Pygmalion
The Text
http://www.bartleby.com/138/
Commentaries
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/pygmalion/
Extras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)
The Text
http://www.bartleby.com/138/
Commentaries
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/pygmalion/
Extras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)
17 comments:
IBRAHEEM AL SMARY firstly,I want to thank you for helpfull websites.secondly,your great efforts give us a chance to developing our skills ,also I suggest that you make an audio discussion to more practising in English.finally,I hope to your website the best ,and more partisipations from students.
GOOD EVENING.
First all thank u teacher for using this play. Because George bernard show is one of the most popular writers that's in my opinion, so I'd like to talk about his life.
He was born in Dabline the capital of Irland. It is in the west. He was born in 1856. In the victorian age. Corruption of the church is the main feature of victorian age. The church was responsible of the government. The government is responsible of all affairs of the country, so the people live in corruption. Because the ministers are theives. The king the creast of the church, they were against people. It is a double catasrophe. It needs all people to solve this catasrophe. Such cases causes poverty. Poverty leads to crime. Their was a question about England condition. It is the economical condition, which is the most important thing in the country. Economic desaster is more dangerous than the political one. In the modern Britian, Show is considered the most famous and important writer, because of his offerts to solve the question of England condition in the victorian age. Literature is not weritten just for amuesment in that time, but to improve the situation. He precedes all his plays with a preface so show the aims of his plays and to talk about catasrophe of the society.
While Bernard show's childhood, he continued his study and his mother support him. She left his father, because he is alkoholic. He suffered alot in his childhood.
He wote 5 novels and more than fifty plays. At the beginning he didn't successed. Because novels were more popular, it isnt time for drama. The second reason for his failure is his critisim of all the people not the church only, he critcized all clases. In order to change the economical situation is to take taxes. Bernard offered this situation. Also he concentrated on the improvement of theatre not on the drama itsels. Because it is not the time of theatre. The critca says that he is responsible of his fault, because if u want to develop the theatre, you have to develop drama.
Actually, I read that some critics considered him that he is the second writer comes after Shakespeare in the field of drama.
Ibrahim Al Smary .The main theme of the play 1 class:the social hierachy is an unavoidabe reality in Britain,and ti is intersting to much it play out in tje work of a socialist playwright.Shaw includes membersof all social classes from the lowest {Liza}to the servant class {Mrs.pearce}to the middle class {doolittle}after his inheritance to the genteel poor {the Eynsford hills} to the upper class {pickering and the higginses} .The general sense is that class structures are rigid and should not be tempered with,so the example of Liza's class mobility is most shocking.The issue of the language is tied up in class quite closely;the fact that higgins is able to identify where people were born by their accents is telling
Dear teachers and fellow students:
This link on Pygmalion causes me an inscapable sense of deja vu.
Before sugessting a question, let me not forget to give all the due credits to our dear teacher.
It seems that the title along with the subtitle of the play are troublesome to a degree.
Think of it, do not you just agree that the play tackles the Greek myth the other way round?? Higgins tries to transform a human being into a statue !!His mam's words are relevent here to quote "playing with your live DOLL". I reckon this is a parody, dont you agree??
As for the subtitle which reads" a Romane ", I want to say that I do feel that this is an Anti-romance, instead,
Let me know what you think.
Have a good time
Khawla
Mohsen Al Quran first ,I want to thank you very much for this great websites because this web give us the chance to express about What we understand inthis siction .Finally i hope all the students partisipations in this great work
Mohsen al quran, the major them is the language, In this play and in British society at large, language is closely tied with class. From aperson,s accent, on can determine wher the person comes from and usually what the persons socioeconomic background is. Because accent aren,t very mallable, poor people are marked as poor for life. Higgins,s teachings are somewhat radical in that they disrupt this social marker, allowing for greater social mobility.
HELLO FRIENDS...,
First of all, I want to thanks our doctor about this great work which makes for us , ands it's the only a mean to reach our ideas and develop our skills and levels .
