Pygmalion is a 5-act play by George Bernard Shaw. It was written in 1912 and first produced in 1913. The plot revolves around Professor Henry Higgins' bet with a colleague over whether he can transform a low-class flower girl, Liza Doolittle, into the equivalent of a Duchess in just 6 months. Pygmalion was a Greek mythological figure who fell in love with a sculpture he had carved and was a popular theme in Victorian drama.
This edition has been carefully proofread and formatted for a clean, modern reading experience while preserving Shaw's original text in full, including his sequel to the play.
Most people would be familiar with the characters Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins from the hit 1956 musical My Fair Lady, which was adapted from Pygmalion, though the plots differ in small but significant ways. In particular Shaw wanted to avoid any sense of a "happy ending" and, after viewing a performance of the play where an extra scene had been added, he wrote a sequel which definitively states what came after. The sequel is included in this edition.
Fans of My Fair Lady will discover the sharper, less sentimental original-Shaw's own ending and all.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)