Pygmalion (1913) is the most popular and best known of Bernard Shaw’s plays. It tells the story of the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, a coarse Cockney flower-girl with an accent, vocabulary and grammar unfettered by education, into a facsimile of a proper Victorian lady through the tutelage of Professor Henry Higgins. Higgins, a phoneticist who believes that correct speech is the key to gentility, takes her in and drills her on proper speech so that he can win a bet with a colleague, Colonel Pickering, that he can pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador’s ball. The circumstances are ripe for misunderstandings and the clash of the classes, which unspool over the course of the play’s five acts.

The play takes its name from the character Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has carved, which is then brought to life by the goddess Aphrodite.  The play, in turn, became the inspiration for the 1956 musical and the 1964 film My Fair Lady. Shaw turns it on its side to satirize the rigid British class system and comment on the issue of women’s independence.  A goodly number of versions have been spawned from its different productions. The initial London production featuring the famed Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree made changes to the ending, which Beerbohm defended by saying “My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful”, to which Shaw replied “You ending is damnable; you ought to be shot.”