George Bernard Shaw

Irish playwright who wrote Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, and Man and Superman — the most important dramatist after Shakespeare in the English language — and whose plays are simultaneously social criticism (capitalism, war, medicine, marriage) and philosophical comedy.

Created the idea-play as a theatrical genre — plays whose subject is not romance but ideas, and whose characters argue philosophy, economics, and social theory while being dramatically compelling — making intellectual argument itself dramatic and demonstrating that theater can carry serious philosophical content.