Bibliografia:

J. I. M. STEWART, The Oxford History of English Literature, Writers of the Early TwentiethCentury, Haroly to Lawrence, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1963, pp. 167-169

R. WELCH, The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1996, pp. 487

G. B. SHAW, Pygmalion, Penguin Classics, London, Clays Ltd Press, 2003

B. BERGONZI, Sphere History of Literature in the English Language vol.7, Aylesbury, G.B. Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, 1970, pp.312

C.T. CHRIST, C. ROBSON, J. STALLWORTHY, J. RAMAZANI, The Norton Anthology of English Literature 8^th edition vol.2, U.S.A., Norton & Company Inc., 2000, pp. 1744

The New Encycloĉdia Britannica, 15^th edition, London and Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998

Appunti delle lezioni

Like all of Shaw's great dramatic creations, Pygmalion is a richly complex play. It combines a central story of the transformation of a young woman with elements of myth, fairy tale, and romance, while also combining an interesting plot with an exploration of social identity, the power of sci 222f52c ence, relations between men and women, and other issues.

Pygmalion is one of Shaw's most popular plays as well as one of his most straightforward ones. The form has none of the complexity that we find in Heartbreak House or Saint Joan, nor are the ideas in Pygmalion nearly as profound as the ideas in any of Shaw's other major works. It can be considerated an issue of language.

This play was written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912, presents a comic Edwardian version of the classical myth about Pygmalion, legendary sculptor and King of Cyprus, who fell in love with his own statue of Aphrodite. At his prayer, Aphrodite brought the statue to life as Galatea.

George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion is the story of Henry Higgins, a master phonetician, and his mischievous plot to pass a common flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, off as a duchess at the Embassy Ball. In order to achieve his goal, Higgins must teach Eliza how to speak properly and how to act in upper-class society. The play looks at middle class morality and upper-class superficiality, and reflects the social ills of nineteenth century England, and attests that all people are worthy of respect and dignity. 

Shaw is a British socialist who sympathized with the lower classes. Shaw criticized that the way of speaking of a person reveals his the social class of the people.

Shaw's Pygmalion is Henry Higgins, a voluble professor of phonetics, who undertakes in a wanger with his colleague Colonel Pickering to turn a cockney flower-girl, Eliza Doolittle, how to speak English in an upper-class manner and transform her as to pass her off for a lady. In one sense she is the very antithesis of Galatea, since she starts a child of nature and ends an artefact. Nor is Higgins ever allowed to acknowledge to himself that he might fall in love with her. But another sense runs counter to this. Eliza's transformation is more than from a common girl to lady. Higgins begins with what is to him no meant, and eventually has to acknowledge his creation as an enjoying and suffering woman.

The play thus comes to move, in a manner unusual with Shaw, at more levels than one. 'You have no idea', Higgins tells his mother, 'how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It's filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.' This has-particularly, perhaps, in England-its social truth and comic potentiality.

Higgins on the one hand can be described as a rude, careless and impolite character, but at the same time likeable because of his fascination and dedication to his work. His rudeness may be revealed when he said about Eliza: "A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift or articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon."

Higgins's mother holds a great fascination for him, she speaks properly, has good manners and is the only woman Higgins adores. In general, he appears small-minded and doesn't reflect about problems Eliza might be confronted with.

Eliza, on the other hand, is willing to learn and does her best to please Higgins. When she becomes aware of Higgins' goals she eventually gets disappointing and angry. She feels as the subject of the experiment, while Higgins, never reflecting about her feelings, treats her in an impersonal way and can't understand her.

Eliza's father is a dustman, he play a little role which is pretty important, in fact he is the most important moral character.

Shaw was never to succed wholly in detaching himself from the perspectives that the novel, the dominant art from of his age, imposed on his writing. An even more obvious example of this id the epilogue to Pygmalion: 'the rest of the story need not to be shewn in action...etc.' where is clear that the dramatist has allowed the novelist to take over the story that he no longer wishes to handle.

The first impression we get of Eliza's is a poor flower girl that has a very strong, whiny personality. "I ain't done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman. I've a right to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb." This is our first view of Eliza standing up for her self and not being outspoken. This foreshadows a girl that would not be good in a relationship because in the time this book is set, a woman was to obey the man and let him do the big talk.

While Eliza in a gloomily and rainy evening is trying to sell flowers out of S. Paul's church, a man have been observing her and taking down notes on a notebook. Eliza was conversating with two women, a mother and daughter, who were waiting for a taxi under the shelter of  the church's portico. Their conversation begins when Freddy, the son who is looking for the taxi, carelessly bumps into the flower girl. She attempts to get the mother to buy the flowers her son has damaged, and is successful. She then tries to sell her flowers to another gentleman, when someone in the crowd warns her that a man is taking notes on what she has been saying. She becomes hysterical, believing the man wrongly suspects her of prostitution, but it is discovered that he is merely a phonetician taking down her accent in phonetic script. He demonstrates that he can tell where any man in England was born just by hearing his accent. The gentleman the flower girl originally propositioned introduces himself to the phonetician as Colonel Pickering, an expert in Indian dialects. The notetaker reveals himself to be Henry Higgins, author of the Universal Grammar and professional language tutor. They part together for dinner, after Higgins throws a generous handful of coins to the miserable flower girl.

