Pygmalion (1913) is a play by George Bernard Shaw based on Ovid's tale of Pygmalion. It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of
phonetics (based on phonetician Henry Sweet or possibly Alexander Melville Bell), who makes
a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl,
Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class
accent and training her in etiquette. In the process, Higgins and Doolittle grow close, but
she ultimately rejects his domineering ways and declares she will marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill – a young, poor, gentleman.
Shaw wrote the lead role of Eliza Doolittle for Mrs Patrick Campbell (though at
49 she was considered by some to be too old for the part). Due to delays in mounting a London production and Campbell's injury in a car accident, the first English presentation did not
take place until some time after Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theater in Vienna on
October 16, 1913, in a German translation by Shaw. The first
production in English finally opened at His Majesty's Theatre, London on April 11,
1914 and starred Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Henry Higgins; it was directed by Shaw himself.
Plot
Act One
Covent Garden - 11.15p.m. A group of people are sheltering from the rain. Amongst them are the silly, shallow, social climbing
Eynsford-Hills, consisting of mother and daughter, Clara. Freddy Eynsford-Hill enters after being unable to find a cab to take
them home. He is a weak and ineffectual character. His sister bullies him, and enjoys seeing him look ridiculous. As he goes off
once again to find a cab, he bumps into a flower girl, Eliza. Her flowers drop into the mud of Covent Garden, the flowers she
needs to survive in her poverty-stricken world. Shortly they are joined by a gentleman, Colonel Pickering. While Eliza tries to
sell flowers to the Colonel, a bystander informs her that a man is writing down everything she says. The man is Professor Henry
Higgins. A row occurs when Higgins tells people where they were born, which creates both amazement and irritation. One man
accuses Higgins of coming from Hanwell Insane Asylum. It becomes apparent that he and
Colonel Pickering have a shared interest in phonetics. Indeed, Pickering has come from India to
meet Higgins and Higgins was planning to go to India to meet Pickering. Higgins tells Pickering that he could turn the flower
girl into a duchess. These words of bravado spark an interest in Eliza, who would love to make changes in her life and become
more mannerly, even though, to her, it only means working in a flower shop. At the end of the act, Freddy returns after finding a
taxi, only to find that his mother and sister have gone and left him with the cab. The streetwise Eliza takes the cab from him,
using the money that Higgins tossed to her out of pity, leaving him on his own.
Act Two
Higgins' Laboratory - Next Day. As Higgins demonstrates his equipment to Pickering, the housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, tells him
that a young girl wants to see him. She is shown up, and to his disappointment it is Eliza. He has no interest in her, but she
says she wants to pay to have lessons, so she can talk like a lady in a flower shop. Higgins claims that he could turn her into a
duchess. Pickering makes a bet with him on his claim, and says that he will pay for her lessons. She is sent off to have a bath.
Mrs. Pearce tells Higgins that he must behave himself in the young girl's presence. He must stop swearing, and improve his table
manners. He is at a loss to understand why she should find fault with him. Then Alfred Doolittle, Eliza's father, appears with
the sole purpose of getting money out of Higgins. He has no interest in his daughter in a paternal way. He sees himself as member
of the undeserving poor, and means to go on being undeserving. He has an eccentric view of life, brought about by a lack of
education and an intelligent brain. He is also aggressive, and when Eliza, on her return, sticks her tongue out at him, he goes
to hit her, but is prevented by Pickering. The scene ends with Higgins telling Pickering that they really have got a difficult
job on their hands.
Act Three
Mrs Higgins' drawing room. Henry tells his mother he has a young 'common' whom he has been teaching. Mrs Higgins is not very
impressed with her son's attempts to win her approval because it is her 'at home' day, in which she is entertaining visitors. The
visitors are the Eynsford-Hills. Henry is rude to them on their arrival. Eliza enters and soon falls into talking about the
weather and her family. The humour stems from the knowledge the audience have of Eliza, of which the Eynsford-Hills are curiously
ignorant. When she is leaving, Freddy Eynsford-Hill asks her if she is going to walk across the park, to which she replies; "
Walk! Not bloody likely..." (This is the most famous line from the play, and, for many years after, to use the word 'bloody' was
known as a pygmalion.) After she and the Eynsford-Hills leave, Henry asks for his mother's opinion. She says the girl is
not presentable, and she is very concerned about what will happen to the girl; but neither Higgins nor Pickering understand her,
and leave feeling confident and excited about how Eliza will get on. This leaves Mrs Higgins feeling exasperated, and she says
"Men! Men!! Men!!!"
