George Bernard Shaw and his work

George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856. He came from an old but impoverished Protestant family in Dublin. When he was 20 years old, he moved to his divorced mother to London (his mother was a singer and was teaching singing as well as one of his sisters, who was an actress, made him acquainted with artist’s society). With his paradoxial humour Shaw used to state: „I am a typical Irish man – my family comes from Yorkshire.“

As a philosophizing and criticizing writer and public figure he was one of the founders and top propagators of the so called Fabian Society, a moderate socialistic organization of which many prominent English writers were members. Shaw was mostly a self-taught person. He spent a great deal of his free time in the huge library of the British Museum.

Shaw’s writings comprise many newspaper articles, critical works, and tracks for the Fabian Society, as well as a number of plays. First he wrote 5 novels, which could not find their publishers (the novel Love among the artists was first published in 1900). Since 1885 Shaw got famous as a journalist-critic of piercing look in the field of literature, later in the field of music, pictures and theatre too.

As to his plays, he published his first social comedy Widower’s Houses. Its dramatic structure as well as its critical aim were like a bomb exploding on the English stage. How to make money by cashing in exorbitant rents from the poor inhabitants of old shabby houses is the theme of his play. Still more famous is another play from the nineties – Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Vivian, who has just graduated in Cambridge, learns to know that the property of her mother comes from the profits of luxurious private hotels (of bad repute) in Europe. She is shocked, but she is able to hear her mother’s passionate defence. For more than 30 years this play of Shaw was prohibited from being performed in England (in Prague it was performed in 1907).

It was because of the censorship that Shaw began to write Plays Pleasant (how he called them). The first of them was the paly Arms and the Man. It is a satire of war. Its hero Bluntschli prefers sweet chocolate to deadly cartridges. Shaw’s plays were in general more successful in book-form than upon the stage. In view of the fact that his plays were more often read than acted, Shaw added to each a lengthy preface.

His best-known play is Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a Cyprian sculptor from the classical mythology who cut a lovely girl of ivory, fell in love with her and the goddess Aphrodite gave her life after Pygmalion’s prayer. It is a story of a poor girl Eliza Doollittle who rises in society thanks to her intelligence and ambition. Henry Higgins, Professor of phonetics, makes this girl an object of his experimental training. He wants to teach her King’s English during some months. He is successful, but also the poor flower girl succeeds – in getting married to him. To this happy-end Shaw was forced by theatre experts and by his spectators – for the first time in the black-and-white film in 1938. Six years after Shaw’s death an American musical My Fair Lady (it’s Pygmalion) was for the first time performed in New York and later on put on the screen.
Historical themes are found in Caesar and Cleopatra and in his only tragedy St. Joan. Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. He died in 1950.