![]() ![]() His best early plays treat contemporary social issues humorously through the satirical use of love plots and melodrama. Grein, who had produced Ibsen’s Ghosts and Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867), encouraged Shaw to start writing plays when he was almost forty. ![]() The director of the Independent Theater in London, J.T. Shaw left Ireland for England as a young man in 1876 and, like many other modern dramatists, wrote novels and criticism before turning to the theater. His best works combined Wilde’s wit and Ibsen’s seriousness of purpose, seeking always to reveal the bogus values of various segments of English society. Like Wilde, Shaw took hypocrisy as one of his major themes. His work introduced the theater of ideas to the English stage where Ibsen turned melodrama into naturalism, Shaw parodied melodrama in order to develop an intellectual comedy of manners. The Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the leading playwright of modern Britain, wrote frankly and satirically on political and social topics such as class, war, feminism, and the Salvation Army, in plays such as Arms and the Man (1894), Major Barbara ( 1905), and, most famously, Pygmalion ( 1913). ![]()
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