The Admirable Bashville

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is revered as one of the great British dramatists, credited not only with memorable works, but the revival of the then-suffering English theatre. Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, left mostly to his own devices after his mother ran off to London to pursue a musical career. He educated himself for the most part, and eventually worked for a real estate agent. This experience founded in him a concern for social injustices, seeing poverty and general unfairness afoot, and would go on to address this in many of his works. In 1876, Shaw joined his mother in London where he would finally attain literary success. "The Admirable Bashville" is a short play based on Shaw's fourth novel "Cashel Byron's Profession", which was written in 1882 and later serialized. Though the novel was generally overlooked in England, it became surprisingly successful in the United States some years later. The novel and the play tell the story of Cashel Byron, a world champion prizefighter and his attempts to woo wealthy aristocrat Lydia Carew while hiding his illegal profession from her.