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Humane comedy
- Pygmalion, romance in five acts by George Bernard Shaw, produced in German in 1913 in Vienna. It was performed in England in 1914, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle. The play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system.
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Pygmalion, romance in five acts by George Bernard Shaw, produced in German in 1913 in Vienna. It was performed in England in 1914, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle. The play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. Learn more about the play in this article.
Shaw's comedy of manners, which satirizes the customs and habits of the Victorian elite, plays with and critiques the social conventions of this historical moment. Other Books Related to Pygmalion Shaw's play takes its title from the myth of Pygmalion, which is told in Ovid's epic Latin poem of mythological transformations, the Metamorphoses .
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Further Reading
- Sources
George Bernard Shaw was born into a poor Protestant family in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856. Despite childhood neglect (his father was an alcoholic), he became one of the most prominent writers of modern Britain. His mother introduced him to music and art at an early age and after 1876, when he moved to London to continue his self-education, sh...
Act I
The action begins at 11:15 p.m. in a heavy summer rainstorm. An after-theatre crowd takes shelter in the portico of St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. A young girl, Clara Eynsford Hill, and her mother are waiting for Clara’s brother Freddy, who looks in vain for an available cab. Colliding into flower peddler Liza Doolittle, Freddy scatters her flowers. After he departs to continue looking for a cab, Liza convinces Mrs. Eynsford Hill to pay for the damaged flowers; she then cons three halfpe...
Act II
The next morning at 11 a.m. in Higgins’s laboratory, which is full of instruments. Higgins and Pickering receive Liza, who has presented herself at the door. Higgins is taken aback by Liza’s request for lessons from him. She wants to learn to “talk more genteel” so she can be employed in a flower shop instead of selling flowers on the street. Liza can only offer to pay a shilling per lesson, but Pickering, intrigued by Higgins’s claims the previous night, offers to pay for Liza’s lessons and...
Act III
The setting is the flat of Mrs. Higgins, Henry’s mother. Henry bursts in with a flurry of excitement, much to the distress of his mother, who finds him lacking in social graces (she observes that her friends “stop coming whenever they meet you”). Henry explains that he has invited Liza, taking the opportunity for an early test of his progress with Liza’s speech. The Eynsford Hills, guests of Mrs. Higgins, arrive. The discussion is awkward and Henry, true to his mother’s observations, does app...
Clara
SeeMiss Clara Eynsford Hill
Doolittle
SeeAlfred Doolittle
Alfred Doolittle
Alfred is Liza’s father, whom Shaw describes as “an elderly but vigorous dustman. . . . He has well marked and rather interesting features, and seems equally free from fear or conscience. He has a remarkably expressive voice, the result of a habit of giving vent to his feelings without reserve.” Doolittle describes himself as the “undeserving poor,” who need just as much as the deserving but never get anything because of the disapproval of middle-class morality. Nevertheless, he is a skilled...
Appearances and Reality
Pygmalion examines this theme primarily through the character of Liza, and the issue of personal identity (as perceived by oneself or by others). Social roles in the Victorian era were viewed as natural and largely fixed: there was perceived to be something inherently, fundamentally unique about a noble versus an unskilled laborer and vice versa. Liza’s ability to fool society about her “real” identity raises questions about appearances. The importance of appearance and reality to the theme o...
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Research the history of phonetics and speech as a subject of study; does Shaw’s depiction of the scientific interests of his character Higgins seem to have been well-grounded in historical precedent? 2. Compare and contrast the ways in which both Liza and her father are thrust into the middle class (she through learning to speak “properly,” he through obtaining money), and why each is not comfortable in it. Through these characters, what does Shaw seem to be saying about class distinctions...
Beauty
In Pygmalion,Shaw interrogates beauty as a subjective value. One’s perception of beauty in another person is shown to be a highly complex matter, dependent on a large number of (not always aesthetic) factors. Liza, it could be argued, is the same person from the beginning of the play to the end, but while she is virtually invisible to Freddy as a Cockney-speaking flower merchant, he is totally captivated by what he perceives as her beauty and grace when she is presented to him as a lady of so...
Plotting with a Purpose
In Pygmalion’splot, Higgins, a phonetics expert, makes a friendly bet with his colleague Colonel Pickering that he can transform the speech and manners of Liza, a common flower girl, and present her as a lady to fashionable society. He succeeds, but Liza gains independence in the process, and leaves her former tutor because he is incapable of responding to her needs. Pygmalion has a tightly-constructed plot, rising conflict, and other qualities of the “well-made play,” a popular form at the t...
Intellect vs. Entertainment
Shaw broke both with the predominant intellectual principle of his day, that of “art for art’s sake,” as well as with the popular notion that the purpose of the theatre was strictly to entertain. Refusing to write a single sentence for the sake of either art or entertainment alone, Shaw openly declared that he was for a theater which preached to its audience on social issues. Edward Wagenknecht wrote in A Guide to Bernard Shaw that Shaw’s plays “are not plays: they are tracts in dramatic form...
Romance
In calling Pygmalion a romance (its subtitle is “A Romance in Five Acts”), Shaw was referencing a well-established literary form (not usually employed in theatre), to which Pygmalion does not fully conform. (Shaw was aiming to provoke thought by designating his play thusly.) The term romance does not imply, as it was misinterpreted to mean by many of Shaw’s contemporaries, a romantic element between Liza and Higgins. Since the middle ages, romances have been distinguished from more realistic...
Nineteen-fourteen, the year of Pygmalion’s London premiere, marked tremendous changes in British society. On July 28, the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, setting off an international conflict due to a complicated set of alliances which had developed in Europe. Within two weeks, this conflict had erupted into a world war (known in Britain at the time as the “Great War”). By the end of World War I(as it came to be known later), 8.5 million p...
Colonialism and the British Empire
In 1914 Great Britain was very much still a colonial power, but while victory in the First World War actually increased the size of the British Empire, the war itself simultaneously accelerated the development of nationalism and autonomy in the provinces. Even before the war, British pride in its Empire had reached a climax prior to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and the brutalities of the Boer War (1899-1902), fought to assert Britain’s authority in South Africa. Still, British society...
COMPARE & CONTRAST
1. 1910s: Women in Britain do not have the right to vote, and their opportunities for education and employment remain limited.Today: Since 1928, all women over the age of 21 have had the right to vote in Britain. The direct participation of women in government continues to be more limited than that of men, although the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 set an important precedent. Women were admitted to full admission at Oxford in 1920 and to Cambridge Universityin 1948....
Building upon the acclaim Pygmalion had received from German-language production and publication, the original English production of the play at His Majesty’s Theatre was likewise a success, securing Shaw’s reputation as a popular playwright. Still, contemporary reviews of Pygmalion are mixed, revealing the somewhat prejudicial views English critic...
Christopher Busiel
Busiel is an English instructor at the University of Texas. His essay considers Shaw’s play within the context of his other great works. Like all of Shaw’s great dramatic creations, Pygmalion is a richly complex play. It combines a central story of the transformation of a young woman with elements of myth, fairy tale, and romance, while also combining an interesting plot with an exploration of social identity, the power of science, relations between men and women, and other issues. Change is...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Major Barbara, another of Shaw’s plays, first produced in 1905, and considered his first major work. It explores the ideological conflict between “Major” Barbara Undershaft, who strives to lift up the poor through her untiring effort with the Salvation Army, and her father, Sir Andrew Undershaft, a fabulously wealthy arms manufacturer. Both achievers represent Shaw’s theory of the Life Force, or human advancement through “creative evolution.” The play explores the question of whose actions...
Stanley J. Solomon
Solomon addresses the controversy surrounding the ending of Shaw’s Pygmalion in this essay. Examining the play’s action, he concludes that the playwright’s original denouement is the only appropriate one. Solomon is an educator and critic who specializes in film theory. Pygmalion is one of Shaw’s most popular plays as well as one of his most straightforward ones. The form has none of the complexity that we find in Heartbreak House or Saint Joan, nor are the ideas in Pygmalionnearly as profoun...
Bentley, Eric. Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950,amended edition, New Directions, 1957. Crane, Milton. “Pygmalion: Bernard Shaw’s Dramatic Theory and Practice” in Publications of the Modern Language Association,Vol. 66, no.6, December, 1951, pp. 879-85. Dukore, Bernard F. “The Director As Interpreter: Shaw’s Pygmalion” in Shaw,Vol. 3, 1983, pp. 129-47. Evans...
Berst, Charles A. Bernard Shaw and the Art of DramaUniversity of Illinois Press (Urbana), 1973, pp. 197-218.
How is Pygmalion a comedy of manners? Quick answer: Pygmalion is a comedy of manners because it satirizes the behavior of the upper and middle classes in turn-of-the-century British society.
Pygmalion falls under the genre of social satire, a genre Shaw wields with precision and genius, crafting a story that is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. The play’s title, drawing from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who falls in love with a statue he created, hints at the transformation and themes Shaw explores.
Although it is often conflated in the popular imagination with the much-loved musical it inspired, George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is somewhat different from the romantic comedy My Fair Lady. Let’s take a closer look at Shaw’s play and some of its prominent themes.
In the first four acts of Pygmalion, Bernard Shaw uses two myths to introduce romantic comedy elements in order to encourage his fifth and final act. The first and most obvious myth Shaw drew upon in the writing of the play is that of Pygmalion and Galatea, a famous Greek legend.
