Study Guide to Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
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Study Guide to Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Intelligent Education

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About This Book

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, a didactic play written with the purpose to teach the audience.

As a play of the early-twentieth century, its story and relevance continues to play out in modern movies, musicals, and movie musicals. Moreover, Pygmalion's success can be attributed to its challenging of a universal truth that in the English-speaking world, there seems to be only one "sufficient" way to speak it. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of George Bernard Shaw's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645421597
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INTRODUCTION
SHAW’S LIFE.
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856. He lived for ninety-four years and wrote more than fifty plays. He is usually considered to be the greatest writer of plays in the English language since Shakespeare. He also wrote many volumes of literary criticism, art criticism and music criticism as well as numerous essays on social and political problems; an example of such an essay is the one called “The Crime of Imprisonment.”
Shaw’s family was part of the Protestant minority in Ireland, not the Roman Catholic majority. Shaw was himself baptized into the Church of England; however, he gave up formal religion early in his life, although he always had a deep interest in questions concerning the meaning and purpose of human life.
The Irish Protestant minority has always tended to regard itself as aristocratic and superior. Shaw’s parents certainly felt this way. They were proud of their distant relationship to an Irish nobleman. In reality, however, they led a shabby, disorganized family life. The father was a grain merchant, and his business was always in difficulties; he was good-natured but ineffectual. He found life easier when he kept himself in a state of alcoholic confusion. His wife became an embittered woman who despised her husband and neglected her three children. She was much interested in music; so occupied was she with training her voice and arranging musical scores that she could not spare much time for running her household. George Bernard Shaw and his two sisters were neglected as children. When he was a grown man he recalled vividly how he had spent many childhood days in the kitchen, being looked after by a miserably paid servant girl, and how his meals had almost always consisted of badly stewed beef and stale strong tea.
The one thing he received in his home was a deep knowledge of music and a great love for it. While still a boy he knew many opera scores almost by heart. He could sing a number of passages from great operas note for note. He wanted to be a great singer, but he did not have the voice. His voice was good enough and well trained enough to make him an excellent public speaker in later life, however. Also, he learned enough about music in his boyhood to give him a foundation for writing about it; he became a music critic when he was in his thirties—some feel the best one that ever lived. In an amusing essay, the first thing he wrote after he got the job, he explains how his childhood qualified him for the job, although his knowledge of music had nothing to do with his being hired!
In his neglected boyhood, Shaw received a little Latin instruction from an uncle who was a good teacher. But his main education came from his own independent wanderings in picture galleries and museums, and from attendance at concerts, operas and Shakespeare’s plays whenever he got the chance. Shaw’s knowledge of Shakespeare was solid and detailed.
Shaw was sent to several different schools, always for short periods of time, and he cordially hated all of them. When he was fifteen, he left school forever. This boy, who was to become one of the great masters of the English language, became an office boy in a Dublin real estate office. Here, among other things, he had the ugly job of collecting rents in slum tenements—an experience he remembered and put to use in his plays.
At nineteen, he moved to London. There he lived with his mother, who had left his father and was making her living by teaching singing. During his early years in London, Bernard Shaw determined to become a writer. He went about it in a practical way: he learned to write by writing. Between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five pages every day, eventually completing five books in this way. Unfortunately, the books were novels, for which Shaw had little talent. Only one of them has ever gained any popularity. That is Cashel Byron’s Profession, a wildly comic story about a prize fighter. The others were pretty terrible.
Another important event in Shaw’s life took place in 1882. He became converted to socialism. The injustices of industrial society in the nineteenth century, such as the labor of small children in factories and mines, the payment of wages too low for anyone to live on, the absence of sanitation and decent housing, made a deep impression on Shaw, as they had on Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Also, there was a depression in the eighteen eighties, so that Shaw saw plenty of cold, hungry people in London. Shaw was convinced by a lecture given by the economist Henry George, who felt that the inequalities of the economic system could be corrected by land reform. In 1884, Shaw read and was impressed by Karl Marx. However, he fought bitterly with the Marxists afterward. He became convinced that none of them had read Marx. It is interesting that to this day many Marxists are hostile to Shaw. They are stronger enemies to him than conservatives are.
