Nobel Prize for literature
In 1925, George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy. The award recognised his contribution to drama and his distinctive use of language and ideas across plays such as Man and Superman and Saint Joan. Shaw accepted the prize itself, but declined the accompanying money, later directing it towards a fund to support the translation of Swedish literature into English, helping to make Swedish writing more accessible to English-speaking readers.
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​Click on the Nobel Prize Logo below to explore The Nobel Prize website pages dedicated to Bernard Shaw.
Bernard Shaw's Nobel Prize
By Michel Pharand
Nobel Centenary
This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925, for which the Swedish Academy received twenty-five letters nominating twenty-one writers. Among them were Thomas Hardy, Georg Brandes, Paul Claudel, and Sigrid Undset. The prize went to George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), its twenty-fifth recipient and the third English-language author to receive it, after Rudyard Kipling (1907) and W.B. Yeats (1923). Kipling would live to age seventy, Yeats to seventy-three. The 1925 laureate was a spry seventy years young and would live—and continue writing—for almost another quarter-century, reaching ninety-four.
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According to Stanley Weintraub, Shaw relegated his numerous congratulatory letters to the dustbin—all except one: “Allow me to offer my felicitations to you on the honour you have received,” wrote James Joyce from Paris, “and to express my satisfaction that the award of the Nobel prize for literature has gone once more to a distinguished fellow townsman.”
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Although the award was for 1925, the official announcement of Shaw’s laureateship was made only on 11 November 1926. The formal ceremony, which Shaw declined to attend, was held in Stockholm on 10 December. However, he duly accepted the Nobel Prize medal and diploma in London in February 1927.
This highest of honours, bestowed upon the reluctant—if at times recalcitrant—playwright, would have not a few unintended consequences….
Alfred Nobel
Swedish chemist, engineer, and inventor Alfred Nobel (1833–96) had patented dynamite in 1867 and, in his will, specified that his fortune be used to endow a series of prizes to be awarded on those who confer the “greatest benefit on mankind.” The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, on the fifth anniversary of his death.
Nobel also served as a prototype for wealthy munitions manufacturer Andrew Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara (staged 1905, published 1907). Having inherited an armaments firm from his father, Alfred Nobel built it up, writes Weintraub, “to enormous size through his hardheadedness in selling weapons and patents, like Undershaft, to all comers regardless of politics. […] His motto ‘My home is where my work is, and my work is everywhere’ would have pleased the motto-loving Undershaft.” Undershaft’s motto is “Unashamed.”
Evaluating Shaw for the Nobel Prize
Little has been written about the years-long prelude to Shaw’s winning the Nobel Prize. His great friend, the distinguished classical scholar and Oxford don Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), had nominated Shaw for the prize as early as 1911. By then, the prolific Shaw had written five (unpublished) novels, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, art criticism, music criticism, theatre criticism, and over a dozen plays, among them Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara, and The Doctor’s Dilemma.
(Although this was a substantial body of work—Shaw was only in his mid-fifties—yet to come were Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Saint Joan, written in 1912, 1916–17, 1918–20, and 1923, respectively.)
In 1911, the task of evaluating Shaw’s achievement fell to Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864–1931), whose thirty-page report has been ably summarized by Ishrat Lindblad. Although he dismissed Man and Superman as one of Shaw’s lighter comedies, Karlfeldt wrote that Widowers’ Houses “speaks with a remarkable blend of irony and indulgence”; Mrs Warren’s Profession is “a drama of profound spiritual tragic dimensions”; Candida is one of Shaw’s “most successful artistic creations”; in Caesar and Cleopatra “content and form are successfully integrated”; and Major Barbara combines “biting irony with human kindness which is the essence of its author’s own manner.” In terms of overall characterization, Karlfeldt found that Shaw “endows his creations with life and he achieves this without any consistent or schematic adherence to certain pronounced features. On the contrary, his people are like people in real life, unpredictable, given to impulses that come from inner or outer forces.” Unfortunately, Karlfeldt’s generally positive assessment did not persuade the Nobel Committee. The 1911 prize went to Belgian Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck.
Shaw was proposed and discussed again in 1912, 1921, 1924, 1925, and 1926. In 1921, the expert appointed to judge Shaw’s work was Per Hallström (1866–1960). Hallström—himself a poet, dramatist, and short story writer—had serious reservations: Shaw is “at his best as a writer of prefaces,” he wrote, and “has nothing new to offer the drama”; Candida “suffers from the same chill and lack of emotion as his other plays”; the ideas in Major Barbara are “unconvincing although consistent for Shaw”; and in Pygmalion and Heartbreak House, “Shaw resorts to the creation of bizarre and puzzling figures.” In short, writes Lindblad, Hallström found Shaw “too coldblooded and too rational to give his work emotional depth or to be able to create convincing characters.” He thus relegated Shaw to third place, after H.G. Wells (a four-time nominee) and John Galsworthy (the 1932 recipient). The 1921 prize went to best-selling French novelist Anatole France.
