The Author

* Name: George Bernard Shaw

* Occupation: Author, Playwright
* Birth Date: July 26, 1856
* Death Date: November 2, 1950
* Place of birth: Dublin, Ireland
George Bernard Shaw was born in July 26, 1856 in Dublin, Ireland. In
1876 he moved to London. He wrote regularly, but struggled financially.
In 1895, he became a theatre critic for “The Saturday Review” and began
writing plays. His play Pygmalion was later made into the film “My Fair
Lady”. His screenplay won an Oscar. He later won a Nobel Prize.
During his lifetime, he wrote more than 60 plays.

Setting:
London, England in the early 20th century
Pygmalion takes place in London, England in the early 20 th
century. All of the play’s action is confined to three places, each located
in the very fashionable center of town: Covent Garden, the laboratory
of Henry Higgins’s apartment on 10 Wimpole Street, and the “drawing
room” of Mrs. Higgins’s apartment on Chelsea embankment.

Pygmalion …. Genre:
Drama, Realism
Shaw has a lot to say here: heavy stuff about language,
Society, and the soul. We get long speeches from Higgins about how
language is what makes us human, about the great significance of his
work with Eliza.
Until we get to the fourth act, the play seems like it’s headed toward the
usual sort of Hollywood ending. Eliza’s going to be transformed into
an intelligent, elegant, eloquent, and eligible young woman while
grumpy old Higgins is going to learn a lesson or two about manners and
compassion. We are going to get some acts full of arguing and passive
– aggressive behavior with no real end in sight. We do get a marriage,
in the end but it’s not the fairy tale kind. In the end, Higgins seems to
be the only one who’s sure how things will turn out. Eliza will come
back, he tells his mother, but we have no real way of knowing if she
will.
As it turns out, the play’s central question is,
“Can you pass off a flower girl as a duchess?”
“What can you do with her once you do?” As attractive and, perhaps,
truthful as Higgins’s talk about the soul and language is, Shaw forces us
to put it to the test. “The great secret,” Higgins tells Eliza, “is not having
good manners or bad manners, but having the same manner for all human
souls”. We have to wonder, though: can this apply to the real world, or
is this nothing more than a fantasy?
The source of the title:
The legend of Pygmalion and Galatea
Watch the video and write a brief summary of the myth.

Main Points of Act One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8eqFjQShXM
1. It is raining in Covent Garden at 11:15 p.m.
2. Clara complains that Freddy has not found a cab yet.
3. Colonel Pickering comes onstage, and Eliza tries to sell him a flower.
4. Higgins was thought to be an informer for the police.
5. Higgins amuses the small crowd that has gathered when he listens to
what they say and guesses their hometowns with exactitude.
6. When Higgins finds out that Pickering has been in India and is the writer
of Spoken Sanskrit, he exclaims that he was planning to travel to India
to meet him. Pickering is equally excited when he realizes that he has
happened upon the creator of “Higgins’s Universal Alphabet” … for he
has travelled from India to meet Higgins.
7. Higgins gave Eliza some money and promised to educate her, Eliza liked the idea.

Complete the following diagram:

 Themes of Act One

Class:
The play is set in London in the early 20th century, at the end of the
Victorian period. During this time, London was the capital of the wide-
reaching, powerful British Empire. Victorian society was characterized by a
rigid social hierarchy, but as the 20th century began social change was on the
horizon. The characters in the play can be categorized into a high class, upper-
middle class, and lower-middle class. Social class, as a theme, defines a person
and their personality. The main point that will be discussed in the whole play
is whether a person can escape the social class you were born into, and whether
you can fake it either. Will your roots will always show through?
Accent:
From a person's accent, one can determine where the person comes from
and usually what the person's socioeconomic background is. The social
hierarchy is an unavoidable reality in Britain, and it is interesting to watch it
plays out in the work of a socialist playwright. Shaw includes members of all
social classes from the lowest ( Liza) to the servant class (Mrs. Pearce) to the
middle class (Doolittle after his inheritance) to the genteel poor (the Eynsford
Hills) to the upper class (Pickering and the Higgins). The general sense is that
class structures are rigid and should not be tampered with, so the example of
Liza's class mobility is most shocking. The issue of language is tied up in class
quite closely; the fact that Higgins is able to identify where people were born
by their accents is impressive. British class and identity are very much tied up
in their land and their birthplace, so it becomes hard to be socially mobile if
your accent marks you as coming from a certain location.
A. Answer the following questions in your copybooks:
1. What is the significance of choosing “Covent Garden” to be part of the
setting in “Pygmalion”?
2. The flower girl is not an attractive lady. How do physical and verbal
characteristics mark the flower girl Eliza as a member of her particular class?
3. How does the flower girl’s language provoke Higgins?
4. What is significant about the bystander's statement, "It's all right: he's a
gentleman: look at his boots?’’
5. What does the ending scene of Act One reflect about Eliza’s character?
6. What kind of person was Higgins in Pygmalion?
7. How are Victorian social classes represented in Act 1 of Pygmalion?
B. Comment on the following on your copybooks:
1.“I aint done nothing by speaking to the gentleman. I’ve a right to sell
flowers if I keep off the kerb. I’m a respectable girl, so help me.”
2.“You see this creature with her kerbstone English that will keep her in the
gutter to the end of her days. I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an
ambassador’s garden party.”
3.“Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my profession: also, my
hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!”
4.‘I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in
London. Sometimes within two streets.’
5.‘A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right
to be anywhere...... no right to live”.
6.“Charge! I make no charge. Really, sir, if you are a detective, you need not
begin protecting me against molestation by young women until I ask you.”
7. “He’s no right to take my character. My character is the same to me as
any lady’s.”
8. “Who’s trying to deceive you? I called him Freddy or Charlie same as you
might yourself if you was talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant.”

C. Critical thinking questions

* Do you think Eliza aspires for a better life? Why?