Ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic of uzbekistan university of languages 2nd faculty of foreign language and literature 2nd year 2010 group o’rozaliyeva marjona

The most popular play “Pygmalion”.
Born in Dublin in 1856 to a middle-class Protestant family bearing pretensions to nobility (Shaw's embarrassing alcoholic father claimed to be descended from Macduff, the slayer of Macbeth), George Bernard Shaw grew to become what some consider the second greatest English playwright, behind only Shakespeare. Others most certainly disagree with such an assessment, but few question Shaw's immense talent or the play's that talent produced. Shaw died at the age of 94, a hypochondriac, socialist, anti-vaccinationist, semi-feminist vegetarian who believed in the Life Force and only wore wool. He left behind him a truly massive corpus of work including about 60 plays, 5 novels, 3 volumes of music criticism, 4 volumes of dance and theatrical criticism, and heaps of social commentary, political theory, and voluminous correspondence. And this list does not include the opinions that Shaw could always be counted on to hold about any topic, and which this flamboyant public figure was always most willing to share. Shaw's most lasting contribution is no doubt his plays, and it has been said that "a day never passes without a performance of some Shaw play being given somewhere in the world." One of Shaw's greatest contributions as a modern dramatist is in establishing drama as serious literature, negotiating publication deals for his highly popular plays so as to convince the public that the play was no less important than the novel. In that way, he created the conditions for later playwrights to write seriously for the theater. Of all of Shaw's plays, Pygmalion is without the doubt the most beloved and popularly received, if not the most significant in literary terms. Several film versions have been made of the play, and it has even been adapted into a musical. In fact, writing the screenplay for the film version of 1938 helped Shaw to become the first and only man ever to win the much coveted Double: the Nobel Prize for literature and an Academy Award. Shaw wrote the part of Eliza in Pygmalion for the famous actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, with whom Shaw was having a prominent affair at the time that had set all of London abuzz. The aborted romance between Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle reflects Shaw's own love life, which was always peppered with enamored and beautiful women, with whom he flirted outrageously but with whom he almost never had any further relations. For example, he had a long marriage to Charlotte Payne-Townsend in which it is well known that he never touched her once. The fact that Shaw was quietly a member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, an organization whose core members were young men agitating for homosexual liberation, might or might not inform the way that Higgins would rather focus his passions on literature or science than on women. That Higgins was a representation of Pygmalion, the character from the famous story of Ovid's Metamorphoses who is the very embodiment of male love for the female form, makes Higgins sexual disinterest all the more compelling. Shaw is too consummate a performer and too smooth in his self- presentation for us to neatly dissect his sexual background; these lean biographical facts, however, do support the belief that Shaw would have an interest in exploding the typical structures of standard fairy tales. When George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925, he was praised for turning “his weapons against everything that he conceives of as prejudice.” This is clearly true of Pygmalion, which was premiered in German in Vienna in 1913. The play is a modern interpretation of an ancient myth, the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion, an artist, falls in love with Galatea, a statue of an ideal woman that he created. Pygmalion is a man disgusted with real-life women, so chooses celibacy and the pursuit of an ideal woman whom he carves out of ivory. Wishing the statue were real, he makes a sacrifice to Venus, the goddess of love, who brings the statue to life. By the late Renaissance, poets and dramatists began to contemplate the thoughts and feelings of this woman, who woke full-grown in the arms of a lover. Shaw’s central character—the flower girl Liza Doolittle—expresses articulately how her transformation has made her feel, and he adds the additional twist that Liza turns on her “creator” in the end by leaving him. In Shaw’s rendition, Higgins, a teacher, “creates” Eliza, his pupil, by teaching her to speak like a duchess—a transformation that allows Shaw to attack the superficial class prejudices of his time. Shaw’s version discards the romantic element, and transposes the Pygmalion myth into pre-war England, a period in which rigid social class structures were being challenged and gender roles were undergoing profound transformations. In Pygmalion, received ideas on the roles of men and women, teacher and student, and upper and working classes are turned on their heads, and Shaw’s essential humanity, feminism, and egalitarianism shine through. Since its initial English staging in 1914 and its first English publication in 1916, the play has been adapted and updated several times, most prominently in the Broadway musical and later film, My Fair Lady. In addition, Shaw attached to the play a “Sequel,” in which he discusses what took place for the characters after the play proper. The rags to (relative) riches aspect of Shaw’s witty and spirited social commentary have helped contribute to its success.

