George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and came to London at the age of twenty. At first, he dedicated his life in dramatic criticism. He was so admiring of Henrik Ibsen’s works, that he wrote in 1891 The Quintessence of Ibsenism (one of his most famous critical works). He was an active supporter of social justice and women’s rights movement and, in 1884, he joined the Fabian Society, an organization promoting socialism. His affection to these social struggles made him write an essay called ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’. He was even for a simplification and reform of the English alphabet. All Shaw’s plays have a preface telling about the theme the author wants to convey to. The most Important plays by Shaw are ‘Man and Superman’ (1903), ‘Pygmalion’ (1913) and ‘Back to Methuselah’. In 1925 Shaw won the Nobel Prize. He died in 1950. Shaw’s masterpiece is “Pygmalion” whose title is inspired by “Metamorphoses” by Ovid, a Greek legend telling about a sculptor who scorns a statue of a woman and falls in love with it; Aphrodite (the goodness of love) transforms the sculpture into a real woman and, at the end, the artist marries his creation.