In what way is pygmalion a shavian play

Bernard Shaw – the outstanding English playwright, one of the founders of a realistic drama of XX century, the talented satirist, the humorist, the wittiest paradox composer. Shaw has entered drama area as the original innovator. He has confirmed at English theatre new type of a drama – an intellectual drama in which the basic place belongs not to an intrigue, nor to fascinating plot but to those intense disputes, witty verbal duels which are conducted by its heroes. Shaw named the plays "plays-discussions". They grasped depth of problems, the extraordinary form of their resolution; they excited consciousnesses of the spectator, forced it to reflect tensely over an event and cheerfully to laugh together with the playwright at absurd of existing laws, orders and customs. In this assignment I intend to analyze the play «Pygmalion» of Bernard Shaw and show his peculiarities in order to answer the question: Why Pygmalion is Shavian?

Every piece of literature needs an opening part and a good introduction. It should not only be an introduction to the place where it happens, but also an introduction to the different characters, the surroundings or the time. But in a play like Pygmalion, not only an introduction is needed, the reader or viewer of a play need additional information on the different characters. They need to know something about their background, what they are doing on or in a certain scene. The audience also needs this background information to understand actions in the course of the play. Even though this might sound easy, it is hard to include all these information in a play, since the author of a play does not have the same possibilities as an author of a novel has. A novelist can include these information into the text. A playwright on the other hand needs to consider how he can transmit background information especially to the viewer of the play without disturbing the actual plot of the play.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw does not have anything similar. It has, in fact, a preface, but the preface does not reveal much about the actual background of one of the characters or gives a foreshadowing on the plot. Instead the preface of Pygmalion focuses more on one of the themes in the play, Phonetics. It gives the reader some scientific background into the field of Phonetics and the persons who, in a way, inspired Shaw to the characters. It also includes some personal opinions on the play.

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 the English stage by disposing of other conventions of the well-made play; he discarded its theatrical dependence on prolonging and then resolving conflict in a sometimes contrived manner for a theater of ideas grounded in realism. Shaw was greatly influenced by Henrik Ibsen, who he claimed as a forerunner to his theatre of discussion or ideas. Ibsen’s A Doll House, Shaw felt, was an example of how to end a play indeterminately, leading the audience to reflect upon character and theme, rather than simply entertaining them with a neatly-resolved conclusion.

All plays of Shaw meet the major standards presented by Brecht to modern theatre, particularly: the theatre should aspire «to represent human nature as giving in to change and depending on a class association».

The high interest of Shaw with character and social standing relation especially proves the fact that Shaw has made radical character transformation the main theme of the play «Pygmalion». Entirely clear the intention pursued by Shaw, having named the play a name of the mythical king. Name ‘Pygmalion’ should remind that Eliza Doolittle has been created in the same way as Galatea by Pygmalion. The person can be formed by person that is a lesson of this, by own recognition of Shaw, «intensively and meaningly didactic» play. It is that lesson for which Brecht called, demanding that «construction of one figure was carried depending on a construction of other figure because in the life we mutually form each other».

Among literary critics there is an opinion, that Shaw’s plays more than plays of other playwrights propagandize certain political ideas. The doctrine about changeability of a human nature and its dependence on a class association is not that other, as the doctrine about social determinacy. The play «Pygmalion» is the good study-book in which the determinism issues are considered. Even the author considered it as "the outstanding didactic play».

In order to show how radically can be changed a person Shaw chose the method of transition from one extreme measure into another. If such radical change of the person probable in a considerably short time the spectator should tell to itself, that then is possible also any other changes of a human being.

Here is what Professor Higgins thinks:

“But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It's filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul”

Bernard Shaw gave a lot of attention to language problems. The play had a serious task: Shaw wished to attract the attention of the English public to phonetics. He stood up for creation of the new alphabet which to a greater extent correspond to the sounds of the English language than nowadays existing and which would facilitate a problem of studying of this language to children and foreigners.

To this problem Shaw repeatedly came back throughout his life and according to his will the big sum has been left for the creation of the new English alphabet.

Shaw, perhaps, the first has realized omnipotence of language in a society, its exclusive social role about which indirectly in the same years psychoanalysis has started talking. Shaw has told about it in placard-instructive but from that is not less ironic-fascinating “Pygmalion”. Professor Higgins, let and in the narrow special sphere, but nevertheless has outstripped structuralism and post structuralism which in the second half of the century will make the ideas of "discourse" and “totalitarian language practices” their central theme.

THE NOTE TAKER (Higgins). You see this creature with her curbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days.

Thus in «Pygmalion» Shaw masterfully has connected two themes equally exciting him: a problem of a social inequality and a problem of the classical English language. Act by act, word by word we understand that the set of behaviour, that is the form and the speech maintenance, a manner of judgment and the thoughts, habitual acts and typical reactions of people are adapted for the conditions of their environment. The subjective being and the objective world correspond each other and mutually penetrate each other.

From the author the big expense of drama means was required to convince of it each spectator. Shaw has found this means in systematical application of alienation effect forcing the characters from time to time to act in another environment that then step by step to return them into their own environment, skillfully creating at the beginning false representation concerning their present essence then this impression gradually and methodically alters.

Logic, the didactics and following to the concept of determinism so peculiar to Shaw force the reader to ponder upon each word to analyze each action of characters. The iceberg style is felt when deeply complicated social issues and philosophical views of the author are hidden under simple, apparently, displays of characters. Shaw prefers simple and compound sentences to complex ones. At the same time Shaw’s works are full of paradoxes, and “Pygmalion” is not exclusion.

"What is life but a series of inspired follies?"

"Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble."

"Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!"

The Shavian forethought is felt in the whole play. Even the interjections can not be changed by the actors. The interjections and grammatical mistakes is not used by Shaw simply as a comedian colouring but to expose the class distinction and to show how miserable is a person who can not explain his thoughts and resorts to different primitive sound combinations.