Pygmalion

Resumen del libro

Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba'

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his creation' has a mind of her own.

This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence, with an illuminating introduction by Nicholas Grene, discussing the language and politics of the play. Included in this volume is Shaw's preface, as well as his sequel' written for the first publication in 1916, to rebut public demand for a more conventionally romantic ending.

Biografía del autor

(Dublín, 1856 - Ayot St. Lawrence, 1950) fue un polémico escritor irlandés, que cuestionó de forma radical los conceptos morales de su época. Su capacidad para la sátira le convirtió en el dramaturgo más influyente de su época, premiado en 1925 con el Premio Nobel de Literatura y el 1938 con el Óscar al mejor guion adaptado por "My Fair Lady", versión cinematográfica de su comedia "Pigmalión" (1912). Airado polemista, golpeó duramente las superstición inherente a las religiones y rechazó todos los galardones y honores público para los que fue propuesto por los gobiernos británicos.