And the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925 goes to … Saint Joan
Then came Saint Joan, which premiered in New York City on 28 December 1923 and in London on 26 March 1924. Hallström was as negative in his 1924 report on Saint Joan as he had been three years earlier in evaluating Shaw’s other works. This time, he noted Shaw’s “mania for contradiction” and dismissed the play as “too logically dry and with too little dramatic content.” And even though Saint Joan does highlight Shaw’s “youthful idealism, high seriousness, fresh and pure humaneness, goodness, yes, even delicacy,” and although Shaw is “equipped with an intelligence that is in many respects brilliant, […] as an artist he remains too uneven and unpredictable in his self-glorification.”
It appeared Shaw would be passed over yet again.
However, when Hallström saw the play performed at the Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern (Royal Dramatic Theatre) in 1925, he was won over. Finding Shaw’s saint “gripping and vivid,” Hallström now believed that “Shaw’s works have played an important role in our time and will probably retain their historic significance,” noting that “his non-dramatic works are amongst the best of their kind.”
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As Gunnar Ahlström (1906–82), director of the Swedish Institute for Cultural Relations in London, reports, the play’s “qualités purement artistiques” (purely artistic qualities) managed to overcome Hallström’s reluctance: in his presentation speech (see below), his early reservations were “adroitement tournées en louages” (skilfully turned into praises). Moreover, Ahlström points out that Shaw had also found an influential ally in Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931), Archbishop of Uppsala. Having denounced the “crude and offensive, cynical and raw indelicacies” of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion in 1917 (resulting in the play closing in only thirteen days), Söderblom now recognized “la grandeur du drame de Jeanne la Pucelle” (the greatness of the drama of Joan the Maid).
Hence it was that our Irish playwright obtained his Swedish award thanks to a French saint. As Shaw wrote to actress Edith Evans, “I am in the very odor of sanctity after St. Joan.”
Per Hallström on Nobel Laureate Shaw
​The newly-converted Per Hallström summarized Shaw’s achievements at some length in his 10 December presentation speech. He began by stating that Shaw’s radical ideas, “combined with a ready wit, a complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the merriest humour—all gathered together in an extravagance which has scarcely ever before appeared in literature.” He pointed out that Shaw’s “rollicking gaiety” so puzzled people that he was forced to declare “that his careless attitude was a mere stratagem: he had to fool people into laughing so they should not hit upon the idea of hanging him.” Calling Shaw “a prophet of revolutionary doctrines,” “an opponent of superficial tradition,” and the creator of “a new kind of dramatic art” imbued with “the bellicosity, the mobility, and the multiplicity of his ideas,” Hallström praised the “genuine psychological insight” of Plays Unpleasant.
He went on to list the salient merits of some of Shaw’s notable plays: Arms and the Man (“an attempt to demonstrate the flimsiness of military and heroic romance, in contrast to the sober and prosaic work of peace”); Candida (“a kind of Doll’s House with a happy ending”); Man and Superman (which proclaims “that woman, because of her resolute and undisguisedly practical nature, is destined to be the superman whose coming has been so long prophesied with such earnest yearning”); Major Barbara (which discusses “the problem of whether evil ought to be conquered by the inner way, the spirit of joyful and religious sacrifice; or by the outer way, the eradication of poverty, the real foundation of all social defects”); Heartbreak House (“where he sought to embody—always in the light of the comic spirit—every kind of perversity, artificiality, and morbidity that flourishes in a state of advanced civilization”); Back to Methuselah (whose thesis that “man must have his natural age doubled many times over in order to acquire enough sense to manage his world, furnished but little hope and little joy”); and Saint Joan (a work that “stands more or less alone as a revelation of heroism in an age hardly favourable to genuine heroism”).
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Hallström concluded his encomium by stating that Shaw’s “struggle against traditional conceptions that rest on no solid basis and against traditional feelings that are either spurious or only half genuine, have borne witness to the loftiness of his aims. Still more striking is his humanity; and the virtues to which he has paid homage in his unemotional way—spiritual freedom, honesty, courage, and clearness of thought—have had so very few stout champions in our times.”
