Pygmalion, is Shaw's piece de resistance. It is his masterpiece. While I can simply leave it at that, I am compelled to say a lot more about this play, but first, the plot.
Two English gentlemen (and when I read this book I wondered if it was implied that they were homosexual) bet as to whether they can take a street urchin and turn her into a lady by teaching her how to speak proper English. They do and the experiment is successful, and he wins his bet. However, the problem is that the woman, Eliza, is left in a difficult position as despite the fact that she is now educated, she is still a woman, and has all the rights of a woman, which is none. So, while Henry Higgins has proven that he can turn a street urchin into a lady, she is still a lady and is left in the situation that she cannot do anything with the education that she now has.
This play is an attack upon education and upon the status of women in early 20th Century England. They simply had no rights, and while they could learn and theyEssays Montaigne could appear to move among the gentry, the fact that they were women relegated them to a second class status. It is said that the system of education was one of the areas that Shaw attacked in his plays, and in this play we see how despite Liza having an education, she knows that she can do nothing with it, and is not recognised has having an education.
This play has spawned a lot of duplicates, one of them being a play by Willy Russell called Educating Rita. I read that book in year 11 when I returned to high school, and my English teacher loved it because he believed that it showed us how an education can change us. After reading Pygmalion I believed that that play was left for dead (and still do). However there are differences, namely that the status of women in the mid-twentieth century had changed dramatically. However, the theme is still the same, in that a woman from the working class, through education, was able to bring herself out of the working class.
Another spawn would be an Eddie Murphy movie called Trading Places. Here two increadibly wealthy men make a bet that they could turn a bum into a successful Wall Street Trader, and turn the successful Wall Street Trader into a common criminal. Like Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, they succeed, but further, they have no understanding of the power of education, because after turning the bum into a successful trader, they realise that they cannot simply send him back to the streets. He has become educated, and in becoming educated, he has the power to fight back, which he does so successfully.
It is a shame that Shaw has disappeared into relative obscurity. I do not see any of his plays being performed (though being stuck in the little backwater that is Adelaide means that we see very little in the way of good theater, or more correctly, what I consider good theater). Still, beggars can't be chosers, but the educated have the world at their doorstep.