| George Bernard Shaw(1856—1950)was born
in Dublin, Ireland. At the age of 14, after graduating from middle school, Shaw
was put into a job as clerk in a land agent's office. At 20 he went to London
where he remained jobless for 9 years, devoting much time to self-education.
Meantime, Shaw took an active part in the socialist movement. A contemporary of
Shaw's thus wrote of him: "I used to be a daily frequenter of the British Museum
Reading Room. Even more assiduous in his attendance was a young man. ...My
curiosity was piqued by the odd conjunction of his subjects of research. Day
after day for weeks he had before him two books—Karl Marx's 'Das Kapital' (in
French), and an orchestral score(管弦乐乐谱) of 'Tristan and Isolde'." Though Shaw admitted Marx's great influence on him, he failed to grasp the necessity of a revolutionary reconstruction of the world. A strong influence was exercised on Shaw by the Fabian society, the English reformist organization. In the early period of his literary career, Shaw wrote some novels, "An Unsocial Socialist" and others, in which he developed the traditions of critical realism, bitterly criticizing the stupidity, snobbishness and petty tyranny of the middle class. In the nineties Shaw turned to the theatre, first working as a dramatic critic, then writing plays for the stage. His role in the development of dramaturgy is very great. Shaw was an enemy of "art for art's sake". He wrote, "for art's sake I will not face the toil of writing a sentence." He used the stage to criticize the evils of capitalism. He wrote 51 plays in total, the important ones including "Widower's Houses", "Saint Joan" and "The Apple Cart". In his plays Shaw laid bare the gross injustice and utter inhumanity of the bourgeois society. This he achieved not so much by the structures of plots in his plays as by the brilliant dialogues between the characters. His exposure of capitalist society is very significant and it places Shaw among the most important representatives of critical realism in modern English literature. |