Pygmalion was first performed in Vienna in 1913 (in German translation) and in London in April 1914, with Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Henry Higgins and Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle. The play was published by Constable in the same year, with a preface and sequel that Shaw added to clarify his intentions — intentions that audiences and actors have been cheerfully ignoring ever since.
The story is based on the Pygmalion myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses — a sculptor who falls in love with his own creation — but Shaw’s treatment inverts the myth’s logic. Professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, bets his friend Colonel Pickering that he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower seller, into a woman who can pass for a duchess at a garden party. The transformation succeeds — Eliza masters received pronunciation, acquires the manners of the upper class, and dazzles society. But Shaw’s real subject is not the transformation itself but its consequences: once Eliza has been remade, she is no longer who she was, but she is not truly accepted as who she has become. She is, in social terms, nowhere.
The play’s genius lies in its treatment of class as a function of language. Shaw, who was deeply influenced by the phonetician Henry Sweet (the partial model for Higgins), understood that in England, accent was the primary marker of class identity. To change a person’s speech was to change their social position — but not their actual life circumstances. Eliza can speak like a duchess, but she has no money, no family connections, and no prospect of the kind of marriage that her new accent implies. Higgins has given her the surface of a higher class without the substance, and the play’s tension arises from the question of what she will do with her impossible position.
Shaw was furious when audiences and actors insisted on turning the play into a romance between Higgins and Eliza. He wrote a prose sequel (printed with the published text) in which he explained at length that Eliza marries Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the amiable but dim young man who is genuinely in love with her, and that she and Freddy open a flower shop. But the romantic reading has proved ineradicable: the 1938 film starred Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in a version that softened Shaw’s ending, and the 1956 musical My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe) made the romance explicit, ending with Eliza’s return to Higgins.
Collecting Pygmalion
First edition (Constable, London, 1916): Published as part of the Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion volume. Green cloth.
First separate edition (various): The play was widely available in collected editions before appearing separately.
Market values:
- First Constable edition (in collected volume): $80–$250
- First Penguin paperback: $10–$30
- My Fair Lady tie-in editions: $5–$15
- Signed Shaw letters/inscribed copies: $500+
Shaw was a prolific correspondent and inscriber, and signed copies appear at auction regularly. The play’s association with My Fair Lady keeps it in steady demand.