Search results for ""author george bernard shaw""

With the single exception of Homer there is no eminent writer not even Sir Walter Scott whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. - From SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE Celebrated playwright critic and essayist George Bernard Shaw was more like the Elizabethan master that he would ever admit. Both men were intristic dramatists who shared a rich and abiding respect for the stage. Shakespeare was the produce of a tempestuous and enlightening era under the reign of his patron Queen Elizabeth I; while G.B.S. reflected the racy and risque spirt of the late 19th century as the champion of modern drama by playwrights like Ibsen and later himself. Culled from Shaw's reviews prefaces letters to actors and critics and other writings SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE offers a fascinating and unforgettable portrait of the 16th century playwright by his most outspoken critic. This is a witty and provocative classic that combines Shaw's prodigious critical acumen with a superlative prose style second to none (except perhaps Shakespeare!).

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'If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.' One of the most prolific and respected playwrights of the twentieth century, Bernard Shaw's legacy shows no signs of waning, and his beautifully written plays, laced with wry wit and invective alike, have seen countless performances over the years, their finest lines paraded in literary conversation and review. Meticulously selected by Simon Mundy, the Wit and Acid series collects the sharpest lines from Shaw’s oeuvre in small neat volumes, allowing the reader to sample some of the very best barbs and one-liners the twentieth century has to offer, and this, the first volume, covers lines from the great writer’s works published before 1911.

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When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wagers with Colonel Pickering that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be riddled with difficulties, and that behind her cockney parlance the girl in question, Eliza Doolittle, has a mind, ideas and aspirations of her own. Things come to a crux when the creature starts to rebel against her creator – and the scene is set for a play that questions the class system, social appearances and the role of women in society. Universally regarded as Shaw’s most successful work, Pygmalion – here presented in its definitive 1941 version, with footnotes indicating the textual variants from the first volume edition of 1916 – has spawned a great number of adaptations, among them the famous 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, and shows ancient myth’s undiminished ability to find new incarnations in modern life.

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After poleaxing his mathematics master with a perfect right, Cashel Byron, the unloved son of a successful actress, runs away to Australia. He returns to England and becomes the most famous prizefighter of his age, only to be floored himself by the lovely and impossible Lydia Carew. Can Lydia, with her reputation for vast learning and exquisite culture, be wooed by the ruffian Cashel? Can Cashel successfully hide his illegal professional? And so follows, with Shaw's inimitable wit and sparkle, a tale of miscommunication, drawing-room comedy and love.

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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. George Bernard Shaw’s classic play and satire of the British class system, first performed in 1913.

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'These highbrows must remember that there is a demand for little things as well as for big things' George Bernard Shaw was one of the leading playwrights and public intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He helped propel drama towards the unexpected, into a realm where it might shock audiences into new viewpoints and into fresh understandings of society. Throughout his long writing career Shaw wrote short plays, ranging in length from 1000-word puppet play, Shakes Versus Shav, to the 12,000-word suffragette comedy, Press Cuttings. These plays can be taken to illuminate Shaw's life and legacy, from ideas about war and patriotism in O'Flaherty, V.C. to censorship in The Shewing up of Blanco Posset. Surveying Shaw's entire career of writing short dramas, focusing especially on those years when his work in the form was particularly prolific (around 1909 and during the First World War), this collection places Shaw's short plays broadly into four key areas: farces, historical sketches, war dramas, and Shakespearean shorts. For each of these areas, the volume explores Shaw's aesthetic and thematic concerns, the precise historical and generic contexts in which the works were written, the major criticism and scholarship that has subsequently emerged, and the most notable stage and screen productions. This collection reveals how a playwright often criticized for being too wordy was actually a master of the short form.

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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. George Bernard Shaw’s classic play and satire of the British class system, first performed in 1913.

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Sidney Trefusis is a proselytizing socialist. Armed with irony and paradox, he is determined to overthrow a society riddled with class and sexual exploitation.Henrietta, his adoring wife, 'loves' him: he must abandon her. Son of a millionaire, he gives up everything to pose as an 'umble peasant'. But when this unsocial socialist goes to work as a gardener in the vicinity of a girls' school he meets his match - for Agatha Wylie is a new kind of woman, perfectly armed: and she doesn't love him.With the character of his clown-prophet Trefusis, George Bernard Shaw presented for the first time his view of what the relationship between the sexes should be. Galloping, exuberant, and irresistibly entertaining, AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST is a brilliant satire on social prejudice from a great author of the past.

