Professor Higgins succeeds in transforming an unkempt London flower girl into a society belle.
Kirjailija
George Bernard Shaw
Kirjat ja teokset yhdessä paikassa: 606 kirjaa, julkaisuja vuosilta 1972–2026, suosituimpiin kuuluu Love Among the Artists (An Autobiographical Novel of G. B. Shaw). Vertaile teosten hintoja ja tarkista saatavuus suomalaisista kirjakaupoista.
Nimi esiintyy myös muodoissa: George Bernard Shaw
606 kirjaa
Kirjojen julkaisuvuodet: 1972–2026.
Written in 1893, Mrs. Warren’s Profession skewers the hypocrisy of British society. The wealthy, respectable title character’s “profession” is the world’s oldest, but Mrs. Warren is unprepared for the reaction of her daughter Vivie when she discovers her mother’s occupation. Shaw brings new life to the woman-with-a-past theme with wit and a defense of his heroine.
Fabian socialist and ardent proselytizer, George Bernard Shaw viewed his role as a playwright as far more than that of an entertainer. His audiences heard fully articulated sermons on moral and economic issues, a potentially dry theatrical experience enlivened by Shaw's genius for creating vital characters and scintillating dialogue. "Major Barbara" offers a sparkling example of its author's unique gift for presenting social theories in an engaging format. The eponymous heroine, an officer in the Salvation Army, is the daughter of Andrew Undershaft, a wealthy armaments manufacturer. When the Army accepts donations from Undershaft and a whiskey distiller, whose money Barbara regards as tainted, she resigns in disgust, but eventually sees the truth of her father's reasoning that social iniquity derives from poverty; it is only through accumulating wealth and power that people can help each other.
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.
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.
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.
Shaw believed that theatre audiences of the 1890s deserved more than the hollow spectacle and sham he saw displayed on the London stage. But he also recognized that people wanted to be entertained while educated, and to see purpose mixed with pleasure. In these three plays of ideas, Shaw employed traditional dramatic forms - Victorian melodrama, the history play and the adventure story - to turn received wisdom upside down. Set during the American War of Independence, The Devil's Disciple exposes fake Puritanism and piety, while Caesar and Cleopatra, a cheeky riposte to Shakespeare, redefines heroism in the character of the ageing Roman leader. And in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, an expedition in Morocco is saved from disaster by a lady explorer's skilful manipulation of the truth.
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.
Misalliance and the Fascinating Foundling
Dan Laurence; George Bernard Shaw
Penguin Classics
1995
pokkari
This volume features the play Misalliance, which explores the incongruities of human nature and family life, and Shaw's one-act burlesque, The Fascinating Foundling.
Shaw’s story is rife with such ‘beyond opinions’, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, a Dubliner in London, and a socialist living in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. In one sense, as a Protestant choosing to live in London, he is a John Bull, yet he remains Irish – an Irish Bull, something alluded to in his one play set in Eire, John Bull’s Other Island.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright, political activist, critic and a co-founder of London School of Economics. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925 and thirteen years later he even won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay ("Pygmalion," based upon his stage play), sharing the award with Ian Dalrymple, Cecil Lewis and W. P. Lipscomb. An ardent socialist, Shaw was distressed by what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class. He wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included demanding equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was also active in local politics, serving in the London County Council.
In Good King Charles's Golden Days: a true history that never happened. A discussion play; the issues of nature, power and leadership are debated between King Charles II ('Mr Rowley'), Isaac Newton, George Fox and the artist Godfrey Kneller. Buoyant Billions: a comedy of no manners. Farfetched fables. Shaw's thoughts simplified. Shakes vs. Shav. Puppets portray Shaw and Shakespeare. The play comprises a comic argument between the two playwrights, an intellectual Punch and Judy. Why She Would Not. His final play.
George Bernard Shaw was the greatest British dramatist after Shakespeare, a satirist equal to Jonathan Swift, and a playwright whose most profound gift was his ability to make audiences think by provoking them to laughter. In one of his best-loved plays, Pygmalion, which later became the basis for the musical My Fair Lady, Shaw compels the audience to see the utter absurdity and hypocrisy of class distinction when Professor Henry Higgins wagers that he can transform a common flower girl into a lady--and then pass her off as a duchess--simply by changing her speech and manners. In Major Barbara Shaw spins out the drama of an eccentric millionaire, a romantic poet, and a misguided savior of souls, Major Barbara herself, in a topsy-turvy masterpiece of sophisticated banter and urbane humor. His brilliant dialogue, combined with his use of paradox and socialist theory, never fails to tickle, entertain--and challenge.
This is a collection of the plays of George Bernard Shaw that includes "The Millionairess", "Too True to be Good" and "The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles".
While some of Shaw’s earlier plays are still performed, his later plays, such as the ones in this volume, are barely known. As the collective title indicates, the themes here are political; yet, frankly, it is doubtful how seriously we can now take Shaw as a political thinker. Despite writing in the 1930s, he has little to say of the nature of totalitarianism: although he satirises Fascist dictators in “Geneva”, the satire is disappointingly mild. Neither did Shaw appear to foresee (on the evidence of these plays, at least) the imminent collapse of the British Empire. But it is Shaw the dramatist rather than Shaw the political philosopher who still holds our attention – even in plays as explicitly political as these. He had a sharp intellect and a quirky sense of humour, and his dialogue still glints and sparkles: he couldn’t write a dull line if he tried. No matter how serious the themes he addresses, the crispness of his writing and his lightness of touch still scintillate. Shaw seems, perhaps unfairly, out of fashion nowadays. But even in these lesser-known works, he demonstrates his matchless ability, still undimmed, to provoke and to entertain.
