GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

◈ Irish playwright, theatre critic, novelist and ‘artist’

◈ Born into a poor Protestan family in Dublin, Ireland in 1856
◈ The only Nobel laureate who also wins Academy Award
◈ Rising awareness on politics (Theatre as a medium to mirror his social, political, and
religious thoughts)
◈ Influenced by Karl Marx after reading Das Kapital
◈ The entrance into the socialist Fabian Society
◈ Persuasive orator in Fabian Society
◈ Intrigued by the pamphlet ‘Why are the many Poor?’ (as a pamphleteer in Fabian Society)
◈ Opposing against the idea ‘art for art’s sake’
◈ Art should not be for fun, but it should be didactic
◈ Theatre of Ideas
◈ Standing against stereotypical characters, melodrama, sentimentality, and conventional
plots
◈ The impact of his sisters’ rebellion against gender-defined roles on Shaw’s thought about
independence of women
◈ The mother figure defying the socially accepted weakness of women as well as glorifying
the female power against established roles of women in society. (career fulfillment,
respectability)
◈ «Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women, and that
the genders should henceforth enjoy equal political rights« (Fabian Principle)
◈ Life Force as a kind of spirit which helps improve and perfects the world
◈ The hope for human and social improvement as a reflection in his work
◈ Satire of social pretensions
◈ Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant as his first collection (Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s
Profession, The Philanderer as unpleasant ones– Arms and the Hand, Candida, The Man
of Destiny, You Never Can Tell as milder ones)
◈ Forging e better society rather than an utopian one
◈ Reflection of Victorian hypocrisy about love and marriage
◈ Marriage as ‘trade unionism’
◈ The need for human race to evolve
◈ A vigorous symbol of the ageless ‘superman’
◈ «His heroines variously overturn custom, care not a whit for
propriety, or pretend to be docile and submissive while
joyously insisting on their status as fully-fledged human
beings.»
◈ Working for a society unblemished by inequalities of class and
gender
 Historical Background
World War I:
◈ The year in which London Premiere of Pygmalion is marked with drastic changes in British society
like the assasination of Franz Ferdinand, the outbreak of the world war and killings of civil people)
◈ Shaw’s disgust with the European societies that tolerate the destruction of many lives
◈ The war demonstrating the necessity of social and individual improvement to reach a level of
understanding which prevents such tragic devastation
Colonialism and The British Empire
◈ The increase in size of the British Empire
◈ The development of nationalism and autonomy
◈ British pride in its Empire asserting authority in South Africa
◈ The ongoing belief that the sun never sets on the British Empire
◈ A set of values known as Victorianism (social high-mindedness, domesticity, and etc.)
Industrialization
◈ A tremendous impact on the organization of British society which has more
hierarchical class system
◈ The growth of a merchant middle class
◈ An aristocracy of money more than land
◈ Agricultural laborers seeking for a job in cities
◈ Limited employement and poverty
◈ Urban crises like tuberculosis and cholera
◈ Disproportionate distribution of wealth
The Rise of Women and The Working Classes
◈ The political power of the working class increases
◈ Class division leading to strikes and disturbances
◈ The emergence of a new political party called Labour (reforms in working sphere
and laws)
◈ Suffrage (the right to vote) based on the requirement of property ownership
◈ The women known as Suffragettes obtaining the right to vote in 1928
◈ The appearance of ‘New Woman’ in laws and work places
 PYGMALION (1914)
◈ A comedy about a phonetics expert who attempts to make a lady out of an
uneducated Cockney flowergirl
◈ Raising important questions about social class, human behavior and relations
between the genders
◈ Production of German translation of Pygmalion in Vienna and and Berlin before its
staging in London
◈ The myth of Pygmalion from the Greek playwright Ovid’s Metamorphoses
◈ The impact of other works on Shaw’s version such as Tobias Smollet’s novel The
Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, W. S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea and Henrik
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
◈ The unusual word uttered by Eliza; ‘bloody’
◈ The significance of Cockney Accent in the play
 Style
Plotting with a purpose
◈ Shaw’s revolutionary stage filled with the disposal of theatrical conventions in
Well-made plays
◈ The necessity of indeterminate endings in plays
Intellect versus entertainment
◈ Art is not for entertainment, it is rather used to enlighten social issues
Romance
◈ Pygmalion as a romance due to the almost magical transformations which occur in
the play and the idealized qualities to which the characters aspire
 THEMES
Appearance versus Reality
◈ Natural and largely fixed social roles in Victorian era
◈ A noble versus unskilled laborer
◈ Lisa’s ability to fool the society about her real identity
◈ ‘You see, really and truly, apart from things anyone can pick up, the difference
between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated’
Beauty
◈ Beauty as a subjective value
◈ Eliza as a Cockney-speaking flowergirl and a lady of society
Change and Transformation
◈ The transformation of Liza as the central theme of the play
◈ ‘How frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite
different human being by creating a speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf
that separates class from class and soul from soul’
◈ The truly important transformation of Liza?
Identity
◈ Higgins’s experiment as a crisis of identity for Liza
◈ An experiment as glorious but painful
◈ Lack of belonging to a particular class
Language and Meaning
◈ One’s refinement of speech as a characteristic of social identity (subjective)
◈ The richness of English language
◈ Cockney accent as the last trend
Ubermensch (Superman)
◈ Shaw’s belief in the Life Force and the possibility of human evolution on an
individual and social level
◈ A realized individual living to the fullest extent of his/her capacity
◈ The height of scientific achievement in his field (Higgins)
◈ Lisa’s capability of transforming herself towards self-awareness and self-realization
◈ Endless possibilities for personal development
◈ Wealth and Poverty
◈ Class consciousness under examination of Shaw
◈ The linguistic signals of social identity as an issue of class
◈ Lisa’s unforeseen rise into the middle class
◈ ‘’You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that
will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three
months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's
garden party. I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop
assistant, which requires better English. That's the sort of thing I do
for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine
scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic
lines.’’
◈ ‘’PICKERING: He's incorrigible, Eliza. You won't relapse, will
you?
LIZA: No: Not now. Never again. I have learnt my lesson. I don't
believe I could utter one of the old sounds if I tried. [Doolittle
touches her on her left shoulder. She drops her work, losing her
self-possession utterly at the spectacle of her father's splendor]
A—a—a—a—a—ah—ow—ooh!’’
◈ LIZA [looking fiercely round at him] I wouldn't marry YOU if you
asked me; and you're nearer my age than what he is.
HIGGINS [gently] Than he is: not "than what he is."
LIZA [losing her temper and rising] I'll talk as I like. You're not my
teacher now.
◈ ‘’I can't. I could have done it once; but now I can't go back to it. Last
night, when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I tried to
get back into the old way with her; but it was no use. You told me,
you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks
up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a
child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can
speak nothing but yours. That's the real break-off with the corner of
Tottenham Court Road. Leaving Wimpole Street finishes it.’’