A) early works of Bernard Shaw. The first cycle of Shaw’s plays

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in a family of a civil servant. He was fifteen when he left school to become an office boy at a firm of land agents in Dublin. Being fond of the theatre he visited it from his earliest years and acquired so profound a knowledge of Shakespeare that he knew many of the plays by heart.

At the age of nineteen Shaw moved to England to spend his remaining 75 years there. In London B. Shaw had no intention of continuing office work and he spent time educating himself. He used to say: "Though almost penniless I had a magnificent li­brary in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture gallery in Trafalgar Square and another at Hampton Court without any servants to look after or rent to pay. I had the brains to use them." Between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five long novels, such as Im­maturity, Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in which he tackled the problems of marriage and showed himself as the fighter for family relations built on spiritual understanding free from so­cial and class prejudices. Other works are An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron's Profession.

In the early eighties Shaw was deeply impressed by the increas­ing unemployment in London, being not far from poverty himself. At the British Museum reading room he read Karl Marx in a French version and "From that hour I became a man with some business in the world." In 1884 B. Shaw joined the Fabian Society which based their activity on believing in slow development of different social reforms instead of revolutionary measures. He became one of the most famous public speakers, who was feared by every opponent for his sharp tongue and clear argument.

About this time Shaw was offered a job in the Pall Mall Gazette and in a short time he became one of the most popular critics of music, art and drama in London. He published several books of criticism on music and theatre, among them London Music, Music in London, Our Theatres in the Nineties. Nevertheless Shaw's atten­tion was turned to the drama as a means of expressing the ideas crowding his mind. The long list of his plays opens with the cycle of Plays Unpleasant which marked the beginning of a new period in the history of English drama. This cycle includes Widower's Houses (1892), Philanderer (1893) and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894). He protests against the evils of the society and the low position of a woman. He exposes such seamy sides of bourgeois society as pover­ty, sexual exploitation, marriage as a business deal, prostitution.

Widower's Houses. The first performance of B. Shaw's play Widower's Houses in 1892 was quite a sensation. Shaw was attacked both by the public and the critics who called him a cynic.

The theme was declared by Shaw to be "middleclass respectabil­ity fattening on the poverty of the slums as flies fatten on filth”. The play was a ruthless exposure of the darker sides of English life.

A respectable English gentleman Sartorius has made his fortune by renting tenement houses in the slum area. The houses are in a terrible state but he refuses to spend any money on repairs. During the rest on the Rein he acquaints his daughter Blanche with a young doctor Harry Trench. They fall in love with each other and decide to marry. They return to England where Harry Trench pays a visit to Mr. Sartorius' house and is shocked at finding out that Sartorius's wealth has come from slum property. Trench offers Blanche to live on his income which he believes is derived in an honest way. Howev­er, Sartorius proves to Trench that the wealth of the latter comes from the same source, because the slums are located on the land that belongs to Trench and his aunt. The play reveals that the re­spectability of the rich rests on the money squeezed out of suffering and starving people.

Thus the start was made. He started by criticizing bourgeois morals and corruption. A year later he wrote the Philanderer and a few months later another satire Mrs. Warren's Profession, all the three being "plays unpleasant", because he was telling the truth to the bourgeois readers and spectators.

Mrs.Warren's Profession. Mrs. Warren is a proprietress of sev­eral brothels in Belgium, Vienne, Budapest and she profits greatly from them. She considers her business quite honest and noble. She is able to give her daughter Vivie a decent education at private school and then at the university. Her daughter does not suspect what the source of her mother's income is. When she becomes aware of this her first impulse was to protest against it. It seemed that Bernard Shaw's intention was to portray a new character who due to her energy would try to change things in the bourgeois society. But it didn't happen. Her mother told the story of life of three sisters: one of them got poisoned by lead at the factory and died, another married a worker and kept the house with three children for 16 shillings a week till her husband deteriorated through heavy drinking. "Was it worthy to keep straight for the sake of it?" she asks her daughter. Then she told her daughter about her work as a scullery maid until she and her sister Lizz opened a brothel. It was a first-rate brothel and the girls were treated miles better than she was treated working as a scullery maid. Little by little her daughter begins to take mother's side. "You were right if taken from practi­cal point of view", she said. "And from all others", was Mrs. War­ren's answer. She said that marriage did not settle the question, so the best way was to chase a bachelor, marry him and live on his money. Prostitution is tackled by Shaw as the social evil and he severely criticizes it. No wonder that the play did not see the stage until 1902.

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