Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion’ is a play by George Bernard Shaw. It is named after a Greek mythological figure. In this play, Professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women’s independence.