PYGMALION BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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PYGMALION BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

• Date March 14, 2006

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G.B. SHAW (1856-1950)

• An Irish playwright
• Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
• After those of William Shakespeare, Shaw's plays
  are some of the most widely produced in English
  language theatre.

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The Dramatist

• Irish dramatist, literary critic, a socialist
  spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th
  century theater.
• Shaw was a freethinker, defender of women's
  rights, and advocate of equality of income. In
  1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
  Literature. Shaw accepted the honor but refused
  the money.

4
An Irish Native

• George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, where he
  grew up in something close to genteel poverty. "I
  am a typical Irishman my family came from
  Yorkshire," Shaw once said.

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The Shaw Family

• When George Carr Shaw died in 1885, his children
  and wife did not attend his funeral. Young Shaw
  and his two sisters were brought up mostly by
  servants. Shaw's mother eventually left the
  family home to teach music, singing, in London.

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Family Reunion in London

• In 1876 he went to London, joining his sister and
  mother. Shaw did not return to Ireland for nearly
  thirty years.
• Most of the next two years Shaw educated himself
  at the British Museum. He began his literary
  career by writing music and drama criticism, and
  novels, including the semi-autobiographical
  IMMATURITY, without much success.

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Another Identity

• A man of many causes, Shaw supported abolition of
  private property, radical change in the voting
  system, campaigned for the simplification of
  spelling, and the reform of the English alphabet.
  As a public speaker, Shaw gained the status of
  one of the most sought-after orators in England.

8
The Marriage

• In 1898 Shaw married the wealthy Charlotte
  Payne-Townshend. They settled in 1906 in the
  Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence. Shaw
  remained with Charlotte until her death, although
  he was occasionally linked with other women.

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Eliza

• He carried on a passionate correspondence over
  the years with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a widow and
  actress, who got the starring role in PYGMALION.
  All the other actresses refused to say the taboo
  word 'bloody' that the playwright had put in the
  mouth of Eliza.

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The Ibsen Influence

• The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen had a great
  influence on Shaw's thinking.
• His 'unpleasant plays', ideological attacks on
  the evils of capitalism and explorations of moral
  and social problems, were followed with more
  entertaining but as principled productions.

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PICKERING Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE
Can't afford them, Governor.

• (from Pygmalion)

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PYGMALION, THE PLAY

• Pygmalion was originally written for the actress
  Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Later the play became the
  basis for two films and a musical.

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The Shaw Effect

• In his plays Shaw combined contemporary moral
  problems with ironic tone and paradoxes,
  "Shavian" wit, which have produced such phrases
  as

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Shaws Quotes

• "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
• "England and America are two countries divided by
  a common language.

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More of Shaws Quotes

• "Christianity might be a good thing if anyone
  ever tried it"
• "I never resist temptation because I have found
  that things are bad for me do not tempt me."

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Shaws Drama

• Discussion and intellectual acrobatics are the
  basis of his drama, and before the emergence of
  the sound film, his plays were nearly impossible
  to adapt into screen.

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Career As Playwright

• During his long career, Shaw wrote over 50 plays.
  He continued to write them even in his 90s.
• George Bernard Shaw died at Ayot St. Lawrence,
  Hertfordshire, on November 2, 1950.

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The Actor Shaw

• Since the days of the silent films, Shaw had been
  a fan of motion-picture. He also played in the
  film Rosy Rapture - The Pride of the Beauty
  (1914).

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The Film Adaptations

• Shaw did not like much of the German film version
  of Pygmalion (1935), and the penniless producer
  and director Gabriel Pascal persuaded the author
  to give him the rights to make films from his
  plays.

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The Film Pygmalion

• Pygmalion, produced by Pascal and directed by
  Anthony Asquith and David Lean (uncredited), was
  a great success.

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Pygmalion (1938)

• Pygmalion (1938) is the non-musical film version
  of George Bernard Shaw's 1912 stage play, a
  socio-economic drama based on the Cinderella
  story, but actually taken from the Greek myth of
  Pygmalion - about a sculptor who fell in love
  with a marble statue of his own making.

