Bernard Shaw's beginnings on the London Stage

Abstract

IN 1892, AT THE AGE of thirty-six, Bernard Shaw was a notorious socialist and a bachelor, living with his musical mother and sister in Lon? don. He had begun paying his way seven years before as a critic of art; now he assayed music; soon, in 1894, it was to be weekly evaluation of the drama. Four of his six novels?five of them written while his mother supported him?had appeared obscurely and unprofitably. In 1891 a young Dutch friend and fellow critic, Jacob T. Grein, had produced Ibsen's Ghosts to inaugurate the new Independent Theatre in support of Shaw's almost solitary campaign for the New Drama. Grein sought but could not at first find an adequate English play in the new vein. "This was not to be endured," Shaw later recalled. "I had rashly taken up the case, and rather than let it collapse, I manufactured the evidence."1 He had embarked upon Widowers1 Houses in 1885 only to lay it aside uncompleted; he now finished it, and Grein produced it on 9 December 1892 at the Royalty Theatre, on quite unfashionable Dean Street in Soho. It was Shaw's first appear? ance on any stage. The play was performed only twice, semiprivately, and failed signally, even in the estimation of the other two leading avant-garde critics of the time and place, Shaw's close friends, Ar? thur B. Walkley and William Archer. Said Walkley in the Speaker: