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PYGMALION is easily George Bernard Shaw’s most enduring—and most endearing—work. Though inspired by the Ancient Greek legend, Pygmalion (Henry Higgins) is not a sculptor but a professor of British dialect; his Galatea (Liza Doolittle), not a statue but a common English flower girl. Once inspiration has played its role, Shaw leaves antiquity behind and brings his characters into a new age. Higgins does not want to marry his creation, he wants to flaunt his skills by turning Liza into sophisticated lady—though a fraudulent one. Shaw’s theme is centered on the evolving moralities, styles, and gender roles of his own time, but his theme is just as relevant today as it was then. Shaw’s play gained a new generation of admirers when it hit Broadway in 1956 as the Lerner and Loewe musical MY FAIR LADY. In 1964, the film version expanded the new audience worldwide. But music and dancing aside, it is Shaw’s brilliant story that is the heart of its appeal.

One of Shaw's most enduring works, Pygmalion is an insightful comedy of class relations and perceptions, as played out between a Cockney flower girl and the irascible speech professor who has taken her on as a pet project. Described by critics as “a play of great vitality and charm,” Pygmalion inspired the award-winning stage and film productions of Lerner and Loewe's musical, My Fair Lady. Starring Shannon Cochran, Nicholas Pennell, Roslyn Alexander, Denise du Maurier, Kenneth Northcott, and Nicholas Rudall. Written by George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw - Akasha Classics, AkashaPublishing.Com - As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to English-men. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Pygmalion is a comedy which features a unique relationship between a spunky flower girl and her speech professor. In this George Bernard Shaw classic, flower girl Eliza Doolittle teaches her speech professor Henry Higgins that being a lady is more than just speaking like one. This is a truly important work for those who are fans of the writings of George Bernard Shaw and should not be passed up by individuals who are fans of comedic and witty plays.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to English-men. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject.

In the 19th century, Britain faced many challenges due to its class based society, with often nothing but people's speech patterns being enough to keep them rooted in their own static area of society from which it was hard to escape.In this famous George Bernard Shaw play, Henry Higgins, a renowned speech therapist and expert, meets Liza Doolittle, a lowerclass girl with one of the most distorted English accents he had ever heard. As part of a wager, Higgins challenges himself to teach Liza how to speak properly, and even integrate her into higher society without anyone being ableto tell that she's actually a lowerclass individual.While Higgins' progress seems to be slow at first, Liza proves to be up to the challenge, although things quickly get complicated when the two main protagonists end up falling for each other, and their relationship becomes bitter sweet – the kind of love/hate relationship you'd rarely expect to work.Pygmalion is considered to be one of Bernard Shaw's most successful works, beautifully mixing comedy with romance, the possibility of overcoming one's personal limitations, the complex facets of the British social norms and boundaries of the time, as well as the emphasis on artificiality when it comes to describing many of the ironic traits associated with the upper classes.The title, however, leans more toward bringing the focus onto the romantic relationship between Higgins and Liza, hinting at Higgins' predicament, with Pygmalion being a Greek artist who became infatuated with his own sculpture.Many would likely be more acquainted with the movie version of Bernard Shaw's remarkable work – My Fair Lady – which gained great recognition in the mid-1960s, having won multiple Academy awards.

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Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts (1912) is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a comment on women's independence, packaged as a romantic comedy.