Kapital convinced him that socialism was the answer to society's problems. With the
socialist economist Sidney Webb and his wife, also a socialist economist, Beatrice
Webb, Shaw joined the Fabian Society, a socialist organization that had committed
itself to gradual reform rather than revolution. Shaw quickly became a leader in the
group and its principal spokesperson. His pronouncements and tracts had a wit absent
from most political writing. In Fabian Tract No. 2 (1884), for example, he argued that
nineteenth-century capitalism had divided society 'into hostile classes, with large
appetites and no dinners at one extreme and large dinners and no appetites at the
other.' Though painfully shy, he disciplined himself to become an accomplished pub
lic speaker. Accepting fees from no one, he spoke everywhere, stipulating only that he could speak on whatever subject he liked.
Meanwhile, his acquaintance with William Archer led him to journalism. He worked first as an art critic, then as a music critic, championing Wagner's operas and
introducing a new standard of wit and judgment to music reviewing, writing for exam
ple of a hapless soprano who 'fell fearlessly on Mozart and was defeated with heavy
loss to the hearers,' of a corps de ballet that 'wandered about in the prompt corner
as if some vivisector had removed from their heads that portion of the brain which
enables us to find our way out the door,' and of Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden'
quartet, which makes one 'reconciled to Death and indifferent to the Maiden.' Shaw
then turned to drama criticism, where he later described his work as 'a siege laid to
the theatre of the XlXth Century by an author who had to cut his own way into it at
the point of the pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat.' Just as he had
championed Wagner's music, he now championed the plays of the Norwegian dram
atist, Henrik Ibsen. In 1891 he published The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in which, in
setting out the reasons for his admiration of Ibsen, he defined the kind of drama he
wanted to write. In the first ten years of his life in London, Shaw had written five unsuccessful
novels. When he turned to drama in the 1890s, he found his medium. Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), dealt with the problem of slum landlords. Though it ran for only two performances, Shaw's career as a dramatist was launched. In the course of his career he wrote more than fifty plays. Among the most famous are Mrs Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894), The Devil's Disciple (1896), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), Androcles and the Lion (1912), Pygmalion (1912; later the basis of the musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (1919), Back to Methuselah (1920), and Saint Joan (1923). (Because the production and publication history of Shaw's plays is so complex, this list gives the date of composition for each.) Shaw at first had difficulty getting his plays performed. Therefore, in 1898 he decided to publish them in book form as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, for which he wrote a didactic preface? the first of many that he provided for his plays. Then, in 1904, the producer and Shakespearean scholar Harley Granville-Barker put on Candida at the Boyal Court Theatre, which he was managing. The play was a success, and Shaw went on to work with Barker in creating the Boyal Court's long-standing reputation as the center for avant-garde drama in London.
In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw defines the elements of the kind of theater he aspired to create:
first, the introduction of the discussion and its development until it so over
spreads and interpenetrates the action that it finally assimilates it, making play
.
BERNARD SHAW / 1745
and discussion practically identical; and second, as a consequence of making the
spectators themselves the persons of the drama, and the incidents of their own
lives its incidents, the disuse of the old stage tricks by which audiences had to
be induced to take an interest in unreal people and improbable circumstances. Instead of these 'tricks,' Shaw wished to pioneer 'a forensic technique of recrimi
nation, disillusion, and penetration through ideals to the truth, with a free use of all
the rhetorical and lyrical arts of the orator, the preacher, the pleader, and the rhap
sodist.' He created a drama of ideas, in which his characters strenuously argue points
of view that justify their social positions?whether that of the prostitute in Mrs War
ren's Profession or of the munitions manufacturer in Major Barbara. His object is to
attack the complacencies and conventional moralism of his audience. By the rhetor
ical brilliance of his dialogue and by surprising reversals of plot conventions, Shaw
manipulates his audience into a position of uncomfortable sympathy with points of
