Pygmalion (play) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Pygmalion: a romance in Five Acts

Pygmalion (play)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion was the creator of a sculpture which came to life and was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story in 1871, called Pygmalion and Galatea. Shaw also would have been familiar with theburlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.
Inspirations
Shaw created Eliza Doolittle specifically for Mrs Patrick Campbell, partly as a flirtatious challenge and partly to tease her for her social pretensions, which he felt hampered her growth as an artist.Her affected diction onstage (even in Shakespeare), which both he and Oscar Wilde instantly recognized as that of a suburban social climber was at odds with her considerable abilities. The idea came to him in 1897, when "Mrs. Pat" was under contract to Johnston Forbes-Robertson and at the height of her youthful fascination and glamour. Writing to Ellen Terry in September of that year, he mentions Forbes's "rapscallionly flower girl"; the next sentence is, "Caesar and Cleopatra has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a west end gentleman and she an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers.
"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."^[ The success of Pygmalion drew attention to the science of phonetics and speculation arose over whether a model for Henry Higgins existed. Shaw never named an inspiration for the man or the professor. However, in the Preface to the 1916 edition he writes at length about the respectedphilologist and phonetician Henry Sweet, with whom he communicated for years regarding phonetics and shorthand. Dr. Sweet would stand before a group of speakers, taking furious notes on their phonetic conversation; he categorized voice sounds and accents, sent postcards to friends written in a unique shorthand or in the symbols of his "Broad Romic" system of phonetic notation, could pronounce seventy-two vowel sounds, and "unfortunately was of a rather difficult disposition." Nevertheless, "Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet... still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play.
Shaw also knew and may have consulted with Daniel Jones, the leading phonetician of the time. In a few years Jones would codify a standard of English speech, Received Pronunciation, "the accent most commonly associated with the British 'upper crust'...based on a sixteenth-century, upper-class London accent"^[the steps to learning and teaching such an accent would have been of paramount importance to the playwright. It's also possible that Dr. Jones's laboratory equipment inspired Higgins's, but Jones's biographer concludes that "the Higgins character...would appear to have taken on a vivid life of its own during the writing of the play.
Shaw was friends with the author Arthur Mee who lived in the village of Eynsford in Kent. Mee lived in a large house built on the hill overlooking the village, the house was called Eynsford-Hill.
First productions
Shaw wrote the play in the spring of 1912 and read it to Mrs. Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown (and its doctor-enforced leisure, which led to a quasi-romantic intrigue with Shaw^[) contributed to the delay of a London production. Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on October 16, 1913, in a German translation by Shaw's Viennese literary agent and acolyte, Siegfried Trebitsch. Its first New York production opened March 24, 1914 at the German-language Irving Place Theatre It opened in London April 11, 1914 at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree'sHis Majesty's Theatre and starred Mrs. Campbell as Eliza and Tree as Higgins. Shaw directed the actors through tempestuous rehearsals often punctuated by at least one of the three storming out of the theater in a rage

Plot

First American (serialized) publication,Everybody's Magazine, November 1914
Shaw was conscious of the difficulties involved in staging a complete representation of the play. Acknowledging in a "Note for technicians" that such a thing would only be possible "on the cinema screen or on stages furnished with exceptionally elaborate machinery", he marked some scenes as candidates for omission if necessary. Of these, a short scene at the end of Act One in which Eliza goes home, and a scene in Act Two in which Eliza is unwilling to undress for her bath, are not described here. The others are the scene at the Embassy Ball in Act Three and the scene with Eliza and Freddy in Act Four. Neither the Gutenberg edition referenced throughout this page nor the Wikisource text linked below contain these sequences.