Pygmalion in a nutshell分析和总结分析和总结.pdfVIP

Pygmalion In A Nutshell Pygmalion , written in 1912 by George Bernard Shaw and first performed two years later, tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics (speech), who bets his friend that he can pass off a poor flower girl with a Cockney accent as a duchess by teaching her to speak with an upper class accent. In addition to being a playwright, Shaw was a theater critic, an essayist, a lifelong socialist and advocate for the working class, and, like Higgins, something of a phonetician. Given the scope of his interests, it should come as no surprise that he had a lot to say about a lot of things. Pygmalion, like most of Shaws plays, is didactic. That is, its meant to teach the audience about something. In this case, Shaw wants us to think about the problems caused by our common language, and how language can separate people from different places and classes, even different parts of the same town. In his preface to the play, entitled, A Professor of Phonetics, he writes, The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like ( source). Seems like hes about ready to yell, We have a failure to communicate! Well, instead of screaming, he wrote Pygmalion. (He called for the creation of an improved system of spelling English, but, thankfully, it didnt catch on. You can read more about it in Trivia.) Its easy to sympathize with Shaw, though. If youve ever had trouble understanding someone because his accent was different than yours, or had trouble pronouncing an unfamiliar word (why does subtle have a b in it anyway?), you probably know what Shaws talking about: sometimes English doesnt really make much sense, even to native speakers. When you consider that Shaw was writing at a time when the British Empire was still around, when people