Pygmalion

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1914, with an updated version published in 1941. The play was Shaw’s most popular and most critically acclaimed work. It inspired the heavily romanticized musical and movie adaptation My Fair Lady, which won both a Tony for Best Musical and an Oscar for Best Picture.

Shaw began his career as a novelist, but his novels were largely unsuccessful. After he moved from Dublin to London, he shifted to theater and wrote more than 60 plays, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), and Saint Joan (1923). He won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity,” in the words of the selection committee. Throughout his plays, he often incorporated satire and sought to bring realism and contemporary social issues to English theater.

This guide uses the 2009 Simon and Schuster Enriched Classic book, which uses the 1941 play text. Shaw had a lifelong contempt for apostrophes, as he finds them unnecessary. Many editions, including the one used for this study guide, respect this choice and use apostrophes only as Shaw indicated.