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Concetti Chiave

  • George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London at age 20, where he attempted novel writing before turning to plays.
  • He joined the Fabian Society in 1884, advocating for social reforms like income equality, women's suffrage, and anti-colonial movements.
  • Shaw's writing was influenced by Nietzsche and Ibsen, using plays as a platform for debate and social change.
  • Pygmalion stands as Shaw's most popular work, adapted into a film in 1938 and later as the Broadway musical "My Fair Lady."
  • Shaw's first plays were divided into "Plays Unpleasant," addressing social issues, and "Plays Pleasant," which were more audience-friendly.

Indice

  1. Infanzia e primi tentativi letterari
  2. Il successo di Pygmalion

Infanzia e primi tentativi letterari

George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856 in Dublin. When he was 20 he moved to London. He tried to write novels but they were rejected by publishers.
In 1884 he joined Fabian Society, a group of political intellettuals who aimed to transform English society.
He worked as a music and theatre critic for the Saturday Review and began to write plays.

His first plays were published in 2 collections: Plays Unpleasant and Plays Pleasent. As his career progressed, his works became increasingly discussion forums. He advocated equality of income, anti-colonial movements, women's suffrage and the abolition of private property.

He was influenced by the German philosopher, Nietzsche, from whom he derived his theory of individual life force. He was also influenced by his study of the plays of the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen.

In his lecture The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw explained how Ibsen intended his plays to be a vehicle for Ideas and introduced real debates and discussion.

Il successo di Pygmalion

One of his works, Pygmalion, has proved to be his most popular work. Pygmalion became a film in 1938, a broadway musical in 1956 under the name of My Fair Lady and then a musical in 1964.
Shaw wrote over 60 plays in his life. He died at the age of 94 in 1950.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Shaw called his first plays "unpleasant" since they were about social questions like poverty, inequalities of the English class system, prostituition and sex. The Plays Pleasant were a counterbalance helping Shaw to find audiences that the "unpleasant" plays had offended.

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