The following excerpt is from a commentary by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon on Shaw's play Pygmalion. Provided by <irandalb@gmail.com>
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I found it interesting as both a commentary on Shaw’s critique of British social ontology, and the social psychology of the receptive audience.
Like of all Shaw's plays, it was written as a social critique. A phonetics professor named Henry Higgins wagers that he can 'make a duchess' of a young Cockney flower girl by instructing her in the socially acceptable standards of the English language. A pioneering socialist, Shaw was far more concerned with breaking down the arbitrary boundaries of the British class system than he was in writing a romantic lark, but to his continued dismay, from the moment the play opened, audiences wanted the misogynistic Higgins to renounce his ways and run off with the transformed flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, at the final curtain.
‘The chief difficulty in adapting the play was that it was never a love story. Its only passion was for social equality, not between its leading characters’.
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