George Bernard Shaw Trivia
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60 free George Bernard Shaw trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This George Bernard Shaw trivia quiz covers the Dublin-born playwright who dominated English-language theatre for half a century. The easy questions handle the essentials: where he was born, the play that became My Fair Lady, the prize he won in 1925 and the remarkable age he reached. From there it moves into his London years as a music critic, novelist and Fabian pamphleteer, his marriage to a rich Irishwoman and the plays that made his name. The harder end is for theatre lovers and literature students: the pen-name he used at The Star, the play that ran 622 performances, the king who laughed so hard he broke his chair, the play banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the five-play cycle that reaches the year 31,920, the screenplay Oscar he called an insult, his admiration for Stalin, his refusal of the Order of Merit, the alphabet his will paid for and the tree-pruning fall that ended his life. His opinions on vaccination, spelling and vegetarianism get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Shaw, his plays and his circle before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare and Irish literature quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Shaw born in 1856?
Dublin
Dublin: Shaw said he owed 'much of the only real education I ever got' to the city's public art gallery, and he remembered it in his will.
Q 02Which form of his name did Shaw insist on for the title pages of his plays?
Bernard Shaw
Bernard Shaw: he said nothing enraged him more than to be 'Georged in print', though he happily signed his reviews with all three initials, G.B.S.
Q 03About how many plays did Shaw write in his lifetime?
About 60
About 60: counts run from fifty to sixty-two; his first was not staged until he was 36, and he was still writing them at 93.
Q 04Shaw refused his 1925 Nobel money, which instead funded what?
Swedish translations
Swedish translations: Shaw said his readers and audiences already gave him 'more than sufficient money for my needs', so the prize set up a foundation to put Swedish literature into English.
Q 05Shaw was the first person to win both a Nobel Prize and what other award?
An Oscar
An Oscar: it came for his 1938 Pygmalion screenplay, and Shaw scoffed that it was 'an insult for them to offer me any honour'.
Q 06What did George John Lee, whom Shaw long suspected might be his real father, teach Shaw's mother?
Singing
Singing: Lee trained her mezzo-soprano voice and shared a house with the Shaws, and when he left for London she followed him there.
Q 07Which organisation did Shaw choose to take over his Hertfordshire house, Shaw's Corner?
The National Trust
The National Trust took the house even though Harold Nicolson, advising it, doubted that Shaw 'will be a great literary figure in 2000 A.D.'
Q 08Where did the young Shaw spend most weekdays educating himself after arriving in London?
The British Museum Reading Room
The British Museum Reading Room was Shaw's university and office in one: with no degree and no job, he wrote his five unsold novels at its desks.
Q 09What was Shaw's first completed novel, written in 1879 but not published until the 1930s?
Immaturity
Immaturity repelled every publisher in London, as did the four novels that followed, and that run of failure turned Shaw to journalism and then the stage.
Q 10Which lifelong dietary practice did Shaw adopt in 1881?
Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism: Shaw credited the poet Shelley, 'who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet'.
Q 11Why did Shaw grow his famous beard?
To hide a smallpox scar
He suffered an attack of smallpox in 1881.
Q 12Which civil servant did Shaw meet at the Zetetical Society in 1880, beginning a lifelong friendship?
Sidney Webb
Sidney Webb: Shaw called him 'the ablest man in England' and 'greatly my superior in political knowledge', and the two stayed allies for life.
Q 13Before he read Marx, which author of Progress and Poverty turned Shaw to economics with a lecture he heard in 1882?
Henry George
Henry George: Shaw later wrote that five-sixths of those swept into the socialist revival of the 1880s with him 'had been converted by Henry George'.
Q 21Which monarch reportedly laughed so hard at Shaw's John Bull's Other Island that the chair gave way?
Edward VII
Edward VII saw it at a command performance, and the broken chair was news: after a decade of writing plays, Shaw's reputation in his adopted country was finally made.