The next morning, Higgins is showing Pickering his laboratory when the flower girl arrives at his house. She announces that she want to take English lessons in order to speak well enough to work in a shop. The two phoneticians are shocked but amused by her proposition, and Pickering bets Higgins that he cannot transform the flower girl, Eliza, into a convincing duchess in six months. Higgins decides to take the bet and persuades the ruffled Eliza to agree to it.

While Mrs. Pearce, Higgins's house servant, takes Eliza to her room and gives her a bath, Eliza's father, Alfred Doolittle, arrives. Higgins guesses that Doolittle has come to blackmail him in some way, and tells Doolittle to take his daughter back. Doolittle does not want his daughter back; he just wants a little money. Higgins suggests that it is immoral to pay for a person, and Doolittle replies saying middle class morality is only an excuse to never give money to the poor. Higgins is amused and gives him some money.

Eliza begins her lessons the next day, and she is tutored in the language and manners of a gentlewoman for the next six months.

The third act, in which Eliza exhibited at a polite tea party at the half-way stage of having acquired upper-class articulations while preserving a distinctly lower-class conversational range, has a reasonable claim to be reckoned the most amusing in English drama, and it is not in the least impaired by the comparatively muted impact which low expletives are likely to achieve in drawin-rooms today. The social truth is deepened with Eliza's own perception that 'really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated'.

The guests of the tea party happen to be the same gentlewoman, who bought a flower from Eliza during the rainstorm, and her daughter and son. Eliza makes quite a good impression, as her pronunciation and dress are perfect; however, when she tells an off-color story about her family Higgins realizes that she has a lot more to learn. Freddy, the son, is taken with Eliza's beauty and her peculiar ways.

It is in the fourth act, however, that the play touches depth. Higgins has brought off his bet; he has had enough of the game; and he makes no scruple of announcing to his friend Colonel Pickering in Eliza's presence that 'It was a silly notion: the whole thing has been a bore'. To Eliza, Higgins has always been a boor as well as a tyrant. But Pickering has consistently behaved towards her as it is pleasant to think a gentleman would.

The moral lesson now driven home-that it is inhuman to treat any human being as a means to an end-is achieved by a technique which, if found in Shakespeare, would be described as that of episodic intensification. Pickering is for a time not quite Pickering, and Higgins is more impossibly Higgins than before.

At the end of the six-month period, Higgins and Pickering take Eliza to an Embassy ball. The Ambassador's wife is impressed with Eliza's perfect speech and all the guests marvel at her beauty; however, her crowning success is determined when a translator and former linguistic student of Higgins announces to the Ambassador that Eliza is a Hungarian princess.

Later that evening back in Higgins's study, Pickering congratulates Higgins on his success. Higgins complains that it was a boring task that he will not repeat. Eliza is insulted, and feels that her efforts are unappreciated. She is silent but then in a fit of desperation throws Higgins's slippers at him. He is insulted and says she has nothing to complain about. She says she is leaving and gives him back a ring he previously gave to her. He leaves the room angrily, and she gets her things together and leaves the house. She meets Freddy in the street and they embrace impulsively. She decides to go to Mrs. Higgins in the morning to ask for her advice on what to do.

The next morning, Higgins arrives at his mother's house in a panic. He has reported Eliza missing to the police, and seeks his mother's advice. Before she can tell him that Eliza is in the house, Mr. Doolittle arrives dressed in a wedding suit. He accuses Higgins of ruining his happiness. Doolittle has inherited three thousand pounds a year from an American philanthropist who was told by Higgins that Doolittle was the most original moralist in England. Doolittle laments the new responsibilities he must take on as a member of the middle class, including marrying his girlfriend, but says he cannot resist accepting the money. Eliza comes down and reconciles with Higgins, and they all accompany Doolittle to the wedding. Later, Eliza marries Freddy and opens a florist shop with Pickering's financial assistance.

This fifth act, which presents Eliza's come-back by a way of a successful bid for indipendence, is by comparison uncertain and ineffective. It instances the extreme difficulty of writing a classical comedy without recourse to a conventional close. Instead of a preface, Pygmalion has a prose epilogue designed to persuade us of the propriety and indeed inevitability of Eliza's marrying not Higgins but Freddy Eynsford Hill, the lightly sketched 'silly ass' character of the play. Yet the ending provokes an interesting controversy among critics. Higgins and Eliza do not marry, while the play as it is usually produced often does reconcile the two main characters.

Eliza and Freddy set up a flower-shop, we are told, and eventually make a success of it after completing some necessary studies at the London School of Economics.

This conclusion, Shaw asserts, is so obvious that it 'would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories'.

It has to be observed, however, that Shaw himself admirably exploits in the subsidiary parts of his play a good deal that is ready-made-although the prefabrication, indeed, has taken place in the Shavian factory.

The real protagonist of the Pygmalion is the phonetic which is not a play for a little group of well-learned men and it is connected with the profound of the civilization. Shaw write out the dialect of London.

Eliza's father the dustman, although his fortuitous elevation from a comfortable place among the undeserving poor presents a brilliantly grotesque parallel to his daughter's situation, owes his moment of chief theatrical effectiveness to a device echoed from as far back as Widowers' Houses.

Shaw's Pygmalion became the basis of the musical My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe The show's 1956 Broadway production was a smash hit, setting a new record for the longest run of any major theatre production in history. It was followed by a hit London production, a popular film version, and numerous revivals.