debating established romantic, military honour, and class, was Shaw's first attempt to bring him financial success. The news found the play overlong, accusing Shaw of mediocrity, patriotism, heartless intelligence, and copying W. S. Gilbert's style. The public had a different opinion, and the theatre's company promoted extra matinée performances to please the audience. The play spanned the provinces from April to July, toured the provinces, and was staged in New York. In the first year, it earned him £341 in royalties, a substantial enough sum to enable him to renounce his salaried position as a music critic. Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, was one of the cast of the London productions, with whom Jenny Patterson was heavily resented by Jenny Patterson.

Arms and the Man's success was not immediately replicated. In 1895, a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny performed in South Shields for a single performance; in 1897, a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny produced a single staging at Croydon, which featured a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons. Shaw's plays in the 1890s were more well known in print than on the West End stage; his best achievement of the decade came in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned him more than £2,000 in royalties.

Shaw, a Fabian delegate, attended the Bradford conference in January 1893, which led to the establishment of the Independent Labour Party. He was skeptical of the new party's rise and doubted the likelihood that it might shift the working class's allegiance from sport to politics. He advised the conference not to pass resolutions that would abolish indirect taxation and levy unearned income "to extinction." Shaw returned to London in 1892 as Margaret Cole, a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal government that had taken power in Fabian times. O Israel's odious government was chastised for dismissing social concerns and focusing solely on Irish Home Rule, a subject Shaw described as of no importance to socialism. Henry Hunt Hutchinson, a sympathiser, left a substantial bequest to the Fabian Society in 1894—Holroyd mentions £10,000. Webb, the person who was elected to oversee the legacy, suggested that the majority of the money be used to create a school of economics and politics. Shaw declined; he thought such a venture was against the legacy's intended purpose. He was eventually persuaded to accept the plan, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in 1895 in the summer of 1895.

Shaw's political career waned as he concentrated on being a dramatist by the late 1890s. 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 duties; when the London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly elected borough council.

Shaw's health fell in 1898 as a result of overwork. Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Anglo-Irish woman whose Webbs acquaintance him with, was his nurse. She had suggested that she and Shaw marry the previous year. He had declined, but Shaw, who was worried that this might result in scandal, accepted their marriage. The event, which took place in Covent Garden's register office on June 1, 1898, took place on June 1. The bride and the bridegroom were both 40 years old. "They lived happily" in the words of biographer and critic St John Ervine. There were no children of the marriage, which is generally accepted as unconstitutional; whether this was entirely at Charlotte's behest, as Shaw often suggested, is less credited. Shaw was heavily involved writing his Marxist interpretation of Wagner's Ring cycle, first published in 1898 as The Perfect Wagnerite. The Shaws found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, in 1906; they renamed the house "Shaw's Corner" and stayed there for the remainder of their lives. They stayed in a London flat in the Adelphi and later in Whitehall Court.

Shaw made a name for herself as a playwright in the first decade of the twentieth century. J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker formed a company in Sloane Square, Chelsea, to produce modern drama. They staged fourteen of Shaw's plays in the next five years. John Bull's Other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted top politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was held at the city's Royal Theatre in Dublin for fear of the affront it might bring, but it was not shown at the Royal Theatre in November 1907. William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got more than he bargained for," Shaw later wrote. My contribution was uncongenial to the entire spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is intent on creating a new Ireland in the absence of its own ideal, but my play is a brutal representation of the true old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends, and Yeats and Lady Gregory had a difficult time convincing Shaw to accept the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre following J. M. Synge's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell and James Joyce, and Seán O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island.

Both the Royal Court in 1905 and Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year were a success. Major Barbara (1905), a largely serious work about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, were among Vedrenne and Granville-Barker's other Shaw works on view; and Gibson and Cleopatra, a relatively modern work on personal ethics; and Granville-Barker's Trema (1906), a separate work on education; and Granville and

Shaw, who is now wealthy and established, tried out unorthodox theatrical styles referred to by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce." These performances included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet was barred by the Lord Chamberlain (the formal theatre censor in England) but it was staged in Dublin instead; the Abbey Theatre filled to capacity. The First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw production, with 622 performances.

Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of real and false religious convictions than Blanco Posnet, lasted for eight weeks in September and October 1913. Pygmalion, one of Shaw's most popular plays, was written in 1912 and performed in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. "It is the custom of the English press to inform the world that it is not a play that is not a play that is produced," Shaw said, adding that it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially ineffective. ... "I should have my plays performed by them first" was an urgent demand on the part of Vienna and Berlin's city chiefs. Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl, appeared in the British production in April 1914. Charlotte Shaw was worried about a personal relationship between Shaw and Campbell, but by the time of the London premiere, it had come to an end. The performance attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree refused to go on holiday, and the show was cancelled. His co-star appeared on the film in the United States later this year.

