the author is paid to the problem of morality. He calls upon the people to unmask, to free themselves from prejudices and illusions. Then followed Candida, the comic play You Never Can Tell, and the equally comic Androcles and the Lion. The third cycle of plays of B. Shaw Three Plays for the Puritans includes: The Devil s Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Captain Brassbound s Conversion (1899). The title of the third cycle has a double meaning: on the one hand the plays turn against English Puritanism, bigotry and hypocrisy, on the other hand they are directed against the decadent drama. He contrasts his plays for puritans to those where the main themes tackled are love and marriage. Shaw explains that the greatest evil is to replace intellectual life by love intrigues.1900 Shaw had established his reputation as a playwright. He wrote one play after another as well as books of criticism and pamphlets on socialism. B. Shaw s plays were not merely plays of dramatic action. Their tension was created by the struggle of ideas; they always set out to solve some social, moral or philosophical problems. In his more than fifty plays, in their numerous prefaces, Shaw has treated almost every public and social theme of the century.made a revolution in the theatre of his time. Shaw s plays deal with various problems: politics, science, religion, education and economics. And in solving them he criticizes the vices of capitalist society laying bare its gross injustice and showing its inhumanity .. Shaw also revived the practice of including a long preface and sometimes a sequel in the published version, explaining what the play was about and what he actually meant. He gained a reputation as a man of brilliant wit, making frequent and effective use of the paradox, which can be found in dramatic structure, characters and style. Shaw uses them not merely for the sake of witty play of words, but to turn inside out the moral and social truths of the bourgeois world.World War I Shaw wrote long and daring articles, protesting against the imperialist governments and their war policy. In his article Common Sense about the War he said: No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather the harvest in the villages and make a revolution in the towns. was greatly interested in Russian culture . He highly appreciated and admired L. Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and also Chekhov and Gorky .. Shaw was at was at the peak of his fame (1925) when he received the International Nobel Prize for Literature.spite of the fact that he called himself a socialist, Shaw was at times incredibly contemptuous of the working class and thought it incapable of ever playing a significant role in winning socialism. He never fully understood Marxism. Shaw saw and felt the class contradictions of the new imperialist era very sharp and intense and in his analysis of the political and economic basis of imperialism he went much farther than his predecessors, the mid-nineteenth century writers. Shaw's aim was to show real life, not to write plays for entertainment with a happy end . He opposed the so called well-made play trend - which was very popular among the playwrights of his time.list of Shaw s plays is very vast; to his most popular plays also belong Pygmalion (1912), The Apple Cart, Heartbreak House (1917), Major Barbara, Saint Joan.House was written during World War I. Shaw himself highly appreciated the play and in the preface to it he disclosed the symbolic meaning of the title. In the subtitle he called the play fantasia in the Russian manner on the English theme . The dramatic pattern of the play is Chekhovian; a group of people in a country house, the collision of their conflicting ideas and their impact on each other.sympathized with these people for their culture, sincerity, disgust for business, and at the same time accused them of idleness, of hatred for politics, of being helpless wasters of their inheritance. The author indicated the futility of the life of bourgeois intelligentsia .. The main hero of this play, Professor Henry Higgins, is presented rather ironically, as a kind of modern Pygmalion. (Pygmalion, a celebrated sculptor of mythological antiquity and King of Cyprus, fell in love with a statue of Galatea which he had made of ivory, and at his prayer Aphrodite had given life to it. Pygmalion is often accepted as a symbol of the power to breathe...
