Pygmalion is a popular comedy written by the British dramatist George Bernard Shaw. It was first performed in Germany in 1913 and opened in New York City and London in 1914. In the play, Shaw satirized the English class system, especially the superficial judgments made by members of fashionable society about people in their group and others.
In Pygmalion, a professor of phonetics (speech patterns) named Henry Higgins accepts Eliza Doolittle, an uneducated London flower seller, as a student. He bets his friend Colonel Pickering that after six months Higgins will successfully pass Eliza off as a duchess simply by teaching her how to speak well and wear beautiful clothes. Higgins takes Eliza into his house, relentlessly drilling her until she alters her speech from her working-class Cockney dialect into the elegant manner of upper-class London society.
Higgins wins his bet when Eliza is accepted as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. However, Eliza turns against him, angry that he has treated her only as an experiment while ignoring her as a human being with feelings. She moves out of his house, vowing to marry Freddy Eynsford Hill, a young man who has no job prospects but loves her. As the play ends, Higgins smugly is convinced that Eliza will return to live with him as a companion.
The story is partially based on an ancient Greek myth about a sculptor named Pygmalion who creates a statue of a beautiful woman and then falls in love with it. The popular musical My Fair Lady (1956) is based on the Shaw play. The musical follows the story closely and uses much of the original dialogue. The musical’s happy ending, in which Eliza returns to Higgins’s home, is not the ending Shaw wrote. He argued in an essay about the ending of the play that Eliza must go off and assert her independence from Higgins for her transformation to make proper sense.
