Pygmalion

A Play

George Bernard Shaw

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781504061483
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

The most successful play by the Nobel Prize–winning Irish playwright, and basis for the movie and Broadway musical My Fair Lady. Based on the Greek legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, George Bernard Shaw's witty adaptation features linguistic expert Professor Henry Higgins, who encounters a cockney flower seller named Eliza Doolittle. Boasting that he could pass Eliza off as a duchess by teaching her to speak correctly and polishing up her manners, Higgins does not believe he will ever have to prove his claim—until Eliza shows up on his doorstep asking for elocution lessons. Eliza's subsequent transformation fools London society, but makes both Eliza and Higgins question whether they can return to the lives they had before their extraordinary experiment. " Pygmalion, written in 1912 at a time when women's suffrage was making daily headlines, stages both Shaw's progressive belief in the equality of the sexes, as well as his satire of the defiant persistence of Victorian customs and the English class system in the face of inevitable social progress." —BroadwayWorld

Act II

(Next day at 11 a.m. HIGGINS’s laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is a room on the first floor, looking on the street, and was meant for the drawing-room. The double doors are in the middle of the back wall; and persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. In this corner stands aflat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singeing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.

Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with a comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth nearest the door, and a coal scuttle. There is a clock on the mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table is a stand for newspapers.

On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor, is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the telephone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall, is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest from the door, and a bench for the player extending the full length of the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly chocolates.

The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy-chair, the piano bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray chair. It stands near the fireplace. On the walls, engravings: mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.

PICKERING is seated at the table, putting down some cards and a tuning-fork which he has been using. HIGGINS is standing up near him, closing two or three file drawers which are hanging out. He appears in the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a professional-looking black frock-coat with a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby “taking notice” eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments.)

HIGGINS (as he shuts the last drawer): Well, I think thats the whole show.

PICKERING: It’s really amazing. I havnt taken half of it in, you know.

HIGGINS: Would you like to go over any of it again?

PICKERING (rising and coming to the fireplace, where he plants himself with his back to the fire): No, thank you; not now. I’m quite done up for this morning.

HIGGINS (following him, and standing beside him on his left): Tired of listening to sounds?

PICKERING: Yes. It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but your hundred and thirty beat me. I cant hear a bit of difference between most of them. HIGGINS (chuckling, and going over to the piano to eat sweets): Oh, that comes with practice. You hear no difference at first; but you keep on listening, and presently you find theyre all as different as A from B. (MRS PEARCE looks in: she is HIGGlNS’s housekeeper). Whats the matter?

MRS PEARCE (hesitating, evidently perplexed): A young woman wants to see you, sir.

HIGGINS: A young woman! What does she want?

MRS PEARCE: Well, sir, she says youll be glad to see her when you know what shes come about. Shes quite a common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have sent her away, only I thought perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machines. I hope Ive not done wrong; but really you see such queer people sometimes — youll excuse me, I’m sure, sir —

HIGGINS: Oh, thats all right, Mrs Pearce. Has she an interesting accent? MRS PEARCE: Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I dont know how you can take an interest in it.

HIGGINS (to PICKERING): Lets have her up. Shew her up, Mrs Pearce (he rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder to use on the phonograph).

MRS PEARCE (only half resigned to it): Very well, sir. It’s for you to say. (She goes downstairs).

HIGGINS: This is rather a bit of luck. I’ll shew you how I make records. We’ll set her talking; and I’ll take it down first in Bell’s visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we’ll get her on the phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript before you.

MRS PEARCE (returning): This is the young woman, sir.

(THE FLOWER GIRL enters in state. She has a hat with three ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean apron, and the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos of this deplorable figure, with its innocent vanity and consequential air, touches PICKERING, who has already straightened himself in the presence of MRS PEARCE. But as to HIGGINS, the only distinction he makes between men and women is that when he is neither bullying nor exclaiming to the heavens against some featherweight cross, he coaxes women as a child coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of her.)

HIGGINS (brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed disappointment, and at once, babylike, making an intolerable grievance of it): Why, this is the girl I jotted down last night. Shes no use: Ive got all the records I want of the Lisson Grove lingo; and I’m not going to waste another cylinder on it. (To the girl) Be off with you: I dont want you.

THE FLOWER GIRL: Dont you be so saucy. You aint heard what I come for yet. (To MRS PEARCE, who is waiting at the door for further instructions) Did you tell him I come in a taxi?

MRS PEARCE: Nonsense, girl! what do you think a gentleman like Mr Higgins cares what you came in?

THE FLOWER GIRL: Oh, we are proud! He aint above giving lessons, not him: I heard him say so. Well, I aint come here to ask for any compliment; and if my money’s not good enough I can go elsewhere.

HIGGINS: Good enough for what?

THE FLOWER GIRL: Good enough for ye-oo. Now you know, dont you? I’m come to have lessons, I am. And to pay for em too: make no mistake.

HIGGINS (stupent): Well!!! (Recovering his breath with a gasp) What do you expect me to say to you?

THE FLOWER GIRL: Well, if you was a gentleman, you might ask me to sit down, I think. Dont I tell you I’m bringing you business?

HIGGINS: Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down, or shall we throw he...