Pygmalion is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, named after the Greek mythological figure. It premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913 and was first presented on stage in German.
Its English-language premiere took place at His Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle.
Inspiration
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life.
The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era British playwrights, including one of Shaw’s influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea that was first presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the musical Adonis and the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed.
Eliza Doolittle was inspired by Kitty Wilson, owner of a flower stall at Norfolk Street, Strand, in London.
Wilson continued selling flowers at the stall until September, 1958. Her daughter, Betty Benton, then took over, but was forced to close down a month later when the City of London decreed that the corner was no longer “designated” for street trading.
Shaw mentioned that the character of Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of phonetics: Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, Tito Pagliardini, but above all the cantankerous Henry Sweet.
Shaw is also very likely to have known the life story of Jacob Henle, a professor at Heidelberg University, who fell in love with Elise Egloff, a Swiss housemaid, forcing her through several years of bourgeois education to turn her into an adequate wife.
Egloff died shortly after their marriage. Her story inspired various literary works, including a play by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer and a novella by Gottfried Keller, comparing Henle with the Greek Pygmalion.
First productions
Shaw wrote the play in early 1912 and read it to actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production.
Pygmalion premièred at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translation by Shaw’s Viennese literary agent and acolyte, Siegfried Trebitsch.
Its first New York production opened on 24 March 1914 at the German-language Irving Place Theatre starring Hansi Arnstaedt as Eliza.
It opened in London on 11 April 1914, at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s His Majesty’s Theatre, with Campbell as Eliza and Tree as Higgins, and ran for 118 performances. Shaw directed the actors through tempestuous rehearsals, often punctuated by at least one of the two storming out of the theatre in a rage.
Plot
Act One
A group of people are sheltering from the rain. Among them are the Eynsford-Hills, superficial social climbers eking out a living in “genteel poverty”. First seen are Mrs Eynsford-Hill and her daughter Clara; Clara’s brother Freddy enters having earlier been dispatched to secure them a cab (which they can ill afford), but being rather timid and faint-hearted he has failed to do so.
As he goes off once again to find a cab, he bumps into a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle. Her flowers drop into the mud of Covent Garden, the flowers she needs to survive in her poverty-stricken world.
They are soon joined by a gentleman, Colonel Pickering. While Eliza tries to sell flowers to the Colonel, a bystander informs her that another man is writing down everything she says.
That man is Henry Higgins, a linguist and phonetician. Eliza worries that Higgins is a police officer and will not calm down until Higgins introduces himself.
It soon becomes apparent that he and Colonel Pickering have a shared interest in phonetics and an intense mutual admiration; indeed, Pickering has come from India specifically to meet Higgins, and Higgins was planning to go to India to meet Pickering.
Higgins tells Pickering that he could pass off the flower girl as a duchess merely by teaching her to speak properly.
These words of bravado spark an interest in Eliza, who would love to make changes in her life and become more mannerly, even though to her it only means working in a flower shop.
At the end of the act, Freddy returns after finding a taxi, only to find that his mother and sister have gone and left him with the cab. The streetwise Eliza takes the cab from him, using the money that Higgins tossed to her, leaving him on his own.
Act Two
Higgins’s house – the next day
As Higgins demonstrates his phonetics to Pickering, the housekeeper Mrs Pearce tells him that a young girl wants to see him. Eliza has shown up because she wants to talk like a lady in a flower shop.
She tells Higgins that she will pay for lessons. He shows no interest, but she reminds him of his boast the previous day: he had claimed that he could pass her off as a duchess.
Pickering makes a bet with him on his claim and says that he will pay for her lessons if Higgins succeeds. She is sent off to have a bath. Mrs Pearce tells Higgins that he must behave himself in the young girl’s presence, meaning he must stop swearing and improve his table manners, but he is at a loss to understand why she should find fault with him.
Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father, appears, with the sole purpose of getting money out of Higgins, having no paternal interest in his daughter’s welfare. He requests and received five pounds in compensation for the loss of Eliza, although Higgins, much amused by Doolittle’s approach to morality, is tempted to pay ten.
Doolittle refuses; he sees himself as a member of the undeserving poor and means to go on being undeserving. With his intelligent mind untamed by education, he has an eccentric view of life. He is also aggressive, and Eliza, on her return, sticks her tongue out at him. He goes to hit her, but Pickering prevents him. The scene ends with Higgins telling Pickering that they really have a difficult job on their hands.
Act Three
Mrs Higgins’s drawing room
Higgins bursts in and tells his mother he has picked up a “common flower girl” whom he has been teaching. Mrs Higgins is unimpressed with her son’s attempts to win her approval, because it is her ‘at home’ day and she is entertaining visitors. The visitors are the Eynsford-Hills. When they arrive, Higgins is rude to them.
Eliza enters and soon falls into talking about the weather and her family. While she is now able to speak in beautifully modulated tones, the substance of what she says remains unchanged from the gutter.
She confides her suspicions that her aunt was killed by relatives, mentions that gin had been “mother’s milk” to her aunt, and that Eliza’s own father was “always more agreeable when he had a drop in”.
Higgins passes off her remarks as “the new small talk”, and Freddy is enraptured by Eliza. When she is leaving, he asks her if she is going to walk across the park, to which she replies, “Walk?
Not bloody likely!” (This is the most famous line from the play and, for many years after the play’s debut, use of the word ‘bloody’ was known as a pygmalion; Mrs Campbell was considered to have risked her career by speaking the line on stage.)
After Eliza and the Eynsford-Hills leave, Higgins asks for his mother’s opinion. She says the girl is not presentable and she is concerned about what will happen to her, but neither Higgins nor Pickering understands her concerns about Eliza’s future. They leave feeling confident and excited about how Eliza will get on. This leaves Mrs Higgins feeling exasperated, and exclaiming, “Men! Men!! Men!!!”
Act Four
Higgins’s house – midnight
Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza have returned from a ball. A tired Eliza sits unnoticed, brooding and silent, while Pickering congratulates Higgins on winning the bet.
Higgins scoffs and declares the evening a “silly tomfoolery”, thanking God it’s over, and saying that he had been sick of the whole thing for the last two months. Still barely acknowledging Eliza, beyond asking her to leave a note for Mrs Pearce regarding coffee, the two retire to bed.
Higgins soon returns to the room, looking for his slippers, and Eliza throws them at him. Higgins is taken aback, and is at first completely unable to understand Eliza’s preoccupation, which, aside from being ignored after her triumph, is the question of what she is to do now.
When Higgins finally understands, he makes light of it, saying she could get married, but Eliza interprets this as selling herself like a prostitute. “We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.”
Finally she returns her jewellery to Higgins, including the ring he had given her, which he throws into the fireplace with a violence that scares Eliza. Furious with himself for losing his temper, he damns Mrs Pearce, the coffee, Eliza, and finally himself, for “lavishing” his knowledge and his “regard and intimacy” on a “heartless guttersnipe”, and retires in great dudgeon. Eliza roots around in the fireplace and retrieves the ring.
Act Five
Mrs Higgins’s drawing room
The next morning Higgins and Pickering, perturbed by discovering that Eliza has walked out on them, call on Mrs Higgins to phone the police. Higgins is particularly distracted, since Eliza had assumed the responsibility of maintaining his diary and keeping track of his possessions, which causes Mrs Higgins to decry their calling the police as though Eliza were “a lost umbrella”.
Doolittle is announced; he emerges dressed in splendid wedding attire and is furious with Higgins, who after their previous encounter had been so taken with Doolittle’s unorthodox ethics that he had recommended him as the “most original moralist in
