George Bernard Shaw

One of George Bernard Shaw's best-known plays, Pygmalion was a rousing success on the London and New York stages, an entertaining motion picture and a great hit with its musical version, My Fair Lady. An updated and considerably revised version of the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, the 20th-century …

With Saint Joan, Shaw reached the height of his fame as a dramatist. Fascinated by the story of Joan of Arc (canonized in 1920), but unhappy with "the whitewash which disfigures her beyond recognition," he presents a realistic Joan: proud, intolerant, naïve, foolhardy, always brave-a rebel who challenged the …

Shaw began writing MAN AND SUPERMAN in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this …

Major Barbara is a three-act play by George Bernard Shaw, written and premiered in 1905 and first published in 1907. The story involves an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as an official in the Salvation Army in London. For many years Barbara and her siblings have been …

Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw, whose title comes from the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid, in Latin: Arma virumque cano. The play was first produced on April 21, 1894 at the Avenue Theatre and published in 1898 as part of Shaw's Plays Pleasant volume, which also included Candida, You Never Can …

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by …

Caesar and Cleopatra, a play written in 1898 by George Bernard Shaw, is a fictionalized account of the relationship between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. It was first staged in 1901 and first published with Captain Brassbound's Conversion and The Devil's Disciple in his 1901 collection, Three Plays for Puritans. It was …

Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893, and first performed in London in 1902. The title refers to prostitution.