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My Fair Lady (1964)

• My Fair Lady (1964) was experienced director
  George Cukor's film musical adaptation of George
  Bernard Shaw's 1912 play Pygmalion that had
  played successfully on Broadway from March 15,
  1956 to 1962.

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The Allusion

• Shaw's plot was derived from Latin poet Ovid's
  story (in the Metamorphoses) about a character
  named Pygmalion who fell in love with a beautiful
  ivory statue of a woman. In later Greek
  tradition, his prayers to Venus that the beloved
  statue - Galatea - would come to life came true
  so that they could marry.

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Pygmalion (play) Review

• Pygmalion is a play by G. Bernard Shaw, written
  in 1912 and first staged in English in 1914.

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My Fair Lady

• The play was the basis for the musical play and
  film My Fair Lady.
• The play, the stage musical, and the film musical
  have different endings.

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The Mystery Remains Unresolved

• In the stage musical, this is left unresolved,
  and the final scene is of a lonely Higgins. Both
  the 1938 film and the filmed version of the
  musical add a final scene with both of them
  apparently about to reconcile.

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What is the Story anyway

• It is the story of Professor Henry Higgins, a
  professor of phonetics, who wagers that he can
  turn a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into
  the toast of London society merely by teaching
  her how to speak with an upper-class accent.

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The Story Continues

• In the process, he becomes fond of her and
  attempts to direct her future, but she rejects
  his domineering ways and marries a young
  aristocrat.

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Happily Ever After?

• At the end of the play, Eliza leaves Higgins to
  marry the aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill.

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No Happily Ever After?

• Shaw, annoyed by the tendency of audiences,
  actors, and even directors to seek 'romantic'
  re-interpretations of his ending, later wrote an
  essay for inclusion with subsequent editions in
  which he explained precisely why it was
  impossible for the story to end with Higgins and
  Eliza getting together.

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About the Play

• The original stage play shocked audiences by
  Eliza's use of a swear word.
• Humor is drawn from her ability to speak well,
  but without an understanding of the conversation
  acceptable to polite society.

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The Staging

• Shaw completed Pygmalion and later that same year
  it was translated into German. This is important
  because the very first performance was played by
  English actors in Vienna, Austria, with none
  other than Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza
  Doolittle.

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The Language

• For example, when asked whether she is walking
  home, Eliza replies, 'Not bloody likely!' The
  actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw
  wrote the role, was thought to risk her career by
  uttering the line.

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• My Fair Lady is a 1956 musical theater production
  with lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner and music
  by Frederic Loewe.

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Food for Thought

• Accents
• Language
• Socioeconomic status

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Accent

• In linguistics, a method of pronouncing words
  common to a certain group of people, such as
  inhabitants of a locality or members of a social
  class. It can also refer to the stress on a
  certain syllable.

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Accents vary

• The regional accents of English speakers show
  great variation across the areas where English is
  spoken as a first language.

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Local Dialects

• Local accents are part of local dialects. Any
  dialect of English has unique features in
  pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The term
  "accent" describes only the first of these,
  namely, pronunciation.

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Non-native speakers of English

• Non-native speakers of English tend to carry over
  the intonation and phonemic inventory from their
  mother tongue into their English speech.

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Native English Speakers

• Among native English speakers, many different
  accents exist.
• Some regional accents are easily identified by
  certain characteristics.
• There is also much room for misunderstanding
  between people from different regions, as the way
  one word is pronounced in one accent.

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Cockneys

• Cockneys are, in the loosest sense of the word,
  working-class inhabitants of Greater London.
• But according to tradition, the strict definition
  is limited to those born within earshot
  (generally taken to be three miles) of the Bow
  bells, in other words the bells of St
  Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside.

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Londoners

• Londoners have a very distinctive accent, quite
  different from the general accent of
  South-Eastern England.
• Londoners speak with a wide variety of accents
  from Cockney through to Received Pronunciation,
  via Estuary English, as well as those of the many
  ethnic groups there.

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Citations

• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
• http//www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gbshaw.htm
• http//www.bartleby.com/138/
• http//www.loggia.com/myth/galatea.html