Shaw joined the Fabian Society in 1884. This organization was determined not to make noble declarations about economic reform but to do something about it. This could be accomplished by getting to work on speeches and pamphlets that would convince others and lead to new laws. Shaw worked for many years with this small band of serious intellectuals. The Fabian Society played an important role in the founding of the Labor Party, today one of the two major political parties in Great Britain.
During these years Shaw knew about economic hardship from personal experience. His sleeves were so threadbare that he had to trim them with scissors; his hat was so worn that he was afraid to touch it for fear that it would fall apart. But better days were coming. In 1888, he began his brilliant career as a music critic. In 1895, he became drama critic on the London Saturday Review. His witty, intelligent, powerfully expressed reviews were of such excellence that it is still a pleasure to read them, even though the actors he wrote of are long dead and many of the plays mentioned are no longer known to most of us.
Through his friend William Archer, a well-known critic, Shaw became interested in the plays of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen was causing a revolution in the theater by using plays to discuss and advocate new social ideas. This meant that the theatre was becoming a place where the audience could find stimulation for their minds, whereas before Ibsen there was nothing more to attract intelligent people to the average play than there is in a historical movie epic of our own day. Soon Shaw was writing his own plays under Ibsen’s influence. The first one was Widower’s Houses. This was about a subject Shaw was acquainted with at first hand—slum landlords. Its merciless attack caused a great furor in the newspapers. It had a run of only two performances in the little experimental theater where it was produced in 1892. England was not yet accustomed to anything stronger than milk and water on the stage. Shaw the dramatist was not exactly famous, but people were certainly starting to hear about him.
Now Shaw began to embody his ideas in comedy. By 1897 he had written Arms and the Man, The Devil’s Disciple, and Candida. He was a rich and famous playwright. In 1898 he gave up his job as drama critic so that he could devote all his time to writing plays. Caesar and Cleopatra was written in that year. Also in 1898 he married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, with whom he enjoyed a congenial companionship until her death forty-five years later. By 1915, Shaw was famous the world over. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925, an honor enjoyed by only three other Englishmen—Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, and Winston Churchill.
George Bernard Shaw died in England on November 2, 1950.
SHAW’S PLAYS:
Shaw wrote over fifty plays, more than Shakespeare who wrote thirty-seven, and far more than any other important English playwright. He began his playwriting career in his thirties. His great play about Joan of Arc, Saint Joan, was written when he was sixty-seven. In his eighties and nineties he was still producing interesting plays. Like such artists as the sculptor and painter Michelangelo and the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, he continued to be creative even when he was a very old man.
There were no great English playwrights in the nineteenth century before Shaw. The best writers wrote poetry or novels. There were numerous actors of great skill and there were highly elaborate productions, but all this was wasted on plays that were worthless or on productions of Shakespeare’s plays so chopped up and altered that they were hardly recognizable. It is no wonder that Shaw was inspired by Henrik Ibsen, the somber Norwegian whose extraordinary dramatic skill was used to treat controversial subjects in such a way that audiences were simultaneously angered and stimulated.
Shaw set out to do the same thing as Ibsen in English, but he soon found out that his own ability was better suited to comedy than to problem plays. After his first efforts, Shaw wrote comedies almost exclusively.
Shaw’s comedy has nothing at all to do with slapstick or nonsense. These are good kinds of comedy, but they are not Shaw’s kind. Shaw’s method of comedy is to take familiar ideas and situations, to present them with a fresh and startling viewpoint, and to give new insight into humanity by doing this. For instance, Pygmalion tells a familiar story of the Cinderella type. We should expect a “happy ending” with Higgins marrying the transformed Eliza. But Shaw, with startling intellectual clarity, does not have them marry. Eliza has come to care for Higgins, but she does not really like him; he knows too much about her. Higgins cares for Eliza in the sense that he will find it hard to do without her, but if he gives in to this feeling it will be against his will. Then too, in some ways Eliza is Higgins’ superior. She has a soul more responsive and sympathetic than his. Cinderella is changed in more than externals.
