His first years in London were a period of dire poverty. This was of his own choosing. He studiously refused to try for an opening in journalism, instead he devoted himself, sedulously, to writing a series of novels all rejected by publishers. Fortunately, he neither smoked nor drank nor ate meat and was able to survive on sixpence a day. Twenty years later, he was to write, "Now when people approach me with the unfashionableness of my attire they forget the contrast with the indescribable seediness of those days when I trimmed my cuffs to the quick with my scissors and wore a black coat green with decay."

The critic, William Archer, made his acquaintance when Shaw was about 26. His interest was excited not by Shaw’s appearance but by the literature to which he devoted himself day after day in the British Museum Reading Room. He would read Marx’s Das Kapital in French and the orchestral scores of Wagner. His clothes were shabby but not threadbare. Archer would often go to Shaw’s little room, not far from the Museum, to find him cooking frugal meal of porridge on his gas fire. Shaw, he says, described himself, aptly enough, as "looming like a damaged brown paper parcel."

It was Archer who eventually forced him to earn some money through journalism. For Shaw it was the easiest thing in the world because whatever he wrote was brilliant. He had a wonderful gift of clear exposition and analysis. The difficulty according to Archer was to induce Shaw to keep his employment and not fall out with the editor. Archer got him assignments as a reviewer of books for The World and then the regular job as its art critic. When the post of a musical critic of The World fell vacant, Archer secured it for Shaw by the simple process of telling the editor that Shaw was the most competent and the most brilliant writer on music, then living in England. By the time he was 28 Shaw had written pamphlets on everything from "Home Rule" to "the Religion of the Pianaforte’. His time was filled with lecturing and local electioneering for which he received no money.

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After his stint as an art critic, he was offered the position of a political correspondent, but he declined because "he didn’t wish to end up in parliament". It was a stroke of luck that Frank Harris - a man as opposed to Shaw’s ideology as his physique - who had taken over the editorship of The Saturday Review, offered him the post of its drama critic.

Shaw had looked forward to having a regular theatre column. He had already left "all the foes of musical light as dead as a pen could kill them", and was now ready to have a shot at the sterile and moribund stuff that passed for drama in the London of the 1890s. He had a qualm that delayed his acceptance of the theatre critic’s position and that was the question of whether a playwright should become a critic. As a dramatist he could hardly hope to have his own plays accepted by the management whom, as a critic, he might severely pan. It is to Shaw’s eternal credit that he never compromised his integrity as a critic. "I enjoyed a first night as a surgeon enjoys an operation."

The English theatre at the time was languishing at the end of nearly two centuries of mindlessness. When Shaw’s remorseless weekly operations began, the readers began to sense the empty-headed entertainment which made up the stock-in-trade of the West-End theatre.

It was common practice in those days to open the evening’s dramatic presentation with some kind of a curtain-raiser to keep the gallery amused whilst waiting of the ‘Lords and Ladies’ to finish their dinner and get down to their reserved seats. It was only after they were comfortably ensconced that the main play began.

It was always the same play either in the routine of a melodrama or a farce. There were raving soliloquies accompanied by harps and violins, writhing, as Shaw put it, "like a heap of trodden worms". When it was pointed out to Shaw that the impresarios and the popular writers of melodrama were deeply annoyed by what he wrote, he retorted, "Those who think the things I say are severe or even malicious should just see the things I do not say." Shaw’s writings paved the way for a significant change in the theatrical fare of England.

As a playwright Shaw did not make a ‘hit’ with his first two or three plays. ‘The way to write one good book is to write 19 bad ones’ certainly applied to his dramatic work. He admitted to Archer that though he had a great genius for dialogue, he was not very strong in the matter of construction. The first play he ever wrote was based on a plot given to him by Archer. It did not make any impression. His talent as a dramatist only emerged with Candida which was probably his third or fourth full-length play.

It was not until the first decade of the 20^th century that Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. He was 44 when success embraced him. Fourteen of his major plays were staged at the Royal Court theatre within a span of four or five years. His very first successful play Jon Bull’s other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, was seen by all the important people in London. The story goes that the King, Edward VII, saw the play and laughed so much that he broke his chair.

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Shaw does not live because he brought new ideas to the English theatre. He lives, and will live, because - marvellous dramatist that he was - he revelled in the astonishment of human nature. I like Shaw for his quirks. He adored Shelley and despised Tennyson because Shelly was a vegetarian and Tennyson wasn’t. I like him because he sees things not as they are but as it suits him to think they are. I like him because he was an incorrigible jester, and because he has given us an astounding number of dramatic creatures - Sergious, Ceasar and St Joan, to name but three - without whose acquaintance our lives would be poorer.

Since his death Shaw has been rated as second only to Shakespeare among English dramatists. His influence over generations of English speaking dramatists has been enormous. The word ‘Shaviana’ has entered the English language as encapsulating Shaw’s ideas and his means of expressing them.

G.B.S is probably the only Nobel Prize winner who accepted the award but rejected the monetary prize that goes with it on the grounds that "My readers and my audience provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs."

(Concluded)