Contents Introduction chapter The dramatic life of England in the late XIX early XX centuries

1.2 Humanistic, humorous and critical beginnings in the expression of problems in the plays of Bernard Shaw
"My way of joking is to tell the truth"
Bernard Show
B. Shaw's plays are bright, memorable, full of humor, but at the same time serious. Sharp problems Shaw portrayed with the help of ruthless satire. The problems and themes of his work are wide and varied.
B. Shaw's plays of the 1990s (The Widower's House, 1892, Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1894, We'll Wait and See, 1895, The Devil's Disciple, 1896-1897) posed the most acute social problems, revealed the flagrant vices of the bourgeois society.
In the plays "Man and Superman" (1901-1903), "John Bull's Other Island" (1904), "Major Barbara" (1905), the playwright condemns militarism, bourgeois philanthropy, and nationalist narrow-mindedness. In the chronicle play "Saint Joan" (1923), all the writer's attention is focused on the theme of the national liberation struggle, exposing the hypocrisy of the church and creating the image of a positive hero.
Very clearly Shaw also demonstrates the fragility of the boundaries between "good" and "evil" in the understanding of bourgeois public opinion. His heroes are characterized by differences not only in their internal state, but also in their position in society.⁵
Among Shaw's best dramaturgic plays is Pygmalion (1912). In the comedy Shaw, Pygmalion is Higgins, professor of phonetics, and Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, a street saleswoman in violets. Of course, phonetics is a symbol of scientific knowledge. And science in Shaw's play performs a miraculous metamorphosis. The very nature of this metamorphosis contains the main theme of the play, revealing the essence of Bernard Shaw's humanism: Higgins is teaching a girl who speaks the monstrous language of London streets to pronounce words correctly and with exquisite intonation, and now this girl may well pass for a duchess. The show confronts the problems of speech culture and general spiritual development, reveals the moral superiority of a girl from the bottom over an outwardly intelligent, aristocratic professor of phonetics. All people are people, and the difference between "gentlemen" and the poor is only in appearance - that's what Shaw wants to say.
The satire show sometimes goes very far. This is especially true of his early plays. For example, "Widower's House" and "Miss Warren's Profession". They belong to those plays that Shaw called "unpleasant".
In the play Mrs. Warren's Profession, Shaw raises the issue of emancipation. "Miss Warren's profession" was persecuted by bourgeois criticism, the press and censorship. In England, its production was banned for a long time. The indignation of the bourgeoisie at the "obscene, immoral play" was not at all explained by its immorality, but by its social sharpness. The show was able to show that the basis of all kinds of deformities and crimes in the bourgeois world is the capitalist economy. It is she who makes the most repulsive professions most profitable.
Bernard Shaw is a realist. The people depicted by him - their thoughts, feelings, their relationship with each other - all this belongs to the reality that surrounded the writer. Before us are most often ordinary human faces. Even, for example, in such a play as "Androclus and the Lion" (1913), the whole point is that Androclus is the most "ordinary" person, and the lion, in essence, is a naive and simple-hearted guy. This play criticizes dogmatic Christianity.
Bernard Shaw is very quirky. The situations of his plays are bizarre: at the foot of the Sphinx, Julius Caesar meets a naive, mischievous girl named Cleopatra (“Caesar and Cleopatra”). Julius Caesar, it turns out, wears a laurel wreath to hide his baldness. All these are just external features, created in the heat of controversy and directed towards one goal - the destruction of the "stamp". In the play "Julius Caesar" Shaw's only goal was to show Caesar as a living person and the more clearly reveal his greatness, to create an image of an outstanding personality on the material of the play.
It is Caesar, and not Cleopatra, who is a new attempt to create a positive hero - a "realist". In his drama, through the mouth of the god Ra, Shaw directly condemns the bloody policy of imperialism, the policy of wars of conquest. Speaking to an English audience, the god Ra reminds the British that 20 centuries ago there was a Roman army in Egypt, just as the British army is standing there today. Ra threatens the invaders with death and retribution.[8, p.184]
Bernard Shaw touched on the most pressing issues in his plays. The play "Major Barbara" (1905) contains criticism of bourgeois philanthropy; in the play - for the first time in Shaw - the idea is expressed that bourgeois violence must be opposed by a force that serves social progress and justice. Even in solving private issues, Shaw remains an acutely social playwright. The Physician's Dilemma (1906) shows how, under bourgeois conditions, medicine loses its humane character; Marriage (1908), Misalliance (1910), Fanny's First Play (1911) are devoted to family, marriage, and upbringing issues. "Exposure of Blanco Posnet" (1909) contains a denunciation of the religious hypocrisy of the philistines.
