Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, named after the Greek mythological figure. It premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913 and was first presented on stage in German. Its English-language premiere took place at His Majesty's Theatre in London's West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle.
For other works with this title, see Pygmalion.Pygmalion
- Professor Henry Higgins
- Colonel Pickering
- Eliza Doolittle
- Alfred Doolittle
- Mrs Pearce
- Mrs Higgins
- Mrs Eynsford-Hill
- Clara Eynsford-Hill
- Freddy Eynsford-Hill
16 October 1913
Hofburg Theatre in Vienna, Austria
London, England
Shaw's play has been adapted many times, most notably as the 1938 film Pygmalion, the 1956 stage musical My Fair Lady, and its 1964 film version.
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#0__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#0__subtitleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__descriptionDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
Inspiration[edit]
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era British playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea that was first presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the musical Adonis and the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.
Eliza Doolittle was inspired by Kitty Wilson, owner of a sidewalk flower stall at Norfolk Street, Strand, in London. Wilson continued selling flowers at the stall until September, 1958. Her daughter, Betty Benton, then took over, but was forced to close down a month later when the City of London decreed that the corner was no longer "designated" for street trading.[1]
Shaw mentioned that the character of Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of phonetics: Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, Tito Pagliardini, but above all the cantankerous Henry Sweet.[2]
Shaw is also very likely to have known the life story of Jacob Henle, a professor at Heidelberg University, who fell in love with Elise Egloff, a Swiss housemaid, forcing her through several years of bourgeois education to turn her into an adequate wife. Egloff died shortly after their marriage. Her story inspired various literary works, including a play by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer and a novella by Gottfried Keller, comparing Henle with the Greek Pygmalion.[3]
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__descriptionDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
Plot[edit]
Act One[edit]
A group of people are sheltering from the rain. Among them are the Eynsford-Hills, superficial social climbers eking out a living in "genteel poverty". We first see Mrs Eynsford-Hill and her daughter Clara; Clara's brother Freddy enters having earlier been dispatched to secure them a cab (which they can ill afford), but being rather timid and faint-hearted he has failed to do so. As he goes off once again to find a cab, he bumps into a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. Her flowers drop into the mud of Covent Garden, the flowers she needs to survive in her poverty-stricken world.
They are soon joined by a gentleman, Colonel Pickering. While Eliza tries to sell flowers to the Colonel, a bystander informs her that another man is writing down everything she says. That man is Henry Higgins, a linguist and phonetician. Eliza worries that Higgins is a police officer and will not calm down until Higgins introduces himself.
It soon becomes apparent that he and Colonel Pickering have a shared interest in phonetics and an intense mutual admiration; indeed, Pickering has come from India specifically to meet Higgins, and Higgins was planning to go to India to meet Pickering. Higgins tells Pickering that he could pass off the flower girl as a duchess merely by teaching her to speak properly.
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, leaving him on his own.
Critical reception[edit]
The play was well received by critics in major cities following its premières in Vienna, London, and New York. The initial release in Vienna garnered several reviews describing the show as a positive departure from Shaw's usual dry and didactic style.[10] The Broadway première in New York was praised in terms of both plot and acting, and the play was described as "a love story with brusque diffidence and a wealth of humour."[11] Reviews of the production in London were slightly less positive. The Telegraph noted that the play was deeply diverting, with interesting mechanical staging, although the critic ultimately found the production somewhat shallow and overly lengthy.[12] The Times, however, praised both the characters and the actors (especially Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza) and the "unconventional" ending.[13][14]
Influence[edit]
Pygmalion remains Shaw's most popular play. The play's widest audiences know it as the inspiration for the highly romanticized 1956 musical and 1964 film My Fair Lady.
Pygmalion has transcended cultural and language barriers since its first production. The British Library contains "images of the Polish production...; a series of shots of a wonderfully Gallicised Higgins and Eliza in the first French production in Paris in 1923; a fascinating set for a Russian production of the 1930s. There was no country which didn't have its own 'take' on the subjects of class division and social mobility, and it's as enjoyable to view these subtle differences in settings and costumes as it is to imagine translators wracking their brains for their own equivalent of 'Not bloody likely'."[21]
Joseph Weizenbaum named his chatterbot computer program ELIZA after the character Eliza Doolittle.[22]
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#4__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#4__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#3__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#3__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$