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Shaw Bernard 1856 - 1950 (94)

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.


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Pygmalion

Pygmalion tells the story of a poor, young flower girl who has been disrespected and overlooked because of her appearance and the dialect she speak. Colonel Pickering decides to pay the cost for Professor Higgins to teach Eliza and challenges him to present her as a duchess for the ambassador's garden party. Professor Higgins cleans Eliza up and begins his transformation of her. The outcome is astonishing; she changes her appearance and speech but also gain confidence in her own abilities. In the end she changes Professor Higgins as well

George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 - November 2, 1950) was a leading Irish playwright, critic, essayist and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. Born in 1856 in Dublin, in a family of Protestant, his father was an alcoholic and his mother was a professional singer. When Shaw was 16, his mother left his father and moved to London with her singing’s teacher, taking with her Shaw’s older sister. Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, he finished school, worked briefly in a real estate office as a clerk and in 1876 moved to his mother's house in London to become a writer. He wrote five books before he was published with one, titled "Immaturity". At the same time he went into politics and came in contact with the socialists. In 1884 he founded a group of intellectuals with aim to debate and publish socialist ideas with the name Fabian Society. The group will play a key role in establishing the London School of Economics and the Labour Party. He also joined the group: "New Life’s Fellowship" who professed the shaping of a perfect self with education and development of free thought as the only way for liberation from social oppression and with the ultimate goal of a society where the stronger will help the weaker.

In 1891 he wrote his first play, and the next 12 years another 12, none of which was played. The same time Bernard writes reviews for art and music, and from 1895 to 1898 he is working as a theater critic . In 1898 at the age of 42 he is leaving his mother's house and got married to the Irish Charlotte Payne - Townsend. They lived together for 43 years until the death of Charlotte. In 1904, the actor, director and playwright Barker founded a new experimental scene specializing in new and progressive drama. In the next three seasons many works of Shaw were played in this scene . In the next 10 years all of his works (except Pygmalion) had been played to some British scene and he had become rich and famous. The first world war is breaking and Breaks the first world war and Shaw expressed his opposition with many articles, he considers that is a tragic loss of young people in the name of an alleged patriotism, the public sees it as a treachery, his image is destroyed and for few year he became an outcast of the society. After the war he returned to his creativity, he wrote five new plays and gradually his image is restored as the people are realizing that the war with the millions of dead was nothing more than what Shaw had described. He lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, traveling and dealing with local and international problems and continuing to write thousands of letters and many plays . In 1950 he fell off a ladder when he had ascended to prune a tree in his garden, a few days later he died, at the age of 94.

In Shaw’s texts we can distinguishe his ideas, radical for its time, deeply philosophical, always apropos. He believed that the textbooks do not educate because they promote rote, not thinking, urging young people to rebel against the status quo, recommended them to listen to their teachers but always critically. For women considered that to live in the house and deal only with the domestic situation is so natural as a parrot in a cage. Some parrots can be happy in the cage, he were saying, but the truly happy life is outside of the cage. He wrote that in prison should be kept only the people who may be redeveloped. Those who cannot should be killed, like a mad dog or a poisonous snake. Bernard was a man of passion, humor, broaden views, straight and true, with a love for beautiful things, open to to new ideas and views. Notwithstanding he had no higher education, he was a true philosopher, who even now, he is telling us and teaching us many things.