When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wagers with Colonel Pickering
that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak
like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be
riddled with difficulties, and that behind her cockney parlance the girl
in question, Eliza Doolittle, has a mind, ideas and aspirations of her
own. Things come to a crux when the creature starts to rebel against her
creator - and the scene is set for a play that questions the class
system, social appearances and the role of women in society.
Universally regarded as Shaw's most successful work, Pygmalion - here
presented in its definitive 1941 version, with footnotes indicating the
textual variants from the first volume edition of 1916 - has spawned a
great number of adaptations, among them the famous 1956 Broadway musical
My Fair Lady, and shows ancient myth's undiminished ability to find new
incarnations in modern life.