Shaw, who argued that Home Rule should be considered a "non-Socialist" issue when the Boer War began in 1899, wanted the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he called a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including future Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal resistance and resigned from the party when it followed Shaw. Shaw wrote "until the Federation of the World becomes an achievement, we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it" in the Fabians' war manifesto, Fabianism, and the Empire (1900).

Shaw became disillusioned by the Fabians' modest impact on national politics as the new century began. Because he was nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference, which was the precursor to the modern Labour Party, as the Labour Representation Committee was established in February 1900. "I am convinced that the borough councils should be scrapped" after six years of Borough Councillors, by 1903. Nevertheless, he ran in the London County Council elections in 1904. He was eventually defeated after an unusual campaign, which Holroyd refers to as "completely sure of not getting involved." It was Shaw's last foray into electoral politics. The 1906 general election in the United States saw a strong Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw greeted the results with skepticism; he had a poor opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as irrelevant: "I apologise to the Universe for my association with such a body."

Shaw felt that the Fabians needed new leadership in the years after the 1906 election, and that he saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells, who had joined the party in February 1903. Wells' reforms, as well as his plans for closer collaboration with the Independent Labour Party, put him at odds with the organization's "Old Gang," led by Shaw. Wells "had no capacity for expressing [his thoughts] in public meetings against Shaw's taught and exercised virtuosity," Cole says. "The Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells," Shaw says, "he annihilated himself." Wells resigned from the club in September 1908; Shaw stayed a member, but she left the Executive in April 1911. "God only knows if the Family should not have done it," says Wells, who wondered if the Old Gang should have given way to Wells a few years ago: "God only knows if the Society should not have done it." Although less popular—he attributed his growing years—Shaw remained a Fabian.

Shaw paid £1,000 for a one-fifth stake in the Webb's latest publishing venture, The New Statesman, a socialist weekly newspaper that appeared in April 1913, for one-fifth shares. He was a founding member, publicist, and a contributor who was largely anonymous. According to Shaw, he was soon at odds with Clifford Sharp, the magazine's editor, who by 1916 was refusing to publish anything by me."

Shaw's book Common Sense About the War, which claimed that the warring countries were also culpable, appeared after the First World War began in August 1914. Such a sight brought about a moment of fervent patriotism, offending several of Shaw's relatives; Ervine states that "his presence at any public function prompted the immediate departure of several of those present."

Shaw's errant reputation, his publicans were lauded by the British government, and Field Marshal Haig invited him to visit the Western Front battlefields in 1917. Shaw's 10,000-word study, which emphasized the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, but it became less of a lone voice. "A first-class moral resource to the common cause against junkerism" in April 1917, he joined the national consensus in recognizing America's entry into the war.

During the war, three short plays by Shaw were premièred. The Inca of Perusalem, which was published in 1915, had problems with the censorship for burlesquing, not only the criminal but also the British military command; it was staged in 1916 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. In the United Kingdom, O'Flaherty V.C., satirizing the government's treatment of Irish recruits, had been barred in the UK and was displayed at a Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917. Augustus Does His Bit, a virtuous farce, was granted a licence; in 1917, it appeared at the Royal Court.

Shaw had long advocated for the idea of Irish Home Rule in the British Empire (which he believed should become the British Commonwealth). In April 1916, he wrote scathingly in The New York Times about militant Irish nationalism: "In the point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing, these fellow patriots of mine leave the Bourbons nowhere." He argued that total independence was impractical; a relationship with a larger power (preferably England) was vital. Later this month, the Dublin Easter Rising took him by surprise. After its assassination by British forces, he expressed horror at the sum execution of the rebel leaders on the summary, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish unionism. He envisaged a federal system with national and imperial parliaments in how to settle the Irish Question (1917). Holroyd claims that by this time the liberist party Sinn Féin was on the rise, and Shaw's and other modest plans were forgotten.

Shaw resentment of the British government's coercion of Ireland during the war period, and he joined Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these activities. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 resulted in the partition of Ireland between north and south, which stunned Shaw. The former of whom had established the Irish Free State in 1922, a civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions. Shaw visited Dublin in August and met Michael Collins, who became the head of the Free State's Provisional Government. Shaw was greatly impressed by Collins and was saddened to learn that the Irish leader had been wounded and killed by anti-treaty forces three days later. "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last Saturday, and I'm so glad I did." I rejoice in his memory and vow not to be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his vain death. Shaw remained a British subject throughout his life, but in 1934 he adopted dual British-Irish nationality.

Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920, was Shaw's first major work after the war. It was released on Broadway in November and was coldly accepted; according to The Times: "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than normal to say, and it takes twice as long as normal to say it." Following the London premiere in October 1921, the Times agreed with Mr Shaw's comment: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long," the actor says, despite the fact that it contained "much entertainment and some economic reflection." Ervine of The Observer thought the performance was brilliant but acted ponderously, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword.

Back to Methuselah, written in 1918-1920 and staged in 1922, was Shaw's most significant theatrical performance. "Shaw's effort to save 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimist'" is Weintraub's description. From the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD, this series of five interrelated plays depicts growth and the effects of longevity. The five plays were found to be remarkably different in terms of quality and invention, according to critics. The original run was short, and it has been revived infrequently. In the midst of this "Metabiological Pentateuch"'s lengthy span, Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative energies. He was 60 years old and expected to write no more plays.

This mood was short-lived. By Pope Benedict XV in 1920 Joan of Arc; Shaw had long considered Joan of Arc a saint; she had a complex historical past, and her relationship with her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity"; In 1913, he had considered writing a play about her, but the canonization brought him right back to the subject. In the middle of 1923, he wrote Saint Joan, and the performance was premiered on Broadway in December. It was warmly welcomed there and at its London premiere in March. "Even the Nobel prize committee could no longer disregard Shaw after Saint Joan," Weintraub wrote. "Both idealism and humanity, the work's stimulating satire is often infused with a singular poetic elegance," the book award citation noted. He accepted the award but withdrew the cash prize because "my readers and my followers provide me with more than enough funds to satisfy my needs."

It was five years before Shaw wrote a play after Saint Joan. He spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus," a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, from 1924 to 1924. The book was released in 1928 and did well. Shaw's last Fabian tract, a reflection on the League of Nations, appeared at the end of the decade. He characterized the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as opposed to the old Foreign Office diplomacy," but that it had not yet become "Federation of the World."

Shaw returned to the theatre with "a political extravaganza," The Apple Cart, which was written in late 1928. It was unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist, anti-democratic route that appealed to younger audiences, according to Ervine's account. The premiere took place in Warsaw in June 1928, but the first British performance at Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural Malvern Festival was two months later. Sir Edward Elgar, the festival's other eminent creative artist, shared a deep love and admiration with whom Shaw shared a deep friendship and shared admiration. "A scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic thought," The Apple Cart to Elgar described as "a brief but tragic sex interlude."

Shaw began to lose faith in the Fabian gradualism ideology and became more interested in dictatorship in the 1920s. Mussolini's ascension to office in Italy in 1922 had boosted Mussolini's ascension to office, observing that, "indiscipline and chaos, and Parliamentary dysfunction, Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant." Shaw was able to tolerate certain authoritarian interwar regimes, according to Weintraub in his ODNB biographical sketch, Shaw's "flirration with authoritarian interwar regimes" took a long time to fade, and Beatrice Webb said he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.

Shaw's enthusiasm for the Soviet Union dates back to the 1920s, when he had praised Lenin as "Europe's most fascinating statesman." He had turned down many opportunities to visit in 1931, and he joined a movement led by Nancy Astor. The time-managed trip culminated in a long talk with Stalin, whom Shaw later referred to as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him. "I have seen all the 'errors' and I was terribly delighted by them" at a dinner held in his honor. In March 1933, Shaw was a cosignatory to a letter in The Manchester Guardian protesting Soviet achievements' continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too grand, no slander is too stale for work by the more impulsive components of the British press."

Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin expressed his growing conviction that tyrantism was the only viable political system. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler as "a very brave man, a very strong man," and professed himself to be England's sole writer not to Hitler. Stalin, whose draconian regime he praised uncritically throughout the decade, was his principal admiration. Shaw regarded the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a triumph for Stalin, who said he now had Hitler under his thumb, according to Shaw.

Too True to be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in Boston in February 1932, Shaw's first play of the decade was Too True to Be Good. The reception was unethical. Shaw had "yielded to the urge to write without having a subject," the play's Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times said, despite the fact that it was a "rambling and indifferently lengthy discussion." The play's correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune said that the bulk of the lecture was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that, although the audience adored the performance, it was still befuddled by it.

