Bernard Shaw acknowledged no authority — Shakespeare included. "Bardolatry," the worship of the Bard, struck him as a species of religious superstition. Yet he himself wrote more than fifty plays, and won both the Nobel Prize and an Oscar (for the screenplay of Pygmalion).
He was born in Dublin in 1856. His father drank; his mother went off to London to pursue a singing career. At twenty, Shaw followed her. Nine years of penury, five unpublished novels. Then came criticism, journalism, socialism, the Fabian Society.
Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, Major Barbara — plays in which people talk wittily and think aloud about the things usually left unsaid. He was a vegetarian, an anti-war activist, and a provocateur.
He died in 1950, at ninety-four, after falling from a tree he was trying to prune in his garden.