Publication
Penguin, first performed 1914, first published 1916
Collection
Status
Available
Description
Classic Literature. Drama. Fiction. HTML: In George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion a phonetician believes the power of speech is such that he can introduce a Cockney flower girl to polite society after careful language and etiquette training, and no one will discern her true roots. The professor and the flower girl grown close, but after her successful debut she rejects the professor and his overbearing ways for a poor gentleman. The most famous adaptation of the play is the 1964 film My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison..
User reviews
LibraryThing member atimco
For those of us who are familiar only with the movie version titled My Fair Lady, the real story of this play might come as something of a surprise. It did to me! I don't want to spoil anything, but it's fascinating to see how the version starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn was changed to
This LA Theatre production is a live play that was recorded to create an audio performance. So along with the excitement and energy of a live recording, you also get the flaws: different volume levels as the actors move toward or away from the microphones, audience applause, etc. But, taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it very much. It is brilliantly acted; Shannon Cochran as Eliza is especially good. I also liked the actor who plays Mr. Doolittle, and really everyone performs well. It was fun to imagine the actors on a stage rather than in front of a microphone in a recording studio.
The play is very witty and nonsensical, abounding in comic misunderstandings and hilarious reversals of cultural norms. It is, in a word, George Bernard Shaw. And yet for all its fun, it does address serious issues such as women's independence and the strict social class system that based so much of its value judgments on external accoutrements (like a person's accent). Very little is safe from Shaw's satirical eye, but somehow his characters escape being cardboard cutouts displaying particular vices. They're attractive and fun, even the selfish ones. It's the good humor behind everything that does it.
Though this is certainly no studio production, it was very enjoyable. I'm not really one for reading plays; they are designed to be experienced as a performance, not a silent reading. If you can't see a play, the next-best thing is to hear it. I recommend it!
Show More
please its audience in 1964. Apparently the end of the play has been a tug-of-war between George Bernard Shaw and the public (and some critics) since its first performance in 1912. I have to say I'm with the public... sorry, George.This LA Theatre production is a live play that was recorded to create an audio performance. So along with the excitement and energy of a live recording, you also get the flaws: different volume levels as the actors move toward or away from the microphones, audience applause, etc. But, taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it very much. It is brilliantly acted; Shannon Cochran as Eliza is especially good. I also liked the actor who plays Mr. Doolittle, and really everyone performs well. It was fun to imagine the actors on a stage rather than in front of a microphone in a recording studio.
The play is very witty and nonsensical, abounding in comic misunderstandings and hilarious reversals of cultural norms. It is, in a word, George Bernard Shaw. And yet for all its fun, it does address serious issues such as women's independence and the strict social class system that based so much of its value judgments on external accoutrements (like a person's accent). Very little is safe from Shaw's satirical eye, but somehow his characters escape being cardboard cutouts displaying particular vices. They're attractive and fun, even the selfish ones. It's the good humor behind everything that does it.
Though this is certainly no studio production, it was very enjoyable. I'm not really one for reading plays; they are designed to be experienced as a performance, not a silent reading. If you can't see a play, the next-best thing is to hear it. I recommend it!
Show Less
LibraryThing member maccy_P
Other than the amusing OCD-ness of Shaw's (pages of) stage directions, I found this an enjoyable play. Though My Fair Lady did stick very close, almost word for word, to this play, I thought that many of the characters were made more jovial and positive in the film. Higgins particularly is very
There are also a number of similarities with Shakespeare's 'Taming of the Shrew'; Higgins tames Eliza in a similar fashion.
The ending of the play is frustrating. Shaw doesn't round it off in the play scrip, but in an added prose piece at the end.
Show More
serious in the play and sticks to his ways; in the film his character becomes softer and less strict.There are also a number of similarities with Shakespeare's 'Taming of the Shrew'; Higgins tames Eliza in a similar fashion.
The ending of the play is frustrating. Shaw doesn't round it off in the play scrip, but in an added prose piece at the end.
Show Less
LibraryThing member soniaandree
This play has been a favourite of mine, and, somehow, I identified with the heroine. Having learnt English as a foreign language was an interesting experience, and, like her, I could not unlearn what I had taken great pains to learn. So when she decided to take action against her tutors, she was on
Show More
an equal footing, because she had really become a 'lady', but in one of her tutor's eyes, she was still a flower-selling girl. It was wrong of them to think that their teaching would have for sole consequence a change of language and behaviour, as the transformation had gone deeper than that. The musical movie based on it is 'My fair lady', but is more American than English. Nonetheless, to read and see both is quite a good way to see how the play was understood. The play is highly recommended. Show Less
LibraryThing member Jaylabelle
"I'm a good girl I am!" Required reading for every "My Fair Lady" fan. I think this is one example of the play/movie doing justice to the author's original work!