So this website will make us more effective and interest in English language and this play
Also we hope to enjoy in this work and get the right information's in another sites to add it here in this site , then we need all students to participate in this website , and also we need the helping of our doctor in this site.
Finally we hope to get benefit and right information's which will help us in the exams and make comments here. Also that's great to get literature information and increase our skills in literature knowledge. Thanks too much doctor alla'
Biography of George Shaw (1856-1950)
George Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. His mother eventually left his father, who was an unsuccessful merchant, to teach singing lessons in London. At the age of twenty, Shaw left Dublin for London, where he wrote five novels. From an early age, Shaw identified himself as a socialist and joined the Fabian Society, which was a non-revolutionary Marxist group advocating for a kind of social reform that would result in socialism without bloodshed. He was an extremely prolific writer who completed over fifty plays before his death of natural causes at the age of 94.
Shaw began writing rather late in life, begining with articles for a Fabian Society publication called Fabian Letters (1889). He wrote five novels, but he earned a living as a music and theater critic, advocating strongly for the music of Richard Wagner. Shaw originally tried his hand at writing plays to flesh out his criticisms of the existing British stage. Compared to the light Victorian comedies which were the fashion, Shaw's plays were revolutionary in their seriousness and socialist themes.
His earliest plays were published in a set titled Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). The Pleasant volume includes Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1893), and You Never Can Tell (1895). The Unpleasant volume includes Widower's Houses (1892), The Philanderer (1893), and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893). The latter play describes the mother/daughter relationship between a prostitute and her exacting daughter, and it was banned in London for its "immorality."
Shaw was a vegetarian and a teetotaler, and he was well known for his large ego. In 1898, Shaw married an Irish heiress who famously insisted on maintaining celibacy even after marriage. In 1901 he published Three Plays for Puritans, a set which included The Devil's Disciple, a play about the American Revolution.
Major Them
Gender Solidarity
Although British society is supposed to break down along class lines, Shaw makes a point of highlighting gender loyalties in this play. Although Mrs. Higgins initially is horrified by the idea that her son might bring a flower-girl into her home, she quickly grows sympathetic to Liza. As a woman, she is the first to express a concern for what will be done with the girl after the experiment--the idea that her training makes her highly unmarriageable by anyone anywhere on the social scale. When Liza runs away from Wimpole St., she instinctively knows that Mrs. Higgins will take good care of her. Higgins's mother sides with Liza before even her son, not revealing that Liza is in the house while Higgins is dialing the police.
In contrast, relations between people of opposite genders are generally portrayed by Shaw as antagonistic. Higgins and his mother have a troubled relationship, as do the professor and Mrs. Pearce. Freddy and Liza get along better perhaps only due to his more passive, feminine demeanor
About Pygmalion
Pygmalion has become by far Shaw’s most famous play, mostly through its film adaptation as My Fair Lady (1938). Shaw was intimately involved with the making of the film. He wrote the screenplay and was the first man to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award. Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle for a beautiful actress named Mrs. Patrick Campbell, with whom it was rumored that he was having an affair. This rumor later turned out not to be true, and some critics read the disappointed love affair between Higgins and Eliza as reflecting Shaw’s own romantic frustrations including a long, celibate marriage.
Shaw once proclaimed: “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like.” Much of Pygmalion is wrapped up with the class identification that comes with having an accent in British society. As a socialist with strong convictions, Shaw used the stage to expose hypocrisies surrounding marriage, language, and convention. Shaw’s preoccupation with language in this play may also have had something to do with the fact that the most frequent criticism of his earlier plays was that his characters engaged in witty banter that lacked depth. By making language the center of this play, Shaw highlights the significance of something that his critics, despite their criticisms, were tending to downplay.
