GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Among English playwrights George Bernard Shaw is rated next to Shakespeare, though he started to write in his middle age. For the lost time he compensated with an astonishing 47 plays during his long creativity stretching from the Victorian times into the 20^th century. Always full of ideas and opinions, Shaw owed much to his self- education and his long, industrious life.

Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856, Dublin, Ireland — Nov. 2, 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England), the Irish comic dramatist and literary critic, is also equally significant for the development of English literature. After leaving school at age 14, he worked for five years in a land business. In 1876, as his mother together with two daughters left the family to seek fortune in London, Shaw moved there too and launched his literary career with unsuccessful novels. Soon, due to his interest in social reform, he became a co-founder of the Fabian Society in 1884, of socialist orientation, though he was not a conventional member and generally believed in individual powers.

From her mother he inherited a love for music and painting; he knew the operas by Mozart and Wagner, used to visit picture galleries and liked to read in library reading rooms, making up for what he had missed at school. This quality helped him in writing music criticism for the London periodicals; in fact, he initiated a new criteria in this sphere, often ridiculing contemporary tastes. In 1895, he began working in the progressive periodical Saturday Review, supported Henryk Ibsen and Wagner and in 1891 published his reseach The Quintessence of Ibsenism. He said "I must warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures."

His first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), examined the burning problem of London slums. For a long while Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), exploring the taboo subject of prostitution, was not staged. In 1898, Shaw published Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, among the former — Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and among the latter— Widowers' Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession. His later play, John Bull's Other Island (1904) deals with the Irish question; Man and Superman (1904) is a comedy propagating his general outlook; The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) shows doctors and artists solving their moral problems; Major Barbara (1907) is a satire on charitable evangelists; Pygmalion (1912) is a remarkable scene of class differences; Heartbreak House (1919) shows the inevitable crash of civilization; The Apple Cart (1929) treats the problems of monarchy and democracy; Back to Methuselah (1921) is about the Utopian rise of humans to the higher forms of intellect; Saint Joan (1923) is both comedy and tragedy about Joan of Arc. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last plays, of less value, are The Apple Cart (1929), Too True to be Good (1932), On the Rocks (1933), and The Simpleton of the Unexpected-Isles (1934).

Shaw liked to experiment with his characters, settings and time; he intertwined the past and present, and generally achieved his lively theatrical performance, meant both to mock and heal. Most of his plays deal with controversial themes based on amusing plots, interesting characters, and witty dialogue. He stood for spelling reform and in his texts often omitted the apostrophe in some cases like Ive and dont, and used wide-spaced letters instead of italics.

Pygmalion

Pygmalion (1912; produced in 1914), is one of the most popular plays in English. The title alludes to a fabulous king of Cyprus, Pygmalion, who created a statue of so beautiful a woman that he fell in love with her. The goddess of love, Aphrodite, took pity on the king's passion and brought his statue, Galatea, to life. Shaw tells us about a professor of phonetics who tries to reshape a cockney flower girl from the London slums into a polished lady by teaching her correct English.

Henry Higgins, the professor, agrees to a bet that in six months he will change the speech of a Cockney girl, Eliza, to that of a duchess. Though an intelligent and hardworking pupil, she suffers not so much from the training as from Higgins' attitude towards her. When this nice sensitive woman is finally accepted in high society, Higgins simply gets rid of her as the end of a successful experiment. Eliza is in despair as she no longer belongs to her lower class and has no upper class background. In the following episode Eliza visits Professor Higgins for the first time.

JOSEPH CONRAD

Joseph Conrad, apart from a skilful teller of vivid sea adventures, is famous for depicting an individual character in close touch with nature's indifference, and his inner struggle between good and evil. The sea in Conrad's novels still intensifies the tragedy of loneliness, and creates an unprotected vastness against the individual.

One of the greatest English novelists, Joseph Conrad, or Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (Dec. 3, 1857, Berdychiv, Ukraine — Aug. 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England) of Polish origin, was the son of an exiled Polish patriot who died in 1869 and left Conrad in charge of a maternal uncle. In his solitary years little Joseph delighted in reading Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray in Polish and French.

His first contact with the English language was at age eight, as his father was translating Shakespeare to support the family. At age 15 he suddenly decided to go to sea and made his way to Marseilles in 1874, and then made several voyages to the isle of Martinique and the West Indies. In 1878 he came to England, where he enlisted in the crew of a small ship touring between Lowestoft and Newcastle. After six voyages he already spoke English. Afterwards he joined the British merchant service and sailed to the Orient and finally earned his master's diploma in 1886. The same year he received British citizenship. He first commanded a ship in 1888, and in 1890 undertook a steamboat trip up the Congo River, later described in Heart of Darkness (1902). It was a dreadful voyage which forever tortured his imagination and undermined his health.

In the early 1890s, Conrad was already planning to write about his Malayan experiences. Because it was difficult to receive a command over a ship, and because of the aroused interest in his novel Almayer's Folly (1895), he gradually turned to a career as a writer. He moved to London, married an English woman in 1896, and was on his way to becoming an English novelist.

For a long time Conrad was praised as a remarkable sea novelist, but he increasingly used the sea or remote exotic places as a background for deeper explorations of human nature. The novel The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897) tells of a dying black seaman who spoils the spirits of the crew, and symbolically shows Conrad's main concern about the need and danger of human companionship. In Lord Jim (1900) he started his peculiar use of multiple points of view. Another issue under Conrad's artistic eye is the difficulty of true friendship. Such is The Secret Sharer (1912), a story about a young sea captain on his first command to the Gulf of Siam.

Life credos in moments of crisis are probed in The Shadow-Line (1917), Typhoon, (1902) and Nostromo (1904). Political fiction finds its written expression in the novels The Secret Agent (1906) and Under Western Eyes (1911). His later novels include Twixt Land and Sea (1912), Within the Tides (1915), Rescue (1920) and The Rover (1923).

Conrad viewed life pessimistically, and he developed this sad attitude from the fact that even the most honourable men are in danger of losing themselves under the attacks of evil. However, his literary influence was great, both in the way he carries his narrative and the recurrent theme of vicious forces outside and inside his characters. As the author of vivid sea and jungle adventure stories, he was, above all, ardently concerned with man's moral principles and a struggle against misfortune.

The Lagoon

Written in 1896, this short story tells about a white man called "Tuan," meaning "Lord" or "Sir," who travels through an Indonesian rainforest, and stays for the night with his Malay friend Arsat, distressed over the death of his lover.

Once, Arsat, together with his brother, captured his beloved Diamelen, a servant of the Rajah's wife. They all ran away in a boat at night, and sailed until they were totally exhausted. They stopped on a patch of land to rest, but soon noticed a large boat chasing them. It was the Rajah's ship. Arsat and Diamelen were told by his brother to escape to a fisherman's hut in the distance and to take the fisherman's boat. He also instructed them to wait for him while he dealt with the enemy. But Arsat did not wait for his brother and never turned around. He betrayed his brother for a woman he loved.

By the end of the story, the sun rises, and Diamelen dies. Arsat has lost everything and looks absent-mindedly on the sun and an unrecognizable world about him. He plans to get revenge for his brother's death, but later dies on the way.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1388