It is just because Shaw writes a conventional, familiar type of play that his unconventional treatment of the story is so stimulating. This treatment is embodied in confrontations between important characters, giving them the opportunity to show up each other’s absurdities. It is shown as Mrs. Pearce discusses Higgins’ bad manners with him. Another example is Alfred Doolittle’s discussion with Higgins and Pickering as he talks them out of five pounds. Most noteworthy is the brilliantly written verbal battle between Eliza and Higgins in Act V.
Shaw brings out human foolishness and inconsistency with a bubbling gaiety which is one of his most noticeable qualities. He never ceases to be amused at human behavior, still more at human thought. We may surely conclude that Shaw delights in the innumerable absurd human types, that he loves life and enjoys living it. His writing could not have such vivacity and gusto if this were not so.
Yet Shaw’s purpose is in the end like Ibsen’s, even if his cast of mind is so different. For him, a play is a place to come to grips with serious ideas, to present new and sometimes startling points of view to the audience. For him, the stage is a place where the dramatist may teach and even preach, and the theater is a school and even a universal church. In portraying a character like Alfred Doolittle, for instance, Shaw manages to entertain and indirectly lecture to his audience at the same time.
Shaw’s comedies cover a wide range of subjects. This lively-minded, sharp-witted Irishman is interested in almost everything, from socialism to marriage to medicine to religion, right up to and including kindness to animals. (In one of his stage directions, for example, he describes a female character who is wearing a hat “with a dead bird in it.” It is hard to imagine a shorter or more effective attack on the practice of killing animals to get their feathers or skins.)
Because of his long interest in socialism, Shaw often deals with money and property in his plays. Shaw is convinced that much evil human behavior is the result of evil economic conditions. Major Barbara is the most important of Shaw’s plays on this subject. The class system is another frequent target of Shaw’s attack; Pygmalion and Misalliance are two plays concerned with this.
A NOTE ON THE ACTORS IN SHAW’S PLAYS:
The plays of Bernard Shaw are stage plays; they are splendid to read but they are made to be seen. Shaw knows just what will “go” when a play is performed—what dialogue and action will help it to move swiftly and keep the attention of the audience. One of the reasons why Shaw is able to do this is that he wrote many of his plays for special actors. When he wrote a play, he had the actor in mind as he worked. This kept Shaw’s thoughts closely attached to the staging of the play. Caesar and Cleopatra, for example, was written for Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, a famous nineteenth-century actor. Forbes-Robertson’s own natural dignity and majestic personality no doubt helped Shaw to some extent in creating Caesar.
What was true of actors was also true of actresses—truer, since Shaw had a habit of falling in love with actresses and writing plays for them as a sign of his affection. (Actresses also had a habit of falling in love with him. This fact has significance, not only gossipy interest; we must remember that the eloquent redheaded reformer and playwright was attractive to some of the most admired women of his day, especially when certain critics claim he does not understand the subject of sex.) The Man of Destiny and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion were written with Ellen Terry in mind. Pygmalion was Shaw’s gift to Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Both were famous and beautiful actresses. The correspondence Shaw exchanged with these two women constitutes two of the most famous sets of love letters in the world. Their wit makes them far more than conventional love letters.
SHAW’S LITERARY STYLE.
Literary style is the way a writer has of using his language. It includes such things as choice of words, and the length and shape of sentences. Bernard Shaw’s style does not call attention to itself by such devices as elaborate vocabulary or highly rhythmical sentences. The only special quality of the writing is that it mirrors the special quality of Shaw’s mind—that is, it is exceptionally clear, lively, and intellectually powerful. It is obviously the result of Shaw’s concentration on what he has to say. Language that is fancy or tricky for its own sake is of no interest to him. Students who are reading Shaw’s plays are very often studying writing in the same English class. They could not do better than to take his straight-forward, vigorous prose as a model.
READING SHAW’S PLAYS.
Shaw’s plays make enjoyable reading because the author supplies not only the dialogue but much connecting material. There are full descriptions of the characters, vivid descriptions of the scenes, and numerous comments by Shaw which are often very entertaining. Shaw was the first playwright to do this. He felt that the ideas in his plays should be spread as widely as possible. Therefore he wanted to cultivate a reading public as well as a theater-going public. With this in mind, he made his plays as attractive to read as he could.
THE PYGMALION MYTH.
Shaw takes the ...

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