DRAMA II Modern DRAMA

1. DRAMA IIModern DRAMA Lecture 21

2. SYNOPSIS • A Conclusive Talk • George Bernard Shaw • The Myth Behind the Play • Contextual Background • George Bernard Shaw’s Philosophy • Plot Overview • Characters, Role, Relationship, Conflicts & Significance • Themes and the major Conflicts

3. Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw

4. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

5. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

6. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

7. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

8. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

9. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

10. A Conclusive TalkWaiting for Godot

11. George Bernard Shaw • George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was the third and youngest child (and only son) of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. • Technically, he belonged to the Protestant “ascendancy”—the landed Irish gentry—but his impractical father was first a sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant

12. George Bernard Shaw • George Bernard grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, which to him was more humiliating than being merely poor

13. George Bernard Shaw • Another historical point that may have some importance is that in 1872 his mother left her husband and took her two daughters to London, following her music teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, who from 1866 had shared households in Dublin with the Shaws. • Whatever we may feel about this, it shows him close to an exceptionally independent woman

14. George Bernard Shaw • In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer, and he joined his mother and elder sister (the younger one having died) in London. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. • He depended upon his mother's pound a week from her husband and her earnings as a music teacher.

15. George Bernard Shaw He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room, writing novels and reading what he had missed at school, and his evenings in search of additional self education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities. His fiction failed utterly. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled Immaturity (1879; published 1930) repelled every publisher in London.

16. George Bernard Shaw • His next four novels were similarly refused, as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. • Shaw's initial literary work earned him less than 10 shillings a year. A fragment posthumously published as An Unfinished Novel in 1958 (but written 1887–88) was his final false start in fiction. • Despite his failure as a novelist in the 1880s, Shaw found himself during this decade. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist, and tentatively a playwright

17. George Bernard Shaw • Before long, Shaw had become one of the most sought-after public speakers in England.  He argued in his pamphlets in favor of equality of income and advocated the equitable division of land and capital.  He believed that property was "theft" and felt, like Karl Marx, that capitalism was deeply flawed and was unlikely to last.  • Unlike Marx, however, Shaw favored gradual reform over revolution. And there we see Alfred Doolittle, common dustman.

18. George Bernard Shaw • In one pamphlet written in 1897, he predicted that socialism "will come by prosaic installments of public regulation and public administration enacted by ordinary parliaments, vestries, municipalities, parish councils, school boards, etc."

19. George Bernard Shaw • In 1892, Shaw wrote his first play, Widowers' Houses, about the evils of slumlords.  The play was attacked savagely by people who opposed his politics.  • It was then that Shaw knew he was a good playwright--he must have been to have upset so many people with his social commentary.  • He went on to revolutionize the English theater by concentrating his writing on various social issues at a time when most other playwrights were writing "sentimental pap."

20. Pygmalion The Myth Behind the Play

21. The Myth Behind the Play • There is never any overt reference in the play to Pygmalion; Shaw assumes a classical understanding. • According to the Mythology Guide “Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the relation with them, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman could be compared to it in beauty. • It was indeed the perfect sem-blance of a maiden that seemed to be alive, and only prevented from moving by modesty. His art was so perfect that it concealed itself, and its product looked like theworkmanship of nature.

22. The Myth Behind the Play • Pygmalion admired his own work, and at last fell in love with the counter-feit creation. Oftentimes he laid his hand upon it, as if to assure himself whether it were living or not, and could not even then believe that it was only ivory. • The festival of Venus was at hand, a festival celebrated withgreat pomp at Cyprus. Victims were offered, the altars smoked,and the odor of incense filled the air. • When Pygmalion had performed his part in the solemnities, he stood before the altar and timidly said, "Ye gods, who can do all things, give me, I pray you, for my wife" he dared not say "my ivory virgin," but said instead "one like my ivory virgin." Venus, who was present at the festival, heard him

23. The Myth Behind the Play • While he stands astonished and glad, though doubting, and fears he may be mistaken, again and again with a lover's ardor he touches the object of his hopes. • It was indeed alive! The veins when pressed yielded to the finger and thenresumed their roundness. Then at last the votary of Venus found words to thank the goddess, and pressed his lips upon lips as real as his own.

24. The Play Itself: PYGMALION • One of the most popular plays of Bernard Shaw, first performed in 1913 in Vienna and published and performed in London in 1916.

25. Is it a Romance? • Shaw says “NO!” • The Text says “Yes!”

26. Pygmalion Contextual Background

27. Pygmalion: Background Pygmalion is set in London, England, around the beginning of the twentieth century.

28. Pygmalion: Background During this time in London, working-class people like Eliza Doolittle • lived in slums • had no heat or hot water • had to put coins in a meter to get electric light

29. Pygmalion: Background The class structure in England at this time was very rigid. upper class middle class working class

30. Pygmalion: Background The government did provide some schooling. However, an education did not teach the proper speech that was considered a sign of the upper class.

31. Pygmalion: Background The way that many working-class people spoke was an obstacle to their becoming middle class.

32. Pygmalion: Background In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a gifted, young sculptor who resolved never to marry.

33. Pygmalion: Background But after Pygmalion created a statue of a beautiful woman, he fell in love with the statue. Miserable because he loved a lifeless object, he appealed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

34. Pygmalion: Background Sympathetic to the young artist’s plight, Aphrodite turned the statue into a live woman. Pygmalion named the beautiful maiden Galatea, and the two were married.

35. Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw’s Philosophy

36. George Bernard Shaw • “I must warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.” • -Shaw

37. George Bernard Shaw • Shaw wanted to force his viewers to face the reality of unpleasant events. • He promoted the “unpleasant” plays by publishing a long preface in which he could argue his views. • Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. • He continued to write until he was 94.

38. Likewise, how we behave impacts what people think about us. In turn, this affects how others behave towards us. What we believe influences how we behave Ultimately, how they behave towards us reinforces what we believed about ourselves in the first place http://www.meghanwilliams.com/ugb.html Meg Williams

39. Pygmalion Plot Overview

40. Pygmalion: Introduction In this play, George Bernard Shaw uses humor and lively characterization to explore how language, class structure, education, and gender influence how people are seen by society.

41. Pygmalion: Introduction The two main characters are • Eliza Doolittle—a poor but proud flower girl with a cockney accent—a way of speaking associated with the working classes. • Henry Higgins—an arrogant and insensitive linguistics professor

42. Pygmalion: Introduction Eliza comes to Higgins’s house to ask him to give her speech lessons. She wants to learn to speak properly so that she can get a job in a flower shop instead of selling flowers on the street.

43. Pygmalion: Introduction Higgins decides to take the girl on as a professional challenge. He boasts to his associate Colonel Pickering that with six months of lessons, Eliza could be passed off as a duchess.

44. Pygmalion: Introduction Higgins has Eliza move into his home. With the help of Pickering and the housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, he teaches Eliza the proper speech and manners of the upper class.

45. Pygmalion: Introduction Although Eliza wants to learn, there is tension between her and Higgins. She also wants to be treated with respect—as a person. Higgins, however, persists in treating her as a project and an object.

46. Pygmalion: Introduction Will Eliza and Henry Higgins become friends, or will their differences drive them apart? If Higgins’s experiment succeeds, where will Eliza go from there? Will learning to speak like a duchess allow her to live like one?

47. Characters, Role, Relationship, Conflicts & Significance A Look at the Play

48. Eliza Doolittle

49. Mr. Higgins

50. Col. Pickering