George Bernard Shaw

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Letteratura Inglese
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Data:	19.06.2007
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George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Gorge Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 into a middle class Protestant family. His father was an alcoholic. His son lost his respect for him and he never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. His sense of humour, lack of respect for political and social institutions and scorn for everything which was sentimental and romantic. His mother was dedicate to music and singing so he developed an interest in the opera.
Shaw attended a school where the great majority of pupils were Catholic, but he became an atheist.
When his mother moved to London, Bernard joined her years later; there he attended public lectures and joined debating societies.
In 1882 he met Henry George, an American socialist writer who initiated him into socialist theories. He read a volume of Karl Marx’s in French and joined the Fabian Society. He rejected the idea of any revolutionary and military action in favour of gradual parliamentary reform and the spread of education, especially among illiterate people. That is why most of his plays have a didactic vein.
He also came across Henrik Ibsen’s (1828 - 1906) works, and he was profoundly impressed by the Norwegian playwright’s social criticism. Shaw talked about Ibsen, and a year later he expanded his lecture into The Quintessence of Ibsenism. It was Ibsen who gave the start to Shaw’s career as a playwright.
He established his fame as a playwright with the works he wrote between 1900 and the beginning of the First World War. Them were Man and Superman and Pygmalion on the importance of language in establishing differences of class and education.
When the war broke out Shaw attacked both England and Germany for being equally responsible for the war, and the politicians and military leaders for their stupidity and incompetence.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. His plays, amount to fifty.
He went to Moscow and met Stalin; this, together with his exaltation of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, provoked attacks from public opinion and he was accused of supporting Nazi and Fascist ideas.
She died in 1950, at the age of ninety - four.
One of the most important philosophical ideas is the:
-theory of the life force (a natural active power which impels man to procreation). The dominant agent of this impulse is woman, the basic vehicle for procreation.
-theory of creative evolution: Shaw thought that evolution was voluntary because it derived from an effort of the will power of the individual.