In 2016, Bob Dylan became the second person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. The first was Bernard Shaw, arguably the first private individual in history to create a global personal brand: GBS was instantly recognizable from Shanghai to New York. He did this while using plays, speeches and polemics to attack orthodox ideas about sex, money and power and show gender and social class as performances. In this course, we follow Shaw’s career as the creator of Pygmalion, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and St Joan, see and review My Fair Lady on Broadway and explore his use of celebrity to unsettle and challenge his audiences.