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Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw remains one of the world's most important and popular writers. His plays are regularly performed around the world, from the boards of Broadway and the West End to regional, community, and college stages. The three plays selected here are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre: Man and Superman: a four-act comedy for serious people, staged in part at Royal court in 1905, it is one of the early works of Modernism to take an ancient myth and restage it in contemporary mode (and its influence extends across world literature, palpable in writings from Mann to Joyce). Its story of how a sensitive woman compels a superman-figure to adjust to her needs and those of the real world provides an updated commentary on Nietzsche's still-fashionable notions of ubermensch; and its famous third act introduces a persistent Shavian theme, which goes back as far as earliest religious literature-that the truly damned are those who are happy in hell. John Bull's Other Island takes up that idea: to the visionary, hell may be the ultimate modern dream of efficiency and rational administration, as manifested in a colonial Ireland run by liberal exploiters. Commissioned by WB Yeats to mark the opening of Ireland's National Theatre, the Abbey, the play was promptly refused by its Directors (who disliked its mechanical mockeries of mechanism but may have missed its visionary qualities). It was performed to huge acclaim in London in November 1904 and it made Shaw famous, the supreme example of the Playwright as Thinker and, ever afterwards, one of the most valued commentators on Anglo-Irish relations. Major Barbara: a three-act drama which in classic Shavian style unmasks the motivation of puritan idealists and dedicated industrialists, this work (like the previous two) pits a strong woman against a sardonic, practical man. Having exposed the mendacity of apostles of efficiency, Shaw seems then to submit to their doctrine, arguing that a pure private charity towards the destitute is no adequate substitute. Like the previous two works, this is a problem play, in the course of which the audience sympathy is aroused and then repelled in all directions. The suggestion that it may be acceptable to take money from tainted sources, such as arms manufacturers, caused much debate in 1905---and even more after the carnage wrought by mechanized guns in World War One.

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Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre. Pygmalion (1912) was a world-wide smash hit from the time of its première in Vienna 1913 and it has remained popular to this day. Shaw was awarded an Academy Award in 1938 for his screenplay of the film adaptation. It was, of course, later made into the much-loved musical My Fair Lady. Heartbreak House (1917), which was finally performed in 1920 and published in 1921, bares the hallmarks of European modernism and a formal break from Shaw's previous work. A meditation on the war and the resultant decline in European aristocratic culture, it was perhaps staged too soon after the conflict; indeed, it did not have the success of his earlier works, which was likely due to his experimental aesthetics combined with a war-weary audience that sought lighter fare. However, while this contemporary reception was muted, it is now recognised as a modernist masterpiece. Saint Joan (1923) marked Shaw's resurrection and apotheosis. The first major work written of Joan of Arc after her canonization (1920), the play interrogates the origins of European nationalism in the post-war era. Like Pygmalion, it was an immediate world-wide hit and secured Shaw the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Drawing upon the transcripts of Joan's trial, Shaw blended his trademark wit to produce a hybrid genre of comedy and history play. Despite the historical setting, Saint Joan is highly accessible and continues to delight audiences.

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George Bernard Shaw is one of the most famous and celebrated Irish playwrights and this new collection brings together the very best of his witty and entertaining comedies in one volume; Pygmalion, Major Barbara and Androcles and the Lion.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition has a preface by Oscar-winning actress Judi Dench.Pygmalion was first performed in 1914 and was an instant hit which then inspired the hit musical and award winning film, My Fair Lady. It tells the story of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, who tries to elevate a feisty flower girl out of her working-class roots and into high society. In Major Barbara, idealistic Barbara is a major in the Salvation Army, at odds with her millionaire father as they war over the best route to salvation. Androcles and the Lion is a clever retelling of the Bible story about a gentle Christian who pulls a thorn from a lion’s paw. All three plays are not only wonderfully amusing, they also showcase Shaw's intense concerns about poverty, class and inequality.

