In 1898 Shaw's health yielded under the weight of his work. He recovered after his marriage in that year to Charlotte Payne Townshead, but did not resume his former incessant activity on the platform. He became, instead, a co-opted member of the Vestry of St. Pancras, now the St. Pancras Borough Council. To his six years' work on that body we owe his Common Sense of Municipal Trading. He contested the County Council seat ; but the result confirmed his conviction that the Conservatives would vote against him and none of the Liberals for him. This was his only open candidature for popular election. His chief political work was done in the committees of the Fabian Society. By this time he was well known as a brilliant and witty critic and debater, but was hardly known at all as an author, although, in addition to his novels, he had written The Sanity of Art (1908), a reply to Dr. Max Nordau's Degeneration; The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) ; The Quintessence of lbsenism (1891) ; and four plays.
But from 1894 his rise to world fame was steady and swift. He now definitely was a dramatist, publishing his plays for general reading (then an innovation in London) with elaborate prefaces on political, social and finally on religious and biological questions, which were quite independent of the plays to which they were attached. Thus he became known as an unacted dramatist before he was conclusively accepted on the London stage after His vogue as an acted dramatist began in New York and Ger many about six years earlier.
The first of these plays was finished in 1892, seven years after it had been begun in collaboration with William Archer. Shaw it seemed, could write "incomparable" dialogue, but "construction was not his strong point"; Archer "could not write dialogue a bit, but . . . considered himself a born constructor." They agreed to pool their abilities and make a play. Archer constructed "a twaddling cup-and-saucer comedy . . . to be called Rhinegold." But Shaw held that plot was the curse of fiction, literary or dra matic; and Archer was the apostle of plot and construction. Consequently the plot, in Shaw's hands, underwent such a change that Archer retired from the collaboration, nor did he ever ex pect to see the play completed. Seven years later, to help the Independent theatre out of an emergency, Shaw finished the play —a treatise on slum-property—and it was performed for the first time under the management of Mr. J. T. Grein at the Roy alty theatre in London in Dec. 1892. Shaw was then in his thirty seventh year. Archer, writing in The World, earnestly endeav oured to dissuade Shaw from following a career as a dramatist, "for which he has no special ability, and some constitutional dis abilities." In 1893 he wrote The Philanderer, a topical comedy on Ibsenism and the "new woman," for the same theatre, but the piece proved technically unsuitable for Mr. Grein's company. To
replace it Mr. Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren's Profession, which was refused a license by the Lord Chamberlain and was not presented until Jan. 5, 1902, when it was privately given by the Stage Society at the New Lyric theatre. When it was played in New York by the late Arnold Daly's company in 1905 the actors were prosecuted. These three plays were classed by the author as "unpleasant plays" in the printed version. Arms and the Man was produced at the Avenue theatre (April 21, 1894) by Miss Florence Farr, who was experimenting on the lines of the Inde pendent theatre, and by Mr. Richard Mansfield at the Herald Square theatre, New York (Sept. 17, 1894). The scene was laid in Bulgaria, the piece being a satire on romanticism, a destructive criticism on military "glory." Candida was written in 1894 and won a decisive success in Germany with Agnes Sorma as Candida ; but the London managers would have none of it. It won Shaw many friends as a vindication of the woman in the home.
He had found no regular English audience when he published Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (2 vols.), in 1898, and his pieces first became well known to the ordinary playgoer by the perform ances given at the Royal Court theatre under the management of T. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker. Man and Superman (published in 1903) was produced there on May 23, 1905, in a necessarily abridged form, with Granville-Barker in the part of John Tanner, the author of the "Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion," printed as an appendix to the play. A great success was John Bull's Other Island, dealing satirically with Ire land, as she was before receiving autonomy. Major Barbara (Court theatre, Nov. 1905), announced as a "discussion in three acts," placed the Salvation Army on the stage. The last of the plays, Saint Joan, was written in 1923. It will be seen, then, that the bulk of Shaw's dramatic work was done after he had passed his 4oth birthday, and that half of it was done after he had reached the age at which Shakespeare died. It will also be seen that the three plays which are now considered to be his greatest, Heart break House, Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan, were written when he was well over 6o years of age. Three of the plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, and Press Cuttings were banned by the censor, but the ban was subsequently lifted from them. Passion, Poison and Petrifaction is a burlesque melodrama written for the benefit of the Actors' Orphanage. The Interlude at the Playhouse is a topical prologue quoted at length in the Daily Mail, Jan. 29, 1907, and not otherwise published. His political writings, in addition to a number of Fabian tracts and pamphlets, include Common Sense about the War, Peace Conference Proposals, and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.