LibraryThing member LA12Hernandez
I didn't like the attached ending in the book. There was no real need to go into what happens to Eliza after the play ends.
LibraryThing member iron_queen
A geniunely funny and charming play, with a fascinating message about the function of manners with regards to a class-based society.
The characters are lovable and entertaining, even if some of them are more human than others. Higgins will always be amusing to watch, no matter how you slice it: he
However, I had one major criticism that almost ruined the entire play for me. Call me a swooning, hormonal romantic, but I really wanted Eliza and Higgins to get together in the end! I perfectly understand Shaw's explanation at the end about how they could never have married because not only is Higgins not the marrying type due to the admiration he holds for his mother, but because Eliza refuses to submit herself to him, to be the Galatea to his Pygmalion. But still, all that chemistry seems like so much of waste when she goes and marries Freddy, that love-struck milquetoast. I couldn't help but write a mental fanfiction about Eliza's private fantasy about Higgins comes true, in which they are stuck on a remote island together and she seduces him into "making love like any other man." Guess that's just the hopeless romance-whore in me.
The characters are lovable and entertaining, even if some of them are more human than others. Higgins will always be amusing to watch, no matter how you slice it: he
Show More
is an immature, overly-cultured little boy whose intellect so eclipses emotion that, to him, intellectual pursuits are passion. Eliza is also fun, after she somehow develops a sharp mind with Higgins' cultivation.However, I had one major criticism that almost ruined the entire play for me. Call me a swooning, hormonal romantic, but I really wanted Eliza and Higgins to get together in the end! I perfectly understand Shaw's explanation at the end about how they could never have married because not only is Higgins not the marrying type due to the admiration he holds for his mother, but because Eliza refuses to submit herself to him, to be the Galatea to his Pygmalion. But still, all that chemistry seems like so much of waste when she goes and marries Freddy, that love-struck milquetoast. I couldn't help but write a mental fanfiction about Eliza's private fantasy about Higgins comes true, in which they are stuck on a remote island together and she seduces him into "making love like any other man." Guess that's just the hopeless romance-whore in me.
Show Less
LibraryThing member hjjugovic
This is the delightful play that My Fair Lady was based upon. The characters jump off the page, the action is swift, and the story irresitable. The ending is very strange, since it is all told in narrative, unlike the rest of the story which is a script.
LibraryThing member nules
An interesting play, I call it. It is much like the movie /My Fair Lady/. It’s fairly short.
LibraryThing member StEdwardsCollege
This volume is part of a new series of novels, plays and stories at GCSE/Key Stage 4 level, designed to meet the needs of the National Curriculum syllabus. Each text includes an introduction, pre-reading activities, notes and coursework activities. Also provided is a section on the process of
Show More
writing, often compiled by the author. Shaw's play features Professor Henry Higgins who sets out to turn flower-girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady and to pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador's party, and all that in three months' time. Show Less
LibraryThing member LARA335
Thought-provoking play where Higgins as a bet takes on a common flower-seller and trains her to pass as a 'lady'. Interesting 'sequel' where Shaw explains why Higgins and Eliza would never work as a romantic couple, and telling how Eliza lived beyond the play's ending.
LibraryThing member im-imagined
Utterly fantastic - one of my favourite plays. Though really...Eliza should have married Henry.
LibraryThing member mbmackay
George Bernard Shaw's play that was later adapted into My Fair Lady for stage and film. The plot turns on how the way a person speaks sets their social status; changing their speech allows a person to move in different circles. There is more depth in the social commentary, hinging on whether the
Show More
changeling will be happy in their new circumstances, but the play is an enjoyable comedy at several levels. Read August 2011. Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Although he based the tales in Metamorphoses on existing stories, Ovid presents them with a freshness and originality that made them uniquely his own. His writing is vivid, elegant, and succinct, with the stories including "Pygmalion"generally moving swiftly from beginning to end without tedious
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures that 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 the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. It is with this background that George Bernard Shaw took up this myth and made it his own with the first performance occurring in April, 1914. 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 commentary on women's independence.
Like all of Shaw's plays the wordplay is a delight rivaling Shakespeare in that realm.
Show More
digressions or inflated language. Metamorphoses was highly popular with readers of the Augustan age (27 BC to AD 14, when Caesar Augustus ruled the Roman Empire) and became one of the best read books of the Renaissance, influencing Shakespeare and other prominent writers. The themes and motifs are as timely today as they were 2,000 years ago. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures that 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 the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. It is with this background that George Bernard Shaw took up this myth and made it his own with the first performance occurring in April, 1914. 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 commentary on women's independence.
Like all of Shaw's plays the wordplay is a delight rivaling Shakespeare in that realm.