Act Four
Higgins' laboratory - The time is midnight, and Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza have returned from the ball. Pickering
congratulates Higgins on winning the bet. As they retire to bed, Higgins asks where his slippers are, and on returning to his
room Eliza throws them at him. The remainder of the scene is about Eliza not knowing what she is going to do with her life, and
Higgins not understanding her difficulty. Higgins says she could get married, but Eliza interprets this as selling herself like a
prostitute. "We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road." Finally she
returns her jewellery to Higgins, including the ring he had given her, as though she is cutting her ties with him, but retrieves
it from the hearth.
Act Five
Mrs Higgins' drawing room. Higgins and Pickering are perturbed at discovering that Eliza has walked out on them. Doolittle
returns now dressed in wedding attire and transformed into the middle class in which he feels '..intimidated..'. The scene ends
with another confrontation between Higgins and Eliza, which is basically a repeat of the previous act. The play ends with
everyone leaving to see Doolittle married, except for Higgins, who leaves on his own.
Ending
Despite the intense central relationship between Eliza and Henry, the original play ends with her leaving to marry the eager
young Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Shaw, annoyed by the tendency of audiences, actors, and even directors to seek 'romantic'
re-interpretations of his ending, later wrote an essay[1] for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why it was
impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting married.
Some subsequent adaptations have changed this ending. Despite Shaw's insistence that the original ending remain intact,
director Gabriel Pascal provided a more ambiguous end to the 1938 film: instead of
marrying Freddy, Eliza apparently reconciles with Henry in the final scene, leaving open the possibility of their marriage. The
musical version My Fair Lady and its 1964
film have similarly happy endings.
Adaptations
The play led to a series of adaptations:
Television References
- Will and Grace referenced the title in the four part episode "Fagmalion" in which Will and Jack make-over newly queer Barry.
- Boy Meets World made reference to the story in the episode "Turnaround",
where Cory and Shawn enlist the help of a friend to turn Cory's date to the dance popular. Shawn
gets the idea from reading Pygmalion in English Class.
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends made a reference to
Pygmalion in the episode "My So-Called Wife" when Mr. Harriman has to pretend Coco is his wife,
and thus attempts to teach her English using the following sentence: "The sleet in Crete stays neatly in the street."
Trivia
Some have speculated that Alexander Melville Bell was the model for Professor
Higgins. Evidence supporting this includes the fact that Eliza is not a common name, and Eliza Grace Bell was Alexander Melville
Bell's wife. However, in earlier retellings of Ovid's story a similar name is used; Goethe calls her Elise, based upon the variants in the story of Dido/Elissa. The play also
owes something to the legend of King Cophetua.
Shaw's play shocked Edwardian audiences with Eliza's swearing in the line "Not bloody likely!". Campbell was considered to have risked her successful career by
speaking the line.
Joseph Weizenbaum named his artificial
intelligence computer program ELIZA after the
character Eliza Doolittle.
A story goes that Shaw, as part of an ongoing feud with Winston Churchill, sent
Churchill tickets to the opening night of Pygmalion, with an attached note saying that "I have included two tickets so
that you may bring a friend, if you have any." Churchill sent a reply: "I regret to say that I am unable to attend that night; I
would like tickets to the second performance, if there is one."
Similar works
Willy Russell's 1980 stage comedy Educating
Rita, and the subsequent film adaptation, are similar in plot to Pygmalion, but are based on the author's own
experiences.[2]
References to play
In the 2004 film Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
starring Lindsay Lohan, the musical which the school drama club performs is a modern-day
adaptation of Pygmalion with a New York twist (meaning it focuses on a New Yorker woman, rather than a British one).
References
- ^ page 86 of
the Project Gutenberg edition.
- ^ http://www.willyrussell.com/page2intro.html
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
