Only by saying something to the age can one say something to posterity. Many of the next generations have gotten his point, and Shaw’s argument-that he who writes for all time will discover that he writes for no time-seems to have been borne out. He had no desire to be a martyr and insisted that, though his contemporaries might merely laugh at his plays, “a joke is an earnest in the womb of time.” The next generation would get his point, even if the current generation was only entertained. Though he preached socialism, creative evolution, the abolition of prisons, and real equality for women, and railed against the insincerity of motives for war, he did so as a jester in some of the finest comedy ever written. In startling contrast to his contemporary Oscar Wilde and Wilde’s fellow aesthetes, Shaw asserted that he would not commit a single sentence to paper for art’s sake alone yet he beat the aesthetes at their own artistic game. He was a didact, a preacher who readily acknowledged that the stage was his pulpit. Instead of fitting himself to this unreal mold, Shaw offered reality in all its forms: social, political, economic, and religious. The pap on which its audiences had been fed, not very different from television fare today, provided a soothing escape from the realities of the working world. George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) came to an English theater settled into the well-made play, a theater that had not known a first-rate dramatist for more than a century.
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