Pygmalion

Sheltering from the rain in Covent Garden, Professor Henry Higgins — a phonetician who can place any English speaker by their accent alone — makes a careless boast: that in three months he could pass off Eliza Doolittle, a draggled Cockney flower-girl, as a duchess simply by teaching her to speak. His friend Colonel Pickering bets he cannot. Higgins takes the wager, and the next morning Eliza arrives at his laboratory in Wimpole Street to be made into a lady.

He succeeds beyond his own boast. But the triumph raises the question Higgins never thought to ask: what becomes of a flower-girl who has been taught to pass as a duchess, who can no longer return to the gutter and has been given no place above it? Pygmalion turns, in its blazing final act, into an argument between maker and made — about independence, gratitude, and whether a human being created by another can ever belong to herself.

First performed in 1913 and published with Shaw's full apparatus of novelistic stage directions and a prose sequel, Pygmalion is the purest example of his comedy of ideas: a treatise on English as a system of class signals, disguised as a romance and refusing, pointedly, to be one. Shaw would not let Eliza end up with Higgins, and wrote an unsentimental epilogue to make sure no one could mistake him — one of the great anti-romantic gestures in the theatre.

The play later became the beloved musical My Fair Lady (1956), which softened the ending Shaw had fought for and so proved his point against him. Read the original and you meet the harder, funnier, honest version. This edition presents the complete play in clean, readable typesetting for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.