Pygmalion(Illustrated) E-Book

George Bernard Shaw

• Herausgeber: Micheal Smith
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

• Illustrated Edition: This version of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" comes with 20 beautiful illustrations, enhancing the reading experience and bringing the story's iconic scenes to life.
• Includes a Detailed Summary: Dive into the heart of Shaw's masterpiece with an insightful summary that captures the essence and wit of the original work.
• Comprehensive Characters List: Get acquainted with the vibrant cast of characters that make "Pygmalion" a truly unforgettable play. From the ambitious Eliza Doolittle to the eccentric Professor Henry Higgins, understand the motivations and transformations of each character.
• Author Biography: Study up on the life and contributions of George Bernard Shaw the Nobel Prize-winning playwright whose sharp wit and social commentary have left an indelible mark on literature.

Explore the fascinating world of George Bernard Shaw's classic drama "Pygmalion," which tackles issues of identity, social class, and the power of language. With twenty gorgeous drawings, this unique illustrated version vividly brings Shaw's sharp language and compelling characters to life, providing a visual feast that perfectly matches the original text.
In the bustling streets of Edwardian London, Professor Henry Higgins, a brilliant yet arrogant phonetician, makes a daring bet that he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a spirited Cockney flower girl, into a refined lady through the power of proper speech. What follows is a comedic, heartwarming, and thought-provoking tale of transformation, ambition, and the search for identity.
This edition not only immerses you in Shaw's masterful play but also provides a detailed summary that ensures you won't miss any of the wit and nuances of the original work. The comprehensive characters list allows you to delve deeper into the minds and motivations of the play's unforgettable characters, from the determined Eliza to the pompous Higgins and the kind-hearted Colonel Pickering.
Enhanced by a biography of George Bernard Shaw, this edition offers readers a deeper understanding of the man behind the words—his life, his motivations, and the social issues that he passionately addressed through his work.
Whether you're a long-time fan of Shaw or discovering his work for the first time, this illustrated edition of "Pygmalion" promises to enchant, entertain, and provoke thought, making it a cherished addition to any collection.

 

Leseprobe

                          PYGMALION                                                                

                                BY                                    

   GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

ABOUT SHAW

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was a towering figure in the world of literature, a playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist whose influence extended far beyond the confines of the theater. Born in Dublin, Ireland, into a lower-middle-class family, Shaw's early exposure to the arts, especially music and literature, came through his mother's passion for culture. This early influence sowed the seeds of what would become a lifelong commitment to the arts and social reform.

Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he initially struggled to make a living as a writer. His early attempts at novels were unsuccessful, but he found his voice through journalism, writing music and theater criticism. Shaw was a dedicated socialist, joining the Fabian Society in 1884, where he became a prominent advocate for social reform, using his writings to promote his ideals.

It was in the theater that Shaw found his greatest success. His first significant play, "Widowers' Houses" (1892), tackled the issues of slum landlordism, marking the beginning of his career as a dramatist. Shaw's plays were known for their wit, intelligence, and use of drama as a platform to explore social, political, and moral issues. Notable works include "Pygmalion" (1913), which later became the basis for the musical "My Fair Lady," and "Saint Joan" (1923), a dramatization of the life of Joan of Arc. Over his lifetime, Shaw wrote more than 60 plays.

Shaw's contributions to social criticism and literature earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. This award honored not only his extraordinary achievements but also his contribution to preserving social justice and promoting human dignity. Even after being acknowledged, Shaw maintained his reputation as a controversial figure, frequently facing criticism for his strong opinions on divisive topics including marriage, education, and religion.

A committed vegetarian and outspoken critic of the First World War, Shaw's advocacy extended to various causes throughout his life, including the promotion of simplified spelling and the reform of the English alphabet. His eccentricity and iconoclasm were as much a part of his legacy as his literary and social contributions.

Shaw's personal life was as unconventional as his professional one. He married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irish heiress, in 1898, in a union that was said to be celibate but intellectually companionable. Shaw's correspondence and interactions with many of the leading figures of his day, including politicians, actors, and other writers, provide a fascinating glimpse into the cultural and intellectual milieu of the time.

George Bernard Shaw passed away in 1950 at the age of 94, leaving behind a body of work that continues to be celebrated for its brilliance, wit, and profound social insight. His legacy is not just in the realm of literature but also in his enduring impact on social and political thought, making him one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.

SUMMARY

George Bernard Shaw's brilliant play "Pygmalion" delves deeply into the complexity of human nature, human transformation, and social class. The plot, which takes place in early 20th-century London, centers on Henry Higgins, a clever but obnoxious professor of phonetics, and Eliza Doolittle, a lively flower girl from Cockney who has a thick accent that masks her keen sense of humor. A fascinating and life-changing journey begins for both Eliza and Higgins when he boastfully says he can make her into a duchess by teaching her how to talk properly.

As Eliza undergoes her metamorphosis, not just in speech but in manners and self-understanding, Shaw cleverly critiques the rigid British class system and questions the true nature of identity and transformation. The witty banter, the clash of classes, and the unlikely friendships that develop offer both humor and poignant moments, leading to an ending that defies conventional expectations.

"Pygmalion" is more than just a story of a street girl's rise to societal prominence; it's a commentary on social mobility, gender roles, and the power of language. Shaw's sharp wit and keen observations make this play not only a landmark piece of literature but also a timeless reflection on society's constructs. It's a tale that entertains as much as it enlightens, proving Shaw's genius in creating works that resonate well beyond their time.

CHARACTERS LIST

"Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw is a seminal play that critiques the British class system and explores themes of transformation, identity, and the power of language. Here's a list of the main characters in the play:

Professor Henry Higgins - A clever but haughty professor of phonetics bets that by teaching Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle proper English, he can make her a duchess.

Eliza Doolittle - A young, intelligent, and spirited flower girl with a thick Cockney accent. She becomes Higgins' student, hoping to improve her circumstances by learning to speak like a lady.

Colonel Pickering - A retired officer and a fellow phonetics enthusiast. He shares Higgins' passion for linguistics and assists in Eliza's transformation. He is much kinder and more considerate towards Eliza compared to Higgins.

Alfred Doolittle - Eliza's father, a charismatic dustman with questionable morals. He becomes wealthy unexpectedly and grapples with the responsibilities that come with his newfound social status.

Mrs. Higgins - Henry Higgins' mother, who disapproves of her son's experiment with Eliza. She is a woman of high society, with a strong sense of propriety and a more compassionate viewpoint towards Eliza.

Freddy Eynsford-Hill - A young man from an upper-class family who falls in love with Eliza after her transformation. He is smitten by her charm and intelligence, showcasing the shallow nature of social perceptions based on language and appearance.

Mrs. Pearce - Higgins' housekeeper, who expresses concern for Eliza's well-being and challenges Higgins' treatment of her. She represents a voice of reason and maternal care in the household.

Mrs. Eynsford-Hill - Freddy's mother, who represents the struggling upper class. She is initially skeptical of Eliza but later accepts her into their social circle.

These characters collectively explore and challenge the social hierarchies of Edwardian society, making "Pygmalion" a timeless critique of social class and personal transformation.

Contents

Preface

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

Preface

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond Sweet’s patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his “Current Shorthand” is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times; and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman’s. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins’s physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him.

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.

Act I

Covent Garden at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for shelter into the market and under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, where there are already several people, among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing busily.

The church clock strikes the first quarter.

THE DAUGHTER [in the space between the central pillars, close to the one on her left] I’m getting chilled to the bone. What can Freddy be doing all this time? He’s been gone twenty minutes.

THE MOTHER [on her daughter’s right] Not so long. But he ought to have got us a cab by this.

A BYSTANDER [on the lady’s right] He won’t get no cab not until half-past eleven, missus, when they come back after dropping their theatre fares.

THE MOTHER. But we must have a cab. We can’t stand here until half-past eleven. It’s too bad.

THE BYSTANDER. Well, it ain’t my fault, missus.

THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would have got one at the theatre door.

THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy?

THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldn’t he?

Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street side, and comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He is a young man of twenty, in evening dress, very wet around the ankles.

THE DAUGHTER. Well, haven’t you got a cab?

FREDDY. There’s not one to be had for love or money.

THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You can’t have tried.

THE DAUGHTER. It’s too tiresome. Do you expect us to go and get one ourselves?

FREDDY. I tell you they’re all engaged. The rain was so sudden: nobody was prepared; and everybody had to take a cab. I’ve been to Charing Cross one way and nearly to Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all engaged.

THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?

FREDDY. There wasn’t one at Trafalgar Square.

THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?

FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me to walk to Hammersmith?

THE DAUGHTER. You haven’t tried at all.

THE MOTHER. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again; and don’t come back until you have found a cab.

FREDDY. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

THE DAUGHTER. And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in this draught, with next to nothing on. You selfish pig—

FREDDY. Oh, very well: I’ll go, I’ll go. [He opens his umbrella and dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a flower girl, who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of her hands. A blinding flash of lightning, followed instantly by a rattling peal of thunder, orchestrates the incident]

THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah.

FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in the basket] There’s menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her flowers, on the lady’s right. She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to be; but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist].

THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

THE DAUGHTER. Do nothing of the sort, mother. The idea!

THE MOTHER. Please allow me, Clara. Have you any pennies?

THE DAUGHTER. No. I’ve nothing smaller than sixpence.

THE FLOWER GIRL [hopefully] I can give you change for a tanner, kind lady.

THE MOTHER [to Clara] Give it to me. [Clara parts reluctantly]. Now [to the girl] This is for your flowers.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Thank you kindly, lady.

THE DAUGHTER. Make her give you the change. These things are only a penny a bunch.

THE MOTHER. Do hold your tongue, Clara. [To the girl]. You can keep the change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, thank you, lady.

THE MOTHER. Now tell me how you know that young gentleman’s name.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I didn’t.