His play Heartbreak House, published only in 1920, describes the mood of the English intelligentsia on the eve of the First World War. In this play, Shaw raises the problem of the crisis of English bourgeois civilization, the disorder of life and the futility of the existence of the inhabitants of the house, built by the former skipper Shotover like a ship. The show denounces the parasitism of the ruling class, its loss of spiritual values, the erasure of the individual character. Only deep in the subtext of the play is a vague faith in the coming new, invisible to the author himself, faith in the creative power of life.⁶
In the play "Chocolate Soldier" Shaw planned to oppose the "idealist" and "realist", to show the triumph of a business man over a romantic. An important aspect of the play was its anti-war orientation. During this period, aggressive-imperialist tendencies became especially active in English literature. The propagandists of British imperialism sought to create a reactionary-romantic cult of the war of conquest. Shaw opposes this propaganda. The scenes of the war, sparingly outlined in the play, are given in such a way that the reader or viewer is confronted with pictures of inhuman cruelty and makes them feel disgust for the war.
In the midst of a general crisis both in England and in all capitalist countries, in June 1931 Shaw completed a new political play, Bitter but True. This play is permeated in the subtext with the greatest bitterness and draws a dead end into which the English intelligentsia has entered. The meaning of this "political grotesque", as the author called the play, is that all its characters open their eyes to the meaninglessness of their existence. They all understand that their life is empty and that they are "descending into the abyss", they all want to escape somewhere from the meaningless world in which they live. Although the play is in the spirit of a farce, its finale sounds hopeless. Having shown how bad the old and crazy world is, Shaw also discovers something else: how deceitful all the recipes for saving and renewing this world are. To save the inhabitants of that lunatic asylum, which Shaw showed in the play, can, according to him, only practical deeds. But the author of the play himself did not know what kind of work his confused and bankrupt intellectuals should do. But if the play did not give any positive program, then the mockery in it sounded deadly. The emptiness of the people depicted in the play is interpreted by the playwright as the result of the war - the most terrible and monstrous disaster. In the atmosphere of the pre-war years, Shaw continued to raise acute topical issues. In the comedy The Simpleton from the Unexpected Islands, Shaw, in his usual paradoxical form in those years, showed the coming crisis of the British Empire, the collapse of its colonial power.⁷
All the works of the 1930s sparkle with their former wit and richness of satirical fiction. But the contradictions in the mind of the author have by no means been removed: in many cases they are felt more acutely than in early works, since the problems of the works of the late 30s are much more responsible and more complicated than the one that Shaw touched on at the beginning of his creative path. In the works of the 1920s and 1930s (partly in the 1940s), Shaw sharply and caustically criticized the English social order, the predatory nature of imperialist wars, and the arbitrariness of colonialism.
Thus, Shaw expected from the modern play, above all, a practical return. Its goal is not to deliver aesthetic pleasure, but to draw the viewer into a discussion built on a paradox. The show criticizes modern society, but he was looking for a way out of that crisis along the paths of idealism. During his lifetime, and even more so after Shaw's death in 1950, they tried to present him as a joker and a joker who himself did not take his puns, paradoxes and "eccentrias" seriously.⁸ But we must not forget that Shaw's drama was and always has been a discussion drama, a drama of ideas. It unfolded not in the development of characters or around an entertaining plot, but as proof of one or another position. Staging life's phenomena and facts, Shaw invariably posed social problems, and always the most acute and relevant. In his work, B. Shaw touched on the following issues: militarism, parasitism of the ruling class, the loss of spiritual values, the erasure of individual character, bourgeois philanthropy, nationalist narrow-mindedness, the religious bigotry of the philistines, the national liberation struggle, the denunciation of the hypocrisy of the church, the problem of good and evil in understanding bourgeois public opinion. the problem of emancipation, dogmatic Christianity, the crisis of English bourgeois civilization, the disorder of life and the futility of existence.