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George Bernard Shaw was a literary critic, a British socialist and playwright who revolutionized comedic drama._ Pygmalion_ was his most financially successful work which won him the Nobel Prize for literature.His literary career as a novelist was not flourishing; being a follower of Ibsen, he took to writing plays. His plays explore and reflect social class and manners, education and identity.
The individual social, political or ethical issues are addressed in his major plays of the twentieth century. Shaw's drama Man and Superman stands apart in the context of its subject giving a view of Shaw's interpretation of creative evolution. Candida is considered a problem play where the feminine protagonist is the centre of the dramatic discourse dealing about the issue of freedom. Shaw revolutionized comedic drama and was also a literary critic who used his wit to displace the hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas.
Pygmalion which is his masterpiece is his funniest and most popular play. It is claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama. The drama's anti-heroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician but the play is a humane comedy about the English class system.In order to assist a Cockney flower girl become a lady, Higgins trains her and the repercussions of this experiment leads to funny situations.
Shaw also tried his explorations in the tragicomic symbolism. Bernard Shaw is considered the most significant playwright since the seventeenth century who used his plays to propagate his social, political and religious ideas. He is rated high among the British dramatists -second only to Shakespeare. His success as a comic dramatist of his time was secured with the series of his greatest works that included Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, and The Doctor's Dilemma .