All this was a far cry from his evaluation, a mere four years earlier, of Shaw as having “nothing new to offer the drama”!
Shaw accepts the Nobel “Award”
Meanwhile, on 18 November, one week following the 11 November announcement and one month prior to Hallström’s speech, Shaw had duly acknowledged the Nobel Committee’s decision in a lengthy letter addressed “To the Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy,” which was none other than his 1911 champion, Erik Axel Karlfeldt:
The Award of the Nobel Prize for the year 1925 to an English work is a very welcome reinforcement of the cordial understanding between British and Swedish culture established by the famous bequest of Alfred Nobel. It will not be lost on my native country, Ireland, which already claims one distinguished Nobel prizeman. It is naturally very gratifying to me personally that it has fallen to my lot to furnish the occasion for such an act of international appreciation.
I must, however, discriminate between the award and the prize. For the award I have nothing but my best thanks. But after the most careful consideration I cannot persuade myself to accept the money. My readers and audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs; and as to my renown it is greater than is good for my spiritual health. Under these circumstances the money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached shore in safety. I, therefore, respectfully and gratefully beg the Swedish Royal Academy to confer on me the additional and final honour of classing my works in that respect hors concours.
Should this event have been unforeseen and unprovided for by the founder of the prize, it may have the effect of placing at the disposal of the Nobel directors a sum to which they are not bound by the difficult and occasionally impossible conditions of prize-giving. May I, therefore, seize this opportunity to call the attention of the board to the following consideration?
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Some of the most advantageous sites in London are being rapidly filled up with agencies in which not only the British Dominions Oversea, but the European Powers, exhibit their choicest products and advertise the attractions and travelling facilities of their countries. Fruits, cereals, stuffed animals and birds, fabrics of all sorts tempt the importer. The one thing that is rarely exhibited is a book. Sweden invites us to buy her paper, but there is nothing printed on it: the function of Swedish paper, it seems, is to wrap Australian apples in. And yet Sweden’s most valuable export is her literature, of which we in Britain are deplorably ignorant.
The Swedish Minister in London, Baron Palmstierna, who is a proved friend of British men of letters and an indefatigable champion of Swedish literature in our country, has informed me of Swedish books of great value which for lack of means cannot be translated and of organs working for the intellectual intercourse between us which are in need of support.
I therefore venture to propose to you that the money which accompanies the award be funded by the Royal Academy or by the Swedish Minister in London, and the annual proceeds be used to encourage intercourse and understanding in literature and art between Sweden and the British Isles.
It would be desirable for many reasons that the Swedish Minister should be a member of the board controlling the fund.
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G. Bernard Shaw
Baron Erik Kule Palmstierna (1877–1959), Ambassador of Sweden to the United Kingdom from 1920 to 1937, duly delivered the Nobel Prize medal and diploma to Shaw in London in February 1927. The framed two-page diploma is now in the Museum Room at Shaw’s Corner, in Ayot St Lawrence. The “lifebelt” that Shaw said came too late totalled 118,165 Swedish kronor, worth approximately £6,500 at that time. Today’s equivalent would be an astounding £550,000. As is well documented, Shaw often complained that too much of his income was being siphoned away by the government. Gunnar Ahlström points out that, given Shaw’s fear of “l’intervention du fisc” (tax interference), a “package” containing £6,500 was no less terrifying to him than a “bombe à la dynamite” placed in the basement of 10 Adelphi Terrace!
The Nobel Prize money: “a hideous calamity”
​“A consequence of the Nobel Prize laureateship,” writes Dan Laurence, “was for Shaw an insufferable celebrity and an unprecedented invasion of privacy.” In no time, Shaw was deluged with letters worldwide from countless aspirants to his Nobel money. An exasperated Shaw wrote to his American biographer Archibald Henderson: “After the executors of the inventor of dynamite awarded me the Nobel prize […] some fifty thousand people wrote to me to say that as the greatest of men I must see that the best thing I could do with the prize was to give it to them. Instead, I gave it back. Then they all wrote again to say that if I could afford to do that, I could afford to lend them 1,500 pounds for three years. […] I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite. But only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize!”
He wrote in a similar vein to his French translator Augustin Hamon on 2 February 1927: “The Nobel Prize was a hideous calamity for me. All Europe wrote to me for loans, mostly for the entire sum, when the news was announced. When the further news came that I had refused it another million or so wrote to say that if I was rich enough to throw away money like that, I could afford to adopt their children, or pay off their mortgages on their houses, or provide them with a dot [dowry], or let them have £xxxx to be repaid punctually next May, or to publish a priceless book explaining the mystery of the universe. It says a good deal for female virtue that only two women proposed that I should take them on as mistresses.”
