1908-09, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art / Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.īut first, look at the title: Pygmalion was a mythological Greek artist who had become a misogynist. ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ by Auguste Rodin, modeled 1889, carved ca. The main themes of this play concern women and class. The immediate social background is the swelling British women’s suffrage movement, which was increasing in strength, culminating, among other things, in the proclamation of International Women’s Day. Shaw’s perhaps most famous comedy is Pygmalion (1912).
Shaw soon played a leading role there, writing radical liberal pamphlets for them with demands for land reform, abolition of indirect taxes, and women’s suffrage. In 1884 he joined the socialist-oriented Fabians, a political society founded by intellectuals, which had its heyday in the period from 1887 to 1918. Shaw had declared at the founding of the Shelley Society on March 10, 1886, “I am, like Shelley, a Socialist, an Atheist, and a Vegetarian.” In 1882 he read Das Kapital in French translation, as no English version was yet available, and this became a “turning point” in his life. It was his play about Joan of Arc, Saint Joan (1923), written in the year of her canonization, that had swayed the Nobel Committee, as they managed to look past Shaw as the author of Pygmalion, Man and Superman and Major Barbara. When Shaw received the award, he was almost 70 years old. “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite,” Shaw commented, “but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” He did not attend the award ceremony or other celebrations, nor did he accept the money. Shaw was about as enthusiastic about the award as Samuel Beckett was over 40 years later. Highlighted at the award ceremony was “his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was the second Irish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him two years after William Butler Yeats, in 1925.
The 1914 Broadway production of Pygmalion / Stage Publishing Company, Inc.
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