|
|
| |
George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil
servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any
organized training. After working in an estate agent's office for
a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he
established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the
eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian
Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his
literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new
theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he
decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the
English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays
Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's
Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack
social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man
and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's
radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen
dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a
forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous
discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell», the third act
of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and
Superman (1903).
In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the
drama, in Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same
period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in
which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and
extends it from the Middle Ages to the present.
Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra
(1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times,
and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a
kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew
deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905),
one of Shaw's most successful «discussion» plays, the audience's
attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man
can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity,
not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906),
facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy
the humor of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida
(1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of
his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of
phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality
and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on
the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the
social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavor.
Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930
and 1950, the year of his death. |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
About our
people pages:
Because many visitors have asked for more information
about particular people whose words appear on the site,
we'll try to give you as much information as we can about
individuals. The Amazon links should give you access
to works by the author, though at times they'll display
other books if the author has written an essay or
introduction for those books. |
|
| |
|
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others
without getting a few drops on yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
|
| |
|
