Bernard Shaw

In 1900 Bernard Shaw completed the difficult task of drafting the Fabian's society position in the manifest Fabianism and the Empire. The society's progressive program advocated for socialist values, social justice and women rights. Against the background of these modern and leftist values though, the society's position on imperialism is somehow astonishing. One of the motives for its supportive stand on imperialism lies in the yet valid division...

Arms and the man starts with gunfire on a dark street in a small provincial town. The romantic and willful Raina is about to begin her true-life adventure by sheltering the handsome fugitive Bluntschli, enemy of her equally handsome fiancé Sergius. The men may all be heroes - or fools, since this is Shaw's comic view of Balkan chivalry, but the women are definitely more than their match.

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...