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1 知识内容
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2 作业
内容
Bernard Shaw
I. Introduction
III. Main works
IV. Literary ideas
V. Main characteristics
VI. Two representative works
II. Ideas of socialism
Module 8 Unit 3 George Bernard Shaw PPT 图片来源
1. 萧伯纳
http://www.qotd.org/quotes/George.Bernard.Shaw
2. 华伦夫人的职业
http://www.chdbook.cn/read.php?tid=7740&page=e
讲义
George Bernard Shaw
I. Introduction to Bernard Shaw
• Bernard Shaw is an Irish dramatist, a literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th century theater.
• He is regarded as “a second Shakespeare”, who had revolutionized the English theatre.
• He is also a freethinker, defender of women's rights, and an advocate of equality of income.
• In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society and became one of its most influential members.
• In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
II ． Ideas of socialism
When Shaw came to London in the mid-1870s, he found himself involved in the debate of different thought systems.
• He took an immense interest in the exploration of man in relation to his economic status in Karl Marx's Capital , which offered him a guideline for understanding and analyzing reality, and from which he derived his lifelong belief that the economic status of a person is a determining factor for his life.
• After he joined the Fabian Society, he committed himself to helping improve people's life. With abundant sympathies for the poor people, he was a ruthless critic of social evils and made attacks against corruption and injustices.
As a member of the Fabian Society,
• he regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership as the final goal.
• But on how to achieve it, he differed greatly from the Marxists. He was against the means of violent revolution or armed struggle in achieving the goal of socialism;
• he also had a distrust of the uneducated working class in fighting against capitalists.
• Throughout his life and work, this reformist view caused him a painful inner conflict between his sincere desire for the new world and his inability to break out of the snobbish intellectual isolation.
III. Shaw's works
Shaw is a highly prolific writer. In his long career he wrote some 60 plays and many other forms of writings such as novels and critical essays. His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the criticism of the contemporary social, economic, moral and religious evils, as is shown in Widowers' House and Mrs. Warren's Profession.
Shaw wrote quite a few history plays, in which he kept an eye on the contemporary society. The important plays of this group are Caesar and Cleopatra and St. Joan.
Shaw also produced several plays, exploring his idea of “Life Force”, the power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the social, moral and metaphysical problems of human society. The representative work of this group is Man and Superman.
Besides, Shaw wrote plays on miscellaneous subjects, such as The Apple Cart and Pygmalion.
IV. Shaw's literary ideas
• Art should serve social purposes by reflecting human life, revealing social contradictions and educating the common people. Shaw drew the attention of his audiences to the serious social problems of the time.
• In his opinion, a good play is not to satisfy the audiences' curiosity but to provoke their thinking.
• Being a drama critic, Shaw directed his attacks on the Neo-Romantic tradition and the fashionable drawing-room drama. His criticism was witty, biting, and often brilliant.
• Shaw was strongly against the credo of “art for art's sake” held by those decadent aesthetic artists. In his critical essays, he vehemently condemned the “well made” but cheap, hollow plays which filled the English theater of the late 19th century to meet the low taste of the middle class.
V. The main characteristics of Bernard Shaw's plays
First, structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism.
Second, most of his plays, termed as problem plays, are concerned with political, economic, moral, or religious problems.
Third, one feature of Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another.
And last, Shaw's plays have plots, but they do not work by plots. It is the vitality of the talk that takes primacy over mere story. Dialogue and the interplay of the minds of the characters maintain the interest of the audience.
VI. Mrs. Warren's Profession
Mrs. Warren's Profession is the most popular of Shaw's early works. Although published in 1893, it did not make to the stage until 1902. The play, the first of this kind to present a prostitute as its major character, was not well received when it was performed in 1905 in New York . What was worse, the performance was interfered by the police because it was thought that the play was too sharp and ruthless for the rich and the ruling class then.
The play tells about the economic oppression of women with Mrs. Warren as the center. She is forced by the economic realities and becomes a prostitute and later runs several successful brothels. Through her characterization, Shaw exposes the corruption and hypocrisy of the “genteel” class. He also explores the personal consequences of such a profession as Mrs. Warren struggles to gain the respect and love of her daughter after she discovers the truth about her mother.
Pygmalion tells a story between a phonetic professor, Henry Higgins, and a flower girl, Eliza in London . Professor Higgins bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that if he could turn this rude flower girl who spoke very bad English into a refined lady in six months, Colonel Pickering would pay for all the cost. During the six months, Higgins trained Eliza very hard and gradually she was transformed into a totally different person. Six months later, they attended a Royal Embassy Ball, where Eliza behaved so gracefully and elegantly that everybody present was stunned and she was regarded as a princess. When they came back, Professor Higgins, Pickering and all the house helpers celebrated the success and forgot the existence of Eliza. Humiliated and hopeless she left. Professor Higgins felt very frustrated because he sort of had fallen in love with Eliza. To his great unexpected relief, Eliza finally came back and their romance began. The play, packaged as a romantic comedy, is a sharp sarcasm of the rigid British class and a comment on women's independence.
Bernard Shaw got the inspiration from a Greek mythology. Pygmalion, king of Cyprus was a famous sculptor. He made a beautiful ivory statue of a woman and gave it the name of Galatea and fell in love with it. At his prayers, Aphrodite—the goddess of beauty and love, gave it life. And Galatea, now a woman in flesh and blood, became Pygmalion' wife in the end. From the story comes the famous theory: The Pygmalion effect. It is expressed by saying: p eople tend to behave as you expect they will. You get what you expect. Shaw just uses this theory to create such a comedy.
What's worth mentioning is that in 1964, the play was adapted into a musical film named My Fair Lady.The famous actress Audrey Hepburn played the role of the flower girl. After its show to the public, it got a huge success. In 1965, the film won the 37 th Oscar Award.
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