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The four dramas in this volume are some of George Bernard Shaw's most interesting plays. They stretch from 1929 to 1935 and coincide with the Great Depression, the intensification of the crisis of democracy that began after the war, and the rise of totalitarianism, all of which find expression in these plays. They also signal the beginning of an important new phase in Shaw's writing, one marked especially by the development of two new Shaw genres: the political extravaganza and the political allegory. The Apple Cart (1929) marked Shaw's return to playwriting after the long hiatus that followed Saint Joan (1923). The Apple Cart is perhaps the most pointed critique of parliamentary democracy in the entire Shavian canon. Too True to Be Good (1931) is another 'political extravaganza', with the opening stage direction -- 'The patient is sleeping heavily. Near her, in the easy chair, sits a Monster' ---signaling that Shaw is advancing further into uncharted dramaturgical territory. He began writing shortly before his trip to the Soviet Union and finished the play and wrote the preface after his return. In the preface Shaw asserts that the USSR is a new Catholic church. The dark mood continues in Shaw's next play, On the Rocks (1933) which Shaw subtitled, 'a political comedy'. It is reminiscent of The Apple Cart in that it is sharply focused on British politics and set in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street during the economic depression of the 1930s. Shaw started writing The Millionairess in 1934 and finished it in 1935. On the surface, it is a simple comedy, and if not for the preface we might acquiesce to Shaw's assessment that the play 'oes not pretend to be anything more than a comedy of humorous and curious contemporary characters such as Ben Jonson might write'. Yet the preface appended to the play is entirely about leadership and declaims at great length on Mussolini and Hitler.

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'Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf . . . you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba'Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own.With an Introduction by NICHOLAS GRENE

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A new collection of Shaw's major political writings presents an opportunity to reflect on his influential role as a public intellectual. At the forefront of economic and political debate from the 1880s to the 1950s, George Bernard Shaw was once the most widely read socialist writer in the English language, and his lifelong crusade against inequality and exploitation is far from irrelevant today. The thorough interpenetration of Shaw's literary and political engagements is an unusual story in modern literature, and this volume offers a portrait of Shaw as a political artist in the purest possible sense: that is, as a writer of essays, articles, pamphlets, and books with explicitly and expressly political aims. The selected writings in this volume showcase Shaw's most influential and most accomplished political work, but also provide a cross-section that is representative of the whole of his long career. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Edited by Elizabeth T. Forter, this edition of Major Barbara for performance and study includes Shaw's complete "Preface." The text follows Shaw's spelling and punctuation. It also includes a highly regarded twenty-four page introduction, a list of the principal dates in the life of Bernard Shaw, and a selected bibliography.

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'If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.' One of the most prolific and respected playwrights of the twentieth century, Bernard Shaw's legacy shows no signs of waning, and his beautifully written plays, laced with wry wit and invective alike, have seen countless performances over the years, their finest lines paraded in literary conversation and review. Meticulously selected by Simon Mundy, the Wit and Acid series collects the sharpest lines from Shaw's oeuvre in small neat volumes, allowing the reader to sample some of the very best barbs and one-liners the twentieth century has to offer, and this, the second volume, covers lines from the great writer's works published after 1911. With an introduction by Simon Mundy, a poet, novelist, trenchant music critic and occasional playwright.

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Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell are plays which give a clear sense of the range of Shaw's first forays into playwriting. Together they showcase his early negotiations between his political and social concerns and the constraints and possibilities of the British stage at the fin de siècle. These plays are bound together by shared concerns with gender roles, sexuality, concepts of familial and social duty, and how all these are shaped by wider financial, political, literary, philosophical and theatrical influences. Mrs Warren's Profession is the best known of Shaw's 'Plays Unpleasant', his first exercises in using the theatre as a means to awaken the consciences of morally complacent audiences. Written in 1893 in angry response to the success of A. W. Pinero's sensational hit The Second Mrs Tanqueray and a revival of Dumas's La dame aux camélias, Mrs Warren's Profession did not receive a public performance in Britain until 1925. Shaw's provocative response to the sentimental 'fallen woman' plays that dominated the fin-de-siècle stage was a play in which prostitution was presented not as a question of female sexual morality, but as a direct result of the systematic economic exploitation of women. Candida (1894), by contrast, was categorised by Shaw as one of his 'Plays Pleasant', but the label was characteristically deceptive. The play appeared at first sight to offer audiences a reassuringly familiar drama of a marriage threatened by an interloper but ultimately reaffirmed when the wife recognises her true place and her dangerous admirer is sent out into the cold. But, as critics have noted, the play was a re-working by Shaw of Ibsen's A Doll's House in which the husband played the part of the over-protected doll, unaware of the real power dynamics of his marriage. You Never Can Tell (1897) was Shaw's seaside comedy of manners, complete with an all-knowing waiter, exuberant twins, a lovelorn dentist, a long-lost father, lashings of food, and a comic catchphrase to provide the title. Shaw took all these familiar elements of Victorian farce and reworked them into a modern play of ideas, in which etiquette and ideologies collide. Just as in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (a comparison which Shaw always stubbornly rejected), questions of class, marriage, manners, money, sex and identity underpin the plot of love-at-first-sight, mislaid parents and reunited families.

