LITERARY TREND AND AUTHOR CANON
Shaw is considered the most important English-language modern playwright.
Introduced the Theatre of Ideas in British literature – a type of drama that deals with controversial issues in a realistic manner, exposes social evils, stimulating thought and discussion on the part of the audience. The characters represent ideas, conflicting points of view in a realistic context.
Parodies melodrama to develop an intellectual comedy of manners;
Major theme: hypocrisy – his plays try to reveal the bogus values of society;
Modernist traits in Shaw’s prose:
Shaw was an anti-romantic, because he thought that the romantic view went in the way of people seeing what really happened in the world.
“I had no taste for popular art, no respect for popular morality, no belief in popular religion, no admiration for popular heroics. I simply understood life differently”(G.B. Shaw)
He was against the principle of art for art’s sake or entertainment through drama. He was for a theatre that preached to its audience on social issues.
PYGMALION (1912)
LITERARY GENRE
Genre: comedy of ideas about manners and class
Inspiration: Pygmalion was a legendary figure of Cyprus in Greek mythology who was a king and a sculptor. He appears in Ovid’s narrative poem “Metamorphoses”, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.
SETTING
THEMES
Main theme: Language and communication. The play explores language in all its forms, from slang to small talk, pleas, or philosophical language about the soul. Throughout the play, in various characters’ opinions, language connects, separates, degrades, elevates, or transforms. To be effective, language doesn’t necessarily have to be true, because it can both deceive and reveal the truth. Communication is not solely based on language, but also on appearance, clothing, and accents.
Other themes:
CONFLICT
Professor Higgins, a linguist, bets his friend Colonel Pickering, another linguist, that he can teach a cockney-speaking flower girl, Eliza Doolittle to speak as elegantly as a duchess within 6 months. He begins his experiment after the girl offers him some money to teach her how to speak and act properly, and the girl’s father demands money so that he will allow the lessons. After several months, Eliza fails her first test, as she slips into cockney speech while at Higgin’s mother’s house. The second trial is a success, but Eliza and Higgins fight, as Higgins has grown bored of the experiment, and Eliza doesn’t know what to do next. The next day, they fight again, at Higgins’ mother’s house and Higgins understands that he admires Eliza for her determination and fierceness. She threatens to work with his competitor, but Higgins is certain that she will return to work with him again.
CHARACTERS
Characters presented in the analysis of the literary fragment should be adapted to the fragment itself.
POINT OF VIEW
The point of view in drama is usually objective;
It is defined by
TONE
In drama, the tone can belong to:
Author’s tone:
Character’s tone: relevant for characterisation.
STYLE