Shaw's Challenge: A Comparative Study Of The Taming Of The Shrew And Pygmalion

It is generally acknowledged that William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw are two of the most famous playwrights in the British literary history. He has left us a great wealth of 154 sonnets, 37 plays, as well as two long poems. Shakespeare, as Ben Johnson commented,"was not of an age, but for all time."George Bernard Shaw is considered to be the greatest playwright in England since Shakespeare and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. He wrote 51 well-known plays, and his drama has been generally acknowledged as the mainstream in the 20th century English theater.Despite the fact that they are both held in high esteem by literary critics, and are admired by their contemporaries and later generations, their literary opinions, especially when it comes to social moral standards and women's social status, are worlds apart. As a champion of women's liberation who was strongly against the Victorian stereotype of submissive and docile women, Shaw believed that by writing a play a good writer should make his audience reconsider the morals of their society, yet Shakespeare was only content with dramatizing the existing morality of the society.Shaw not only criticized Shakespeare on the purpose of drama, but also set up similar plots in his own works to challenge Shakespeare's treatment in similar stories. The two works Pygmalion and The Taming of the Shrew are a good case in point. Although they are similar to each other in many aspects, yet by taking a closer look one can still find how amazingly different the two female protagonists and their transformations are. Through the study of this thesis, the author tries to discover how the two plays, one of which is set in the Elizabethan age and the other of which in the Victorian age, are similar to each other, and more importantly, how they are different from each other under the two great writers'pens.