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The three plays in this volume are some of George Bernard Shaw's most popular and frequently performed works. They demonstrate the development of Shavian comedy and contain early formulations of his idea of the Superman, an extraordinary individual who catalyzes the evolution of mankind. Arms and the Man (1894) was Shaw's first commercial success and the first public confirmation that he could make playwriting his profession. It is the first of what Shaw called his "pleasant plays',comedies that critique idealism in general rather than specific social problems (as his earlier plays did). Specifically, Shaw undermines the romance of wartime courage, reckless heroism, and nationalist pride among British spectators while using the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1886 as an exotic veneer. Shaw wrote The Devil's Disciple (1897) for William Terriss, an actor known for his swashbuckling roles who had requested a play that would 'contain every "surefire" melodramatic situation' --mistaken identities, terrifying adventures and last-second escapes, and frequent emotional outpourings.. Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) is Shaw's revision of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra as well as a fusion of the pragmatism and unconventionality of the heroes of Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple into a portrait of jocular, morally serious leadership.

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One of Bernard Shaw’s most glittering comedies, Arms and the Man is a burlesque of Victorian attitudes to heroism, war and empire. In the contrast between Bluntschli, the mercenary soldier, and the brave leader, Sergius, the true nature of valour is revealed. Shaw mocks deluded idealism in Candida, when a young poet becomes infatuated with the wife of a Socialist preacher. The Man of Destiny is a witty war of words between Napoleon and a ‘strange lady’, while in the exuberant farce You Never Can Tell a divided family is reunited by chance. Although Shaw intended Plays Pleasant to be gentler comedies than those in their companion volume, Plays Unpleasant, their prophetic satire is sharp and provocative.

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The life of fifteenth-century heroine Joan of Arc is the stuff of legend, and her cruel death (burnt at the stake aged just nineteen) led to her being declared a martyr, granting her an impressive legacy. Following her canonisation in 1920, and against a history of overly romanticised retellings of the story, Bernard Shaw put pen to paper to give a more accurate account, without resorting to demonising her persecutors; as he writes in his preface, 'there are no villains in the piece'. It was an immediate success, securing him the Nobel Prize for Literature, although critics were initially divided by this frank approach - T.S. Eliot was outraged, saying, 'instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends... he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer.' Nonetheless - or perhaps even because of this controversy - Saint Joan is considered one of Bernard Shaw's finest and most important plays. This edition has an introduction by Simon Mundy, who has spent several years as Vice-President of PEN International's Writers for Peace Committee, and extensive explanatory notes.

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When Ellie Dunn joins a house-party at the home of the eccentric Captain Shotover, she causes a stir with her decision to marry for money rather than love, and the Captain's forthright daughter Hesione protests vigorously against the pragmatic young woman's choice. Opinion on the matter quickly divides and a lively argument about money and morality, idealism and realism ensues as Hesione's rakish husband, snobbish sister and Ellie's fiancé - a wealthy industrialist - enter the debate. Written between 1916 and 1917 as war raged across Europe, Heartbreak House is a telling indictment of the generation responsible for the First World War. With its bold combination of high farce and bitter tragedy, Shaw's play remains an uncannily prophetic depiction of a society on the threshold of an abrupt awakening.

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One of Shaw's most unusual and enduringly popular plays. With SAINT JOAN (1923) Shaw reached the height of his fame and Joan is one of his finest creations; forceful, vital, and rebelling against the values that surround her. The play distils Shaw's views on the subjects of politics, religion and creative evolution.

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Shaw began writing MAN AND SUPERMAN in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution.As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes.

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Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire armaments manufacturer, loves money and despises poverty. His estranged daughter Barbara, on the other hand, shows her love for the poor by throwing her energies into her work as a Major in the Salvation Army, and sees her father as another soul to be saved. But when the Army needs funds to keep going, it is Undershaft who saves the day with a large cheque - forcing Barbara to examine her moral assumptions. Are they right to accept money that has been obtained by 'Death and Destruction'? Full of lively comedy and sparkling debate, Major Barbara is one of Shaw's most forward-looking plays, brilliantly testing the tensions between religion, wealth and power, benevolence and equality, and metaphors and realities of war.

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With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences' complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. His first play, Widowers' Houses, depicts Harry Trench's dilemma on learning that the inheritance of his fiancée comes from her father's income as a slum landlord. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while he is still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven - who is not inclined to give him up so easily. And in Mrs Warren's Profession, Vivie Warren is forced to reconsider her own future when she discovers that her mother's immoral earnings funded her genteel upbringing.

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