George Bernard Shaw

First performed in 1913, "Pygmalion" is George Bernard's Shaw's play regarding two scholars of phonetics, Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, trying to test their theories on an unsuspecting flower girl. When Higgins boasts he could pass anyone off as a lord or lady simply by teaching them to speak right, Pickering wagers that he can't and offers to pay for the speech lessons of Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower girl. Eliza accepts the offer for speech lessons because she wants to lose her Cockney accent so she can get a job in a flower shop. A satire of the superficiality of distinctions between social classes, "Pygmalion" is one of Shaw's most famous comedies, the subject of numerous stage productions. Forever immortalized by the multiple Academy award-winning motion picture "My Fair Lady", this play is sure to endure as a dramatic classic for years to come. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and includes the illustrations by May Wilson Preston which appeared in the first serialized American edition.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. In 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in his will, he left money for the development of a phonetic alphabet for English, now known as the Shaw alphabet or Shavian. Man and Superman is a comedy of manners that explores Shaw's socialist politics and hopes for the future, "superman" here referring to Nietzsche's concept of the bermensch. It is best known for the long dream sequence in the third act, often performed on its own under the title Don Juan in Hell. This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).

PYGMALION is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea first presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and the film of that name. (more o: www.wisehouse-classics.com)

The tale begins with a humorous description of student antics at a girl's school then changes focus to a seemingly uncouth laborer who, it soon develops, is really a wealthy gentleman in hiding from his overly affectionate wife. He needs the freedom gained by matrimonial truancy to promote the socialistic cause, to which he is an active convert. Once the subject of socialism emerges, it dominates the story, allowing only space enough in the final chapters to excoriate the idle upper class and allow the erstwhile schoolgirls, in their earliest maturity, to marry suitably.