In the play Pygmalion, we get to know Mister Higgins as a man who knows what he wants, he is not afraid to say what he thinks and he acts like nobody can tell him what to do. But even though he looks a bit arrogant, self-assured and bossy, he is...

George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in hopes that people would see what change can happen in an individual person. While reading this play it is easy to see it as being focused on Eliza Doolittle. However, it is important to understand and observe...

The relationship between the body and soul is one obsessed over by playwrights since the morality plays of the medieval period. Renaissance writer Christopher Marlowe and 20th century American playwright Bernard Shaw are no exceptions to this: in...

Bernard Shaw’s 1914 drama ‘Pygmalion’ finds its roots in the classical myth of Ovid, who writes an erotic tale of romance between a sculptor an this status in ‘Metamorphoses’. It is unsurprising therefore that Shaw’s play has often been celebrated...

Social critique has long been at the heart of drama, whether through satire, allegory or more direct devices, enabling dramatists to comment on the state of the world as they see it, to pose their own idealized version of society or to put forward...

“My Lord is the King of Heaven” (633; sc. 1). With these words, Joan of Arc, heroine in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, declares her allegiance to God. But with these words, she also implies their corrolary: Joan yields to no other authority....

The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley described man as one who obscures facts and evidence with "aimless rhetoric," in order to"distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to...

Bernard Shaw's play St. Joan (1923) tackles with the intricate character of Joan of Arc depicting her distinct traits that comprise of nationalism, individualism, and feminism. In the play, Shaw displays his understanding of the trial of Joan of...

In Major Barbara, one’s religion is equated to their sense of morality, as well as their belief system. The play features a number of characters, each with strong and often conflicting convictions. These faiths shape the characters’ courses of...

In Major Barbara (1907), George Bernard Shaw questions the prevailing ethical assumptions and attitudes of Western culture on social engineering and poverty. Like Nietzsche, he calls for the revaluation of values, as the meaning of concepts like “...

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde and Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw are both satirical plays meant to criticize Victorian society and war, respectively. While both plays were written by Irish authors familiar with London and...