Back to category: English

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.

Consider Bernard Shaw's 'The Doctor's Dilemma' as a satire on the medical profession.

Bernard Shaw- the playwright...

Ifor Evans the well-known critic introduces Bernard Shaw as "the greatest figure in English drama" in the 20th century. His major contribution, no doubt, is as a dramatist. He has to his credit more than fifty plays touching distinct aspects of life and society. But Shaw's greatness as a dramatist derives primarily from the fact that he had no major 19th C. British models on whom to base himself or to draw themes from; or in other words, his forays into the largely unexplored modern dramatic domain were indeed pioneering efforts.
In his time Romanticism was in full flower and the great Victorian novelists--Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontes--held sway in society. It was fortuitous that Ibsen at the time was evolving his realistic dramatic art in Norway. Rather than being a sentimental world of Romantic melodrama, his stage presented 'flesh and blood' human beings. As Richard Weatherford has rightly observed, "...Romantic sentimentalism left...

Posted by: Gabrielle Gooch

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.