Pygmalion

About

Shaw's 1913 comedy — the source for My Fair Lady — follows the phonetics professor Henry Higgins as he wagers he can pass off Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle as a duchess by transforming her speech. What begins as a demonstration of linguistic determinism becomes a sharper inquiry into class, education, and the limits of Higgins's emotional intelligence. Shaw intended a bittersweet ending in which Eliza does not return to Higgins; he was appalled when stage productions consistently softened it into a romantic conclusion. Pygmalion is probably the most immediately accessible of Shaw's major plays, its central dynamic generating comic and dramatic tension with an efficiency that has made it one of the most performed works of the twentieth century.