Editing George Bernard Shaw (section)

===General===
[[File:George Bernard Shaw - bust by Jacob Epstein.jpg|thumb|right|Bust by [[Jacob Epstein]], 1934]]
In the 1940s the author [[Harold Nicolson]] advised the [[National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty|National Trust]] not to accept the bequest of Shaw's Corner, predicting that Shaw would be totally forgotten within fifty years.{{sfn|Dukore ''et al.'' 1994|p=266}} In the event, Shaw's broad cultural legacy, embodied in the widely used term "Shavian", has endured and is nurtured by Shaw Societies in various parts of the world. The original society was founded in London in 1941 and survives; it organises meetings and events, and publishes a regular bulletin ''The Shavian''. The Shaw Society of America began in June 1950; it foundered in the 1970s but its journal, adopted by Penn State University Press, continued to be published as ''Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies'' until 2004. A second American organisation, founded in 1951 as "The Bernard Shaw Society", remains active {{as of|2016|lc=y}}. More recent societies have been established in Japan and India.{{sfn|Weintraub: Shaw Societies Once and Now}}

Besides his collected music criticism, Shaw has left a varied musical legacy, not all of it of his choosing. Despite his dislike of having his work adapted for the musical theatre ("my plays set themselves to a verbal music of their own"){{sfn|Reed|1939|p=142}} two of his plays were turned into musical comedies: ''Arms and the Man'' was the basis of ''[[The Chocolate Soldier]]'' in 1908, with music by [[Oscar Straus (composer)|Oscar Straus]], and ''Pygmalion'' was adapted in 1956 as ''[[My Fair Lady]]'' with book and lyrics by [[Alan Jay Lerner]] and music by [[Frederick Loewe]].{{sfn|Anderson: ''Grove Music Online''}} Although he had a high regard for Elgar, Shaw turned down the composer's request for an opera libretto, but played a major part in persuading the BBC to commission Elgar's [[Symphony No. 3 (Elgar/Payne)|Third Symphony]], and was the dedicatee of ''[[The Severn Suite]]'' (1930).{{sfn|Anderson: ''Grove Music Online''}}{{sfn|Reed|1939|pp=138 and 142}}

The substance of Shaw's political legacy is uncertain. In 1921 Shaw's erstwhile collaborator William Archer, in a letter to the playwright, wrote: "I doubt if there is any case of a man so widely read, heard, seen, and known as yourself, who has produced so little effect on his generation."{{sfn|Morgan|1951|p=100}} Margaret Cole, who considered Shaw the greatest writer of his age, professed never to have understood him. She thought he worked "immensely hard" at politics, but essentially, she surmises, it was for fun—"the fun of a brilliant artist".{{sfn|Cole|1949|p=148}} After Shaw's death, Pearson wrote: "No one since the time of [[Thomas Paine|Tom Paine]] has had so definite an influence on the social and political life of his time and country as Bernard Shaw."{{sfn|Morgan|1951|p=100}}

In its obituary tribute to Shaw, ''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]'' concluded:

{{blockquote|He was no originator of ideas. He was an insatiable adopter and adapter, an incomparable prestidigitator with the thoughts of the forerunners. [[Nietzsche]], [[Samuel Butler (novelist)|Samuel Butler]] (''[[Erewhon]]''), Marx, [[Percy Bysshe Shelley|Shelley]], [[William Blake|Blake]], [[Dickens]], William Morris, Ruskin, [[Beethoven]] and Wagner all had their applications and misapplications. By bending to their service all the faculties of a powerful mind, by inextinguishable wit, and by every artifice of argument, he carried their thoughts as far as they would reach—so far beyond their sources that they came to us with the vitality of the newly created.{{sfn|Tomlinson|1950|p=709}}}}