Pygmalion

by George Bernard Shaw

Possibly Shaw's comedic masterpiece, and certainly his funniest and most popular play, is “Pygmalion.” It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician. The play tells how Professor Henry Higgins, in order to win a bet, trains the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to behave like a duchess, largely by teaching her “to speak beautifully” in Received Standard pronunciation.

Beneath the comedy lies a satire on the superficiality of class distinctions. This is made explicit in the character of Eliza's father, Doolittle, who calls himself one of "the undeserving poor" and is one of Shaw's best comedy creations. Further, the scene in which Eliza Doolittle appears in high society when she has acquired a correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is one of the funniest in English drama.

It was first performed in German in Vienna in 1913, then in London in the original English in 1914, when it created a sensation because the phrase 'not bloody likely' occurs in Act 3. A result of this was the minced oath “not Pygmalion likely” and the use of the name to talk about swearing: “The trouble really began when alderman Mrs. K. Sheridan was speaking about the council fleecing tenants and used a pygmalion word” (The Times, 28 Apr. 1960).

Pygmalion has been both filmed (1938), winning an Academy Award for Shaw for his screenplay, and adapted into an immensely popular musical, My Fair Lady (1956; motion-picture version, 1964).

Mrs. Patrick Campbell, whose maiden name was Beatrice Stella Tanner, is remembered today for her association with G. B. Shaw. She was an actress of great beauty and wit. In 1912 she met Shaw at whose request she originated the role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.

The playwright found the actress irresistible: "It is impossible not to feel that those haunting eyes are brooding on a momentous past, and the parted lips anticipating a thrilling imminent future. Mrs. Patrick Campbell is a wonderful woman." He told the readers of the Saturday Review that her acting ability (or alleged lack of it) was completely beside the point. "Who said she could?--who wants her to act? who cares twopence whether she possesses that or any other second-rate accomplishment? On the highest plane one does not act, one is. Go and see her move, stand, speak, look, kneel--go and breathe the magic atmosphere that is created by the grace of all these deeds."