¡Descarga George Bernard Shaw y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! 7. george bernard Shaw The Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) wrote satirically on political and social topics such as class, war, or feminism in plays such as Arms and the Man (1894), Major Barbara (1905), and, most famously, Pygmalion (1913). Shaw parodied melodrama in order to develop an intellectual comedy of manners, and Mrs Warren’s Profession is a good example of this. Like Wilde, Shaw took hyprocrisy as one of his major themes. His best works combined Wilde’s wit and Ibsen’s seriousness of purpose, seeking always to reveal the values of various segments of English society. Shaw left Ireland for England as a young man in 1876 and, like many others modern dramatists, wrote novels and criticism before turning to the theatre in London. J.T. Grein, who had produced Ibsen’s Ghosts and Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867), encouraged Shaw to start writing plays when he was almost 40. His best early plays treat contemporary social issues humorously through the satirical use of love plots and melodrama. The off-quoted Shaw inspired countless authors and poets and became one of the most popular playwrights of his time infusing irony and wit into his over 50 plays, many of which are still in production today. He was a brilliant photographer, social performer, women’s right advocate, satirist, popular public speaker, among many other things. At the age of sixteen he was receiving a fairly decent wage but he found the work tedious. He also received the odious disparity among the chases, the daily struggles of the have-nots. He longed for more intellectual pursuits. He did manage to go to the theatre, read literature and immerse himself in the poetry of Lord George Gordon Byron and William Blake. He furthered his studies at the British Museum attending lectures. This led him to write critiques and essays on various subjects, often with irony and humour. Emerging themes in his work were marriage, education, politics… Many critics during his lifetime and after his death would come to criticise Shaw’s humanitarian politics and sometimes contradictory but often controversial opinions. “Revolutions have never enlightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder” Shaw was a staunch socialist and member of the Fabian Society which he joined in 1884. This Fabian society was a revolutionary group whose main objective was to protect the interests of the poorer classes against what they perceived to be exploitative, capitalist society. His political interests led him, in 1893, to helping form the Independent Labour Party. In 1895 he was one of the founders of the London school of Economics and Political science. He often lauded the writings of Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. An advocate of Stalinism, he travelled with his wife Charlotte to the USSR in the 1930’s. He wrote many political essays and articles during his lifetime. Shaw was an ardent of social reforms, and was an activist in campaigns that ranged from the movement to reform English spelling to women’s right, to the abolition of private property. Shaw’s plays were written to shock audiences and teach new social and moral values. He used paradox and reversed the common patterns of judgement (i.e. the conventional hero became the villain, and viceversa). Even Shaw’s lighter work contained a socio-political dimension. Pygmalion (1913), for example, which exposes the class divisions in British society, is a mixture of comedy, social observation and dictaticism.
