Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own.
Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own.
Dublin-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an active Socialist
and a brilliant platform speaker. He was strongly critical of
London theatre and closely associated with the intellectual revival
of British drama.
Dan H. Laurence has edited Shaw's COLLECTED LETTERS and COLLECTED
PLAYS with their Prefaces. He was Literary Advisor to the Shaw
Estate until his retirement in 1990.
Nicholas Grene is Professor of English at the University of Dublin.
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“[Shaw] did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between
truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social
maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but
his jests were never at the expense of humanity.” —Thomas Mann
“Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he
attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles,
questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And
he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe
from him.” —Michael Holroyd
“In his works Shaw left us his mind. . . . Today we have no Shavian
wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our
national intelligence is immense.” —The Sunday Times
“He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr. Johnson, a universal
genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the
shade.” —The Independent
“His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every
issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity,
but they were also hits—and still are.” —The Daily Mail
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