Meet the Author
George Bernard Shaw
Irish · 1856–1950 · Playwright and critic
Portrait: Bain News Service, publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A Dublin-born playwright who settled in London and wrote comedies that argue about class, money, and how people are made.
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Why read George Bernard Shaw?
Shaw writes comedy in which the jokes carry an argument. Pygmalion asks how much of social class comes down to accent, dress, and manners, and whether a person can be remade without being wronged. Read him for quick dialogue, and for a prose sequel in which Shaw explains why Eliza does not marry Higgins.
A life in six dates
- 1856Born in Dublin
- 1876Moves to London
- 1892His first play, Widowers’ Houses, is staged in London
- 1913Pygmalion is first performed, in German, in Vienna
- 1926Named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925
- 1939Shares an Academy Award for the screenplay of the film Pygmalion
- 1950Dies at his home in Ayot St Lawrence, England
Themes across the work
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Context that actually matters
The Fabian SocietyShaw joined this British socialist group in 1884, and his plays keep returning to poverty, work, and who profits from them.
Class and speech in Edwardian EnglandThe way a person spoke marked their class, which is the premise Henry Higgins’s experiment with Eliza depends on.
The Pygmalion mythIn Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with a statue he has carved, and Shaw’s title invites readers to compare Higgins to him.
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