Show Less
LibraryThing member barbora.m
Come on, it is classic ! The story is pretty simple, though truly charming. I wish I was Eliza Doolittle !
LibraryThing member AuntieClio
I went into this warily because My Fair Lady has been a favorite movie. The preface sets the tone for the sharp commentary on Britain's class system. The play itself will be very familiar to anyone who has seen My Fair Lady. What wasn't familiar was the ending and here's where I found the most
Show More
delight. My Fair Lady would have been a very different and much more interesting movie had it ended the way Shaw wanted. Show Less
LibraryThing member AlCracka
Man, I loved this play. Reminded me of Oscar Wilde - so much, actually, that I was surprised when I looked Shaw up and he apparently wasn't gay. It's really, really funny. And smart. Awesome shit, man. Awesome shit.
LibraryThing member Iudita
I loved this play but I found the ending so very unsatisfying. It is so abrupt and unfinished. It feels like he simply stopped writing in the middle of a thought and just walked away.
LibraryThing member bookish92
I found myself very interested in this play. I knew a lot about it before reading it, but that didn't stop me being interested. It was funny, well written and I enjoyed it a lot.
LibraryThing member est-lm
I like G.B. Shaw's intent to create a play demonstrating the large variety of way the English speak English (and the comedy involved with the variations, of course!). Higgins, a professor of linguistics can be a downright rude character but at the same time, speaks the truth in such an entertaining
With that said, it is really a wonderful play, but for some reason I wasn't too drawn into it as I read. No doubt it would be TONS better on stage. Maybe if I read it again in the future or see it on stage I'll be more enthusiastic about it.
Show More
way that it's hard not to like him at least remotely. Eliza Doolittle's development from an uneducated flower-girl who is silly into a young woman who has grown to understand herself more and learn her self-worth through the six months of living with that insufferable Higgins is one that I found new for the age, but proper for a time when "feminism" was beginning to bloom. I really enjoyed that this isn't your traditional love-centered story. This isn't a comedy ending in engagements or marriage proposals, and I like how the play ends with a possibility that Eliza may marry someone in the future, but that by no means it is the most important thing in her life. The most important thing is that she has in a way "found" herself while trying to be someone she's not. She has learned her self-worth and wants her independence, which is something grand. With that said, it is really a wonderful play, but for some reason I wasn't too drawn into it as I read. No doubt it would be TONS better on stage. Maybe if I read it again in the future or see it on stage I'll be more enthusiastic about it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member siubhank
This is the original story that 'My Fair Lady" was based o. The original is more gritty and less huerous than the movie. Shaw, not at his best, but in his amusing phase.
LibraryThing member TheDivineOomba
Here is the play that "My Fair Lady" was based on. Written by George Bernard Shaw in 1916, this is story of a bet between to bachelor linguists - on if they can make a flower girl sound like Duchess, and pass her off as one at an important party.
This book mostly focuses on Professor Henry Higgins.
There are certainly funny bits, especially with Clara spouting very crass slang, thinking its "in style". I especially liked the "sequel", which explains what happens to the main characters- the Bachelor Henry Higgins stays a bachelor in this story, but I found the ending to be very enlightening in what Shaw saw in his characters.
This book is rather more satirical and dark than the musical it inspired. Its an easy fun read.
This book mostly focuses on Professor Henry Higgins.
Show More
While Liza, the flower girl, is present and finally becomes a much larger character by the end, Mr. Higgins really doesn't get why he is an ass, even his mother thinks so. There are certainly funny bits, especially with Clara spouting very crass slang, thinking its "in style". I especially liked the "sequel", which explains what happens to the main characters- the Bachelor Henry Higgins stays a bachelor in this story, but I found the ending to be very enlightening in what Shaw saw in his characters.
This book is rather more satirical and dark than the musical it inspired. Its an easy fun read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
One of the few plays listed in my catalog. I've never spent much time looking into this side of literature - a shame, considering what's out there. I read - several times - this play simply because I had to, for the engrossing OU course "Introduction to the Humanities." A lot of it has stuck with
Show More
me, and probably because of the exposure. Nicely done, GBS. Show Less
LibraryThing member danlai
I'm not sure how I would feel about this book now, but as a high school freshman, this was the last thing I wanted to read.
LibraryThing member AliceAnna
A lovely, lovely story well-written, amusing, wonderful characters. A modern classic.
LibraryThing member BayardUS
Amusing play with some funny dialogue and enjoyable characters, but what really elevates it is the portions that Shaw wrote out demonstrating that he knew what the expectations of the audience were and how foolish such genre cliches often are. Awareness of his material and the average reader's
Show More
thought process allows Shaw to force you to think more critically about what you've just consumed, which is always a plus in my book. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1913-10-16 (performed)
1914-11 (printed)