Pygmalion-George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw - téléchargez et lisez!

One of the most famous plays of Bernard Shaw is Pygmalion, written in 1912. The originality, wit and democratic spirit of the play, reflecting deep and acute social problems, have provided it with enormous popularity in many countries, the play has enjoyed success today.

Pygmalion's play tells about the London professor of phonetics Henry Higgins, who made a bet with his friend, Colonel Pickering. According to the terms of the bet, Higgins must, in six months, train the flower girl Eliza Doolittle with the pronunciation adopted in the high society, and at the secular reception be able to imagine her as a duchess. The name of the play Pygmalion is an ironic allusion to the ancient myth about the sculptor Pygmalion who created such a perfect statue of the girl that the goddess Aphrodite agreed, at the request of Pygmalion, in love with the image he created, to revive the statue.

For the adaptation of 1938, Shaw wrote several major new episodes, which are now usually included in the English text of the play. In 1956, the American composer Frederick Lowe wrote, based on the play, the musical "My Fair Lady", which also had great success. Both the film and the musical, unlike the play, end in a happy love ending.

The idea of ​​Pygmalion began to take shape in Shaw, in his confession, back in 1897.

In the new play, Shaw decided to reflect his long-term passion for phonetics. Pronunciation, in his opinion, divides social groups of England more than many other factors, and this injustice needs to be eliminated. At the same time, Shaw tried to show that there is no impassable gap between the "lower" and "higher" classes. Later, literary scholars discovered in the novel "The Adventures of Perigrin Peakly" Tobias Smollett, a classic of Scottish literature of the 18th century, a story quite close to the "Pygmalion", although in Smollett's novel the attempt to overcome class barriers ends in failure.