Shaw’s comic touch （喜剧风格）is seen at its best in Pygmalion （皮格马利翁）(1913), which was adapted as the musical comedy and film My Fair Lady. But the play also addresses important issues of class, social power and even sexual politics in the relationship between the Cockney （伦敦东区人）flower girl Eliza Doolittle and her teacher, the middle class Professor Henry Higgins.
Shaw’s productivity dried up temporarily （创作力一时干涸）during World War I, which he saw as a crude struggle between GREedy imperial powers. In Heartbreak House （伤心之家）(1920), he condemned the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation. Back to Methuselah （回到马修斯拉时代）(1921) was more optimistic, setting out Shaw’s theory of creative evolution in a sequence of parable plays（逐步展示了萧伯纳在系列寓言剧中表现创世进化的理论）. In 1923, Shaw produced what many regard as his masterpiece, Saint Joan, for which he received the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. Witty yet deeply moving, the play depicts Joan of Arc as a mystic visionary （神秘的幻想家）and also as a plain-speaking peasant girl.
Throughout his long career, Shaw always used his plays as a vehicle for his ideas（表达思想的手段）. He was adept at blurring the distinctions between high drama and comedy to show simultaneously the absurdity and the seriousness of life（他驾轻就熟地把严肃剧和喜剧融为一体，同时展示了生活荒诞的一面和严肃的一面）. ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh（人们死去的时候生活依旧滑稽有趣，人们大笑的时候生活依然板着面孔）,’he wrote in The Doctor’s Dilemma （医生的穷境）(1906).
Although his later work is not considered to be of the same standard, Shaw continued to write into his 90s and was always in the public eye. All his plays were accompanied by extended prefaces which persuasively and influentially set out the ideas contained in the plays（他全部的剧本都伴有冗长的前言，旨在把剧中的思想发扬光大）. His letters are considered to be among the best in the English language.
