Pygmalion
Subtitle: A Romance in Five Acts
By: Bernard Shaw ; with over a hundred drawings by Feliks Topolski ; definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence ; with an introduction by Nicholas Greene.
Edition: Reprint (1)
Series: Penguin Classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2000
Place of publication: London; New York
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 152
ISBN-13: 9780140437898
Copyright date: 2000
Subjects: Speech and social status -- Drama.; Linguistics teachers -- Drama.; Social classes -- Drama.; Flower vending -- Drama.; London (England) -- Drama.
Genres: Drama.
Description: Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle -- 'an East-End dona with an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers' -- for Mrs Patrick Campbell, with whom he had a passionate but unconsummated affair.

From the outset the play was a sensational success, although Shaw was irritated by its popularity at the expense of his artistic intentions and dismissed it a s a potboiler. The Pygmalion of legend falls in love with his perfect female statue and persuades Venus to bring her to life so that he can marry her. But Shaw radically reworks Ovid's tale to give it a feminist slant: while Higgins teaches Eliza to speak and act like a duchess, she also asserts her independence, adamantly refusing to be his creation.

A brilliantly witty exposure of the British class system, it is, as Nicholas Greene comments, 'the wonderful inventiveness of its comedy, the force of what it still has to say to us and the light playfulness of tone with which it is said', that ensures that Pygmalion continues to entertain us.
(back cover)
Notes: CAN/UK/USA