hello doctor .. how are you doing... i'm so sorry because i committe mistake... my true name's hasham alhaj ahmed but im forget passport and this comment for me
FIRSTLY I NEED TO GIVE INTRODUCTION ABOUT THE AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
George Bernard Shaw was born into a poor Protestant family in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856. Despite childhood neglect (his father was an alcoholic), he became one of the most prominent writers of modern Britain. His mother introduced him to music and art at an early age and after 1876, when he moved to London to continue his self-education, she supported him for nine more years. During this period Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels, then, in 1884, he met William Archer, the prominent journalist and drama critic, who urged him to write plays. Through Archer, Shaw became music critic...Pygmalion is a comedy about a phonetics expert who, as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of an uneducated Cockney flower-girl. Although not as intellectually complex as some of the other plays in Shaw's "theatre of ideas," Pygmalion nevertheless probes important questions about social class, human behavior, and relations between the sexes.
Besides introducing the major characters of the play, this act introduces socioeconomic class as a central theme of Pygmalion. As a socialist, Shaw was particularly concerned with exploring and exposing the power divide between the poor and the rich. By setting the play in London, Shaw chooses to deal with a society that is particularly stratified. British class-consciousness is based not only on economic power, as it is in many other societies, but also on history (historic class differences). The play highlights British people's recognition of accents to differentiate among themselves not only geographically (a Welsh accent is distinct from a Scottish accent, which is distinct from a Surrey accent), but also to distinguish (on another but related dimension of accents) the various social classes
SUMMARY OF ACT " I "
The action begins at 11:15 p.m. in a heavy summer rainstorm. An after-theatre crowd takes shelter in the portico of St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden. A young girl, Clara Eynsford Hill, and her mother are waiting for Clara's brother Freddy, who looks in vain for an available cab. Colliding into flower peddler Liza Doolittle, Freddy scatters her flowers. After he departs to continue looking for a cab, Liza convinces Mrs. Eynsford Hill to pay for the damaged flowers; she then cons three halfpence from Colonel Pickering. Liza is made aware of the presence of Henry Higgins, who has been...
SUMMARY OF ACT "II"
The next morning at 11 a.m. in Higgins's laboratory, which is full of instruments, Higgins and Pickering receive Liza, who has presented herself at the door. Higgins is taken aback by Liza's request for lessons from him. She wants to learn to "talk more genteel" so she can be employed in a flower shop instead of selling flowers on the street. Liza can only offer to pay a shilling per lesson, but Pickering, intrigued by Higgins's claims the previous night, offers to pay for Liza's lessons and says of the experiment: "I'll say you're the greatest teacher alive if you make that good." Higgins...
I NEED TO COMMENT ABOUT THE STYLE IN THIS DRAMA :
Plotting with a Purpose :
In Pygmalion's plot, Higgins, a phonetics expert, makes a friendly bet with his colleague Colonel Pickering that he can transform the speech and manners of Liza, a common flower girl, and present her as a lady to fashionable society. He succeeds, but Liza gains independence in the process, and leaves her former tutor because he is incapable of responding to her needs.
Pygmalion has a tightly-constructed plot, rising conflict, and other qualities of the "well-made play," a popular form at the time. Shaw, however, revolutionized...
At the beginning Pygmalion seems to be a play about social injustice and indeed some of Shaw's ideas on this subject are expressed, but it is not principally a means of expressing social comment.
One of the most nteresting and dominant characters is Henry Higgins in whom we can see aspects of the author himself. Like Shaw he is very much attached to his mother and has difficulty finding a woman who can equal her.
Like Shaw he appreciates independence in people and has more esteem for Eliza when she rebels agains him than when she obeys him slavishly.
The title Pygmalion is taken from a Greek legend in which Pygmalion was the king of Cyprus and a sculptor. Having been repeatedly disappointed in his dealings with women, he decided to make a statue of the ideal woman. He asked Aphrodite to bring his creation alive, fell in love with her and made her his wife.
This is not how Shaw's play ends as he explains to us in the epilogue. Given Eliza's and Henry Higgins's characters a marriage between them would be disastrous and psychologically improbable.
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