Pygmalion

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Presented by The Online Stage In the Greek legend, a sculptor, Pygmalion, created a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with it. Later the goddess Aphrodite responded to his earnest prayers and brought the statue, named Galatea, to life. Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers at Covent Garden and whose father is a dissipated but cunning vagrant. Higgins finds Eliza a surprisingly apt pupil, but with her new found skill in elocution comes a streak of independence, which threatens to upset the complacent harmony of his domestic life. Like many of Shaw's plays, Pygmalion includes a preface, as well as an afterword in which Shaw relates the further history of Eliza as she learns how to incorporate her training by Higgins