Q 22At which London theatre did Vedrenne and Granville-Barker begin their seasons of Shaw's plays in 1904?
The Royal Court
The Royal Court: a 1904 staging of Candida there led the pair to go into partnership, and their seasons finally made Shaw's reputation as a dramatist in England.
Q 23Shaw's Major Barbara sets the morality of an arms manufacturer against that of which organisation?
The Salvation Army
Q 14Which socialist group did Shaw join in 1884, becoming its most prominent pamphleteer?
The Fabians
The Fabians were only months old when Shaw joined; before the year was out he had written their manifesto, and he soon became the force behind the whole society.
Q 15Under what pen-name did Shaw write music criticism for The Star?
Corno di Bassetto
Corno di Bassetto is Italian for the basset horn; Shaw said he chose it because it 'sounded like a foreign title, and nobody knew what a corno di bassetto was'.
Q 16Which playwright did Shaw champion in an 1891 book, before any play of his own had been staged?
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen: Shaw's book The Quintessence of Ibsenism argued for the Norwegian's new kind of drama, and he then began writing plays himself to show the English stage what he meant.
Q 17Which play of 1894 gave Shaw his first success with the London public?
Arms and the Man
Arms and the Man drew one boo amid the first-night cheers, and Shaw answered from the stage that he quite agreed with the man, but what were the two of them against so many.
Q 18Which Shaw play did the censor ban because its subject was organised prostitution?
Mrs Warren's Profession
Mrs Warren's Profession argues that poverty and underpaid work, not depravity, drive women into prostitution; written in 1893, it reached a stage only in 1902, at a private club.
Q 19Which Shaw melodrama, set in the American Revolution, became a hit in America in 1897 and ended his poverty?
The Devil's Disciple
The Devil's Disciple turns stage melodrama upside down, and Richard Mansfield's production made Shaw's name and fortune in America years before London took to his plays.
Q 20Whom did Shaw marry in June 1898 after she nursed him through a breakdown?
Charlotte Payne-Townshend
Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress, had proposed the year before and been refused; Shaw gave in only while she was nursing him back to health.
The Salvation Army disillusions Major Barbara when it accepts donations from a whisky distiller and from her own father, the arms maker.
Q 24Which Shaw play contains the dream scene 'Don Juan in Hell', often performed on its own?
Man and Superman
Man and Superman is usually staged without the scene, so Don Juan's long debate in the underworld has taken on a stage life of its own.
Q 25When England's censor banned Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet in 1909, which Irish theatre staged it anyway?
The Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre could do it because the Lord Chamberlain's powers stopped at the Irish Sea; Lady Gregory called the struggle with the authorities 'the fight with the Castle'.
Q 26In which German-speaking capital did Shaw's Pygmalion have its world premiere in 1913?
Vienna
Vienna: the comedy was first heard in German, in Siegfried Trebitsch's translation, almost six months before it opened in English in London.
Q 27Who played the Cockney flower girl in the 1914 London premiere of Shaw's Pygmalion?
Mrs Patrick Campbell
Mrs Patrick Campbell caused a sensation with Eliza's 'Not bloody likely', and 'not Pygmalion likely' caught on as a polite stand-in for the swear word.
Q 28What does Henry Higgins do for a living in Shaw's Pygmalion?
Phonetician
Phonetician: Higgins trains a Cockney flower girl to pass as a lady, and the play turns on what is to become of her once his experiment succeeds.
Q 29Which musical was adapted from Shaw's Pygmalion in 1956?
My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady had to wait for Shaw's death: asked in his nineties to let the play be set to music, he wrote, 'I absolutely forbid any such outrage.'
Q 30Which 1908 operetta was based, much to his disgust, on Shaw's Arms and the Man?
The Chocolate Soldier
The Chocolate Soldier: Shaw called its libretto 'a putrid opéra bouffe in the worst taste of 1860', and the experience turned him against musical versions of his plays for good.