Pygmalion
Pygmalion,one of the most popular plays of Bernard Shaw , first performed 1913 in Vienna, published in London, 1916 .
It describes the transformation of a Cockney flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle, into a passable imitation of a duchess by the phonetician Professor Henry Higgins (modelled in part on H. Sweet , and played by Beerbohm Tree ), who undertakes this task in order to win a bet and to prove his own points about English speech and the class system: he teaches her to speak standard English and introduces her successfully to social life, thus winning his bet, but she rebels against his dictatorial and thoughtless behaviour, and ‘bolts’ from his tyranny. The play ends with a truce between the two of them, as Higgins acknowledges that she has achieved freedom and independence, and emerged from his treatment as a ‘tower of strength: a consort battleship’: in his postscript Shaw tells us that she marries the docile...
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