Shaw travelled extensively and often during the decade. The bulk of his trips were with Charlotte; she loved ocean liners and found some solace in writing during the long days at sea; and he loved being aboard. Despite his vehement opposition to South Africa's racial divisions, Shaw received a warm welcome in 1932. The couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise in December 1932. They arrived in San Francisco in March 1933, to begin Shaw's first trip to the United States. "Unfit to rule itself," the uncivilized nation has previously refused to go, "illiberal, superstitious, crude, lethal, anarchic, and arbitrary." He visited Hollywood, where he was stunned, and New York, where he spoke to a packed audience in the Metropolitan Opera House. Shaw was ecstatic when his ship sailed from New York harbour despite the press's invasive interest. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he encouraged his people to be more confident and loosen their reliance on trade with Britain. He completed two plays—The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and The Six of Calais—and began work on a new, The Millionaires, during his time at sea.

Shaw, despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, was passionate about cinema, and he wrote screenplays for prospective film adaptations of Pygmalion and Saint Joan in the middle of the decade. The former was never made, but Shaw entrusted the former to Gabriel Pascal, who created it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was certain that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but that it was powerless to refuse it from winning one Academy Award ("Oscar"; he referred to his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult as a result of such a report. He was the first person to be rewarded both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award. Anthony Holden notes that Pygmalion was shortly described as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy" in a 1993 study of the Oscars.

Cymbeline Refinished (1936), Geneva (1936), and In Good King Charles' Golden Days (1939), Shaw's final performances of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished (1936). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a commentary on European dictators, attracted more attention, much of it unfavourable. Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was also considered mild and almost sympathetic. In May 1940, the third play, a historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London. Even conservative audiences could have skepticism, James Agate said the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences might have protested, and although it was long and lacking in dramatic development, only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object, even though it was long and deprived in dramatic action. None of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime, even after their first runs.

Both Shaws began to feel ill-health as a result of the decade. Charlotte was increasingly ill as a result of Paget's bone disease, and he developed perforated anaemia. His therapy, which involved injections of concentrated animal liver, was fruitful, but militant vegetarians were alarmed by his disappearance of his vegetarian creed, causing him to be chastised.

Although Shaw's The Apple Cart had been shown with no enthusiasm, his older plays were revived in the West End during the Second World War, starring Edith Evans, John Gield, Deborah Kerr, and Robert Donat. Arms and the Man were staged in London in 1944, with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike, and Margaret Leighton in lead roles. Two touring companies presented his shows throughout the United Kingdom. Shaw didn't want him to write a new story, but he concentrated on prolific journalism, which was the cause of his fame. Pascal, Major Barbara (1941), was less successful artistically and commercially than Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited.

Shaw was accused of defeatism after the outbreak of war on September 3rd and Poland's rapid conquest of Poland, when he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference in a New Statesman column. Nonetheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated peace was impossible, he urged the neutral United States to participate in the conflict. The Shaws, who were in their mid-eighties, now live at Ayot St Lawrence full time. Even so, they were not immune to enemy air raids, and Nancy Astor, Cliveden, was on occasion with her country house, Nancy Astor. The Shaws migrated back to Whitehall Court, where medical assistance for Charlotte was more readily accessible. They were in 1943, the worst of the London bombings. Her illness worsened, and she died in September.

Everybody's Political What's What, Shaw's last political treatise, was published in 1944. Holroyd terms this piece "a rambling narrative" that repeats arguments he had received better elsewhere and then repeats itself. By the year's end, the book had sold 85,000 copies—85,000 copies by the end. Shaw accepted the formal condolences offered by the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin following Hitler's suicide in May 1945. Shaw condemned the postwar trials of the defeated German kings as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all criminals."

Pascal had a second chance to film Shaw's appearances in Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times more than three times more than doubled its initial budget and was rated as "the biggest financial tragedy in British cinema history." Critics in the United Kingdom were critical of the film, but American reviews were more helpful. Shaw believed the lavishness nullified the drama, and he called the film "a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille."

He accepted the liberation of Dublin in 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, and became the first honorary freeman of St Pancras, London. In the same year, the British government asked Shaw formally if he would accept the Order of Merit. He resigned, believing that an author's reputation could only be determined by a posthumous decision in history. The crime of Imprisonment was published in 1946, but Shaw's preface had contributed 20 years to a study of prison conditions 20 years before. It was widely lauded; a researcher in the American Journal of Public Health considered it essential reading for any student of the American criminal justice system.

Shaw continued to write into his nineties. Buoyant Billions (1947), his last full-length performance; Farfetched Fables (1948), a collection of six short plays reimagining some of his earlier works, including evolution; a comedy play for puppets; and Why She Would Not (1950), a ten-minute work written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday, which Shaw referred to as "a little comedic."

Shaw's Corner's gardens were always in bloom. He died as a result of an accident while removing a tree at the age of ninety-four. On November 6, 1950, he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.

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