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  Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (the complete text)
  
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  George Bernard Shaw: Biographical Details
  
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  Discovering 20th Century Literature (an intro to Pygmalion)
  

Your study of literature will be assessed in two ways: Paper 2 (at the end of the course) and in an oral examination called the Individual Oral. You are allowed to choose the literary text that you want to prepare for the Individual Oral. Pygmalion is a great text for you to think about using, as it contains many passages that connect to concepts you will have studied in other parts of the course. Some students enjoy this activity as it does not require spending lots of time writing essays, and allows you space to work on other aspects of the IB; this is called having intellectual balance in the learner profile. Other students find the Individual Oral stressful and even a little nerve-wracking (affecting what the learner profile calls emotional balance). The important thing to do is to remain balanced: if you gather your thoughts regularly throughout the course and record them in your Learner Portfolio, and hone preparation techniques that work for you, you’ll find this is a great way to boost your internal assessment score. Although it is often conflated in the popular imagination with the much-loved musical it inspired, George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is somewhat different from the romantic comedy My Fair Lady. Let’s take a closer look at Shaw’s play and some of its prominent themes. Before we offer an analysis of Pygmalion, though, let’s briefly recap the story of the play. The ‘plot’ of Shaw’s play is easy enough to summarise. Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, has an almost Sherlockian ability to deduce the hometown or region of anyone based on their accent. He overhears a flower girl named Eliza Doolittle and mocks the common way she talks. The next day, Eliza shows up and asks Higgins to give her elocution lessons so she can learn to talk ‘proper’. Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, shows up and tries to get some money off Higgins: he shows himself to be boorish and prone to violence – he tries to strike his daughter when she sticks her tongue out at him – and Higgins, realising the upbringing his young protégé has had, acknowledges that he has taken on a mammoth task in trying to make Eliza into a respectable-sounding lady. Higgins nevertheless accepts the challenge, with his friend Colonel Pickering betting him that he can’t pass Eliza off as a lady at the ambassador’s party in six months’ time. Higgins is emboldened by this challenge, and a few months later he tests his progress on Eliza by taking her to his mother’s drawing-room party, where Eliza’s diction impresses the partygoers. However, her use of vulgar language – including the swearword ‘bloody’ – is greeted less enthusiastically. But the young Freddy Eynsford-Hill is smitten by her, and pursues her. At the ambassador’s ball, Eliza charms everyone with her diction and her language, and Higgins wins his bet. However, he loses interest in her afterwards, much to her annoyance. Indeed, he even crows that her transformation is only superficial and possible because of his work on her; when her father appears, announcing his marriage, and Eliza immediately reverts to her Cockney speech, he is triumphant. Eliza accepts Freddy’s attention instead, agreeing to marry him. Note: the most famous line from the play was also the most daring. When Eliza is leaving Mrs Higgins’s party and Freddy asks her if she plans to walk across the park, Eliza replies, ‘Walk? Not bloody likely!’ Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle, was risking her whole career in saying such a strong swearword, for the times, on the public stage. Most theatre critics regard the musical adaptation of Shaw’s play, the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady, as a sentimental travesty of Pygmalion, and with good reason – not least because the friendship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play is founded on Higgins’s professional pride (read: arrogance) rather than any romantic interest he has in her. His lifelong bachelorhood is a result of his love for his mother, as Shaw himself made clear, and his interest in Eliza is purely professional. Taking the superficial structure of the romantic comedy and inverting it for his own ends, Shaw explores the English class system with all of its petty attitudes and posturings. The fact that a Cockney flower girl can, with a few months’ tuition, be trained up so she will convince even the most blue-blooded within society that she is one of them doesn’t say much for the inherent superiority of the upper classes. It’s all a sham, a show: class is not just a social construct, but an artificial one. The title of Shaw’s play alludes to the classical myth of Pygmalion, a Cretan king who fell in love with his own sculpture. She was transformed into a woman, Galatea, by Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. But here again, as Billington observes, Shaw inverts this love story: in Pygmalion a woman is turned into a statue, a ‘mechanical doll who resembles a duchess’. As Shaw makes clear in the epilogue to the play, Eliza makes a carefully considered decision not to marry Professor Higgins, not least because she realises she could never supplant his mother in his affections. Shaw’s socialist thinking is central to his exploration of the English class system in Pygmalion. In his depiction of the ease with which Eliza is transformed into a lady in fashionable upper-class society, he exposes the hollowness at the heart of that society. And yet just as Eliza is easily made into a passable lady, so the spell can instantly wear off and she can be transformed back into her former self, such as when Mr Doolittle appears in the final act. It is, apparently, harder to lose or forget our humble roots than it might first appear. But another of Shaw’s interests – indeed, his life’s project – is at the core of Pygmalion: the English language as it is spoken. In his preface to the play, Shaw famously argued, ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’ He also states in the preface: ‘If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among its most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.’ Thanks to its musical adaptation ("My Fair Lady"), George Bernard Shaw’s "Pygmalion" has become the playwright’s most famous comedy. It illustrates the comical clash between two different worlds. The pompous, upper-class Henry Higgins attempts to transform the gruff, Cockney Eliza Doolittle into a refined lady. As Eliza begins to change, Henry realizes that he has become rather attached to his “pet project.” Shaw insisted that Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle do not end up as a couple. However, most directors suggest that "Pygmalion" ends with the two mismatched individuals ultimately smitten with one another.