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All About Pygmalion and It's Author

George Bernard Shaw was a famous Irish playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. He wrote many plays between 1893 and 1929 that were popular on Broadway. His most famous work is Pygmalion, written in 1912, which tells the story of a professor who bets he can pass off a poor flower girl as a duchess by teaching her to speak with an upper class accent. Shaw used the play to discuss issues of class, society, gender, and language barriers in England at the time. Pygmalion remains extremely popular today, best known from the musical adaptation My Fair Lady.

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177 views

All About Pygmalion and It's Author

George Bernard Shaw was a famous Irish playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. He wrote many plays between 1893 and 1929 that were popular on Broadway. His most famous work is Pygmalion, written in 1912, which tells the story of a professor who bets he can pass off a poor flower girl as a duchess by teaching her to speak with an upper class accent. Shaw used the play to discuss issues of class, society, gender, and language barriers in England at the time. Pygmalion remains extremely popular today, best known from the musical adaptation My Fair Lady.

Uploaded by

octavianc96
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for

Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the
first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs.
Warren's Profession" in 1893 to "The Apple Cart" in 1929. His works have been revived on Broadway
from 1894 to 2010. His most famous work in the 21st Century is My Fair Lady (1964), the musical
adaptation of Pygmalion(1938).A Shavian drama (his reputation was so great, he had his own adjective
ascribed to his works) had a biting social critique leavened by humor. According to his Nobel Prize
citation, "His ideas were those of a somewhat abstract logical radicalism; hence they were far from new,
but they received from him a new definiteness and brilliance. In him these ideas combined with a ready
wit, a complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the merriest humor - all gathered
together in an extravagance which has scarcely ever before appeared in literature."He was a major
international celebrity and a force in British politics, being a charter member of the Fabian Society. The
Fabians were committed to democratic socialism, that is, using parliamentary mechanisms to encourage
a gradual adoption of socialist policies through political reform rather than revolution.
Pygmalion, written in 1912 by George Bernard Shaw and first performed two years later, tells the story
of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics (speech), who bets his friend that he can pass off a poor
flower girl with a Cockney accent as a duchess by teaching her to speak with an upper class accent.In
addition to being a playwright, Shaw was a theater critic, an essayist, a lifelong socialist and advocate for
the working class, and, like Higgins, something of a phonetician. Given the scope of his interests, it
should come as no surprise that he had a lot to say about a lot of things. Pygmalion, like most of Shaw's
plays, is didactic. That is, it's meant to teach the audience about something. In this case, Shaw wants us
to think about the problems caused by our "common" language, and how language can separate people
from different places and classes, even different parts of the same town. In his preface to the play,
entitled, "A Professor of Phonetics," he writes, "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" (source). Seems like he's about ready to yell, "We have a failure to communicate!" Well,
instead of screaming, he wrote Pygmalion. (He called for the creation of an "improved" system of
spelling English, but, thankfully, it didn't catch on. You can read more about it in "Trivia.")
It's easy to sympathize with Shaw, though. If you've ever had trouble understanding someone because
his accent was different than yours, or had trouble pronouncing an unfamiliar word (whydoes "subtle"
have a "b" in it anyway?), you probably know what Shaw's talking about: sometimes English doesn't
really make much sense, even to native speakers. When you consider that Shaw was writing at a time
when the British Empire was still around, when people from all over the globe were expected and
sometimes forced to communicate in English, and the situation only becomes more complicated.All this
talk about language is only the beginning, though. Shaw uses it as a base to discuss other issues:
problems about society, class, and gender. No need to get overwhelmed right off the bat, though. It's
best to take it slow and start with words. That's where all literature begins, right?
Given that we can all relate to these problems, however, it's no surprise that Pygmalion was and is
extremely popular. Most people know the plot from My Fair Lady, the musical film adaptation of Shaw's
play and it's been parodied by everyone from The Three Stooges to The Simpsons and Family Guy. Shaw
also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for the 1938 film version, making him the only
person ever to win both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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