The world of George Bernard Shaw -- Introduction / by John A. Bertolini -- Preface to Mrs. Warren's profession : mainly about myself -- Mrs. Warren's profession -- Preface to Candida : plays pleasant -- Candida -- Preface to The devil's disciple : three plays for Puritans -- The devil's disciple -- Shaw's notes to The devil's disciple -- Epistle dedicatory to Man and superman -- Man and superman -- Excerpts from The revolutionist's handbook and pocket...

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor 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...

Based on the fable about a Greek tailor's conversion to Christianity, his befriending of a lion, and gladiatorial experience in Nero's Coliseum.

A biography of playwright Bernard Shaw, discussing his childhood in Dublin, his early career and affairs in London, his marriage in 1898, and his later successes which led to a Nobel Prize for literature, and an Academy Award for his screenplay for "Pygmalion."

"Following her successful appearance at an Embassy Ball--where Eliza Doolittle won Professor Henry Higgins' bet that he could pass off a Cockney flower girl as a duchess--Eliza becomes an assistant to his chief rival Emil Nepommuck. After Nepommuck publicly takes credit for transforming Eliza into a lady, an enraged Higgins submits proof to a London newspaper that Nepommuck is a fraud. When Nepommuck is found with a dagger in his back, Henry Higgins...

Arrogant, irascible, and misogynistic professor of phonetics Henry Higgins believes that the accent and tone of one's voice determines a person's prospects in society. He boasts to a new acquaintance, Colonel Hugh Pickering--also an expert in phonetics--that he could teach any woman to speak so "properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball. He chooses as an example a sassy, young working-class London flower seller from the...