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Two months later, on 9 April, Shaw told Hamon that “my disposal of the Nobel money was not a political demonstration. I should not have accepted the money at all but for the fact that my refusal created an impossible situation in which the money was hung up in the air belonging to nobody. […] I accepted the money formally in order to be able to give it to him [Palmstierna] to obtain decent translations of Strindberg and other modern Swedish authors. I was determined that the money should be virtually returned to Sweden or used for Swedish purposes under Swedish public control, as the spectacle of other nations begging prizes from a Swedish dynamite millionaire for their art and literature and science is a revolting one. So Palmstierna and I devised the trust, making it as undemocratic—that is, as independent—as possible; and he and his successors can now do as they like with the money subject to the general terms of the trust.”
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That “trust” was the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation (ASLF), which would fund the publication of a book of new Strindberg translations, EASTER and Other Plays (Jonathan Cape, 1929). In 1991, the ASLF also instituted the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize: £2,000 “awarded every three years to a translator, for the best translation into English of a Swedish work, published for the first time by a UK publisher.” The prize, now £3,000 and biennial, is administered by the Society of Authors, founded in 1884. (Shaw joined in 1897 and was elected to the management committee in 1905).
It should be noted that Shaw’s new-found celebrity, however “insufferable” he may have found it, also led to a tremendous increase in world income. “In America sales of his published works soared,” writes Dan Laurence, “and several were circulated in tens of thousands by the Book-of-the-Month Club. In England his thirty-volume Collected Edition [1930–32], following a single advertisement, was oversubscribed.”
Shaw’s “calamity” would become the Inland Revenue’s bounty.
Shaw and Strindberg
Although not mentioned by name in Shaw’s letter to the Permanent Secretary, Shaw likely had in mind as a master of “Swedish literature” the iconoclastic playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist August Strindberg (1849–1912), author of over sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, history, and politics. Some of his most famous plays include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1908).
Shaw had recognized Strindberg’s talent early on. In 1903, he lamented to actress Janet Achurch that Strindberg, “a great man, is still unexploited in this country,” albeit admitting to Henderson in 1905 that he had read only The Diary of a Madman and The Father. But as Laurence points out, most of Strindberg’s plays “were known to Shaw only through their German translations.” Hence Shaw’s wish to obtain “decent” English-language translations.
In 1908, while on a two-week tour of Scandinavia and Germany, Shaw and his wife arranged to meet the “great man” in Stockholm, although communicating with Strindberg proved challenging. On 16 July, Shaw told critic William Archer that he’d only managed to do so using “a fearful lingo, half French, half German.” “We found Strindberg in a mood of extreme and difficult shyness,” he recalled in 1927, “but his sapphire-blue eyes were irresistible; the man of genius was unmistakable. […] He was in love with his Little Theatre, where we saw his Froken Julie [Miss Julie] next night.” (Strindberg had founded the Intima Teatern in 1907 for the production of his plays.)
On 16 March 1910, Shaw would write to Strindberg at great length, summarizing what had occurred on the dramatic scene since their meeting two years earlier, events “which may have the effect of rescuing England from its present condition of darkness concerning your works.” Shaw assured him that “there is only one name that strikes the European imagination more than Maeterlinck, and that is Strindberg.”
Nonetheless, England lagged far behind Europe in staging Strindberg’s works. Aside from a 23 July 1911 private performance by the Adelphi Play Society, London audiences would wait until 1927 to see The Father staged at the Apollo Theatre, in a production starring Shaw’s close friend Robert Loraine.
George Bernard Shaw’s Nobel Prize Medal for Literature awarded in 1925. Photo credit: Sailko. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
The Nobel Prize medal: “eight ounces of solid gold”
​A decade after his laureateship, on 24 July 1936, Shaw wrote to actor Ernest Thesiger from Malvern describing the Nobel Prize medal as follows: “Eight ounces of solid gold, with a stamp of less merit than a postmark. I haven't the faintest notion of where it is; and its possession has never given me a moment’s gratification.”
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On the other hand, gratification by the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation is ongoing. A century ago, Shaw lamented that Britain was “deplorably ignorant” of Sweden’s literature. Today, the ASLF continues to sponsor English translations of works by Swedish authors and, as its website states, to promote “cultural exchange between Sweden and the UK, with a focus on literature” - all thanks to George Bernard Shaw’s 1925 Nobel Prize “lifebelt.”
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