Bernard Shaw

If one were to describe George Bernard Shaw's position in the history of Western thought he might be called the witty, didactic English disciple of Nietzsche as well as a devoted socialist and playwright. Shaw was very much affected by the philosophy of Nietzsche and Marx, and Romantic poets like Blake, Shelley, Whitman and Thoreau. In a sense, G. B. Shaw was a disseminator and destroyer of the Romantic tradition in the Modern era. Shaw could be called...

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in...

"Following her successful appearance at an Embassy Ball--where Eliza Doolittle won Professor Henry Higgins' bet that he could pass off a Cockney flower girl as a duchess--Eliza becomes an assistant to his chief rival Emil Nepommuck. After Nepommuck publicly takes credit for transforming Eliza into a lady, an enraged Higgins submits proof to a London newspaper that Nepommuck is a fraud. When Nepommuck is found with a dagger in his back, Henry Higgins...

A Cockney waif is transformed by a linguistics professor into an elegant lady.

"Epifania is glamorous, clever-- and also the richest woman in the world. After yet another row with her spendthrift husband, Epifania meets an intriguing Egyptian doctor. But she faces the challenge her money-mad father imposed on her before his death: She can only marry a man who can convert 150 pounds into 50,000 pounds within six months"--Container. In the bonus play, set 40 years in the future, the king must match wits with an unruly mistress...

The changeling: Beatrice-Joanna is betrothed to one man, but loves another. She hires her father's servant to kill her betrothed, but is then horrified at what she has done. The apple cart: The king must match wits with an unruly mistress and a cabinet wanting a constitutional monarchy. Caesar and Claretta: The story of Mussolini and his lover, Claretta Petacci on their last night together. The philanthropist: A circle of friends talks of unimportant...