On Pygmalion
(1)
Eric Bentley
Pygmalion is a singularly
elegant structure. If we call Act ? the prologue, the play falls into two parts
of two Acts apiece. Both parts are Pygmalion myths. In the first a duchess is
made out of a flower girl. In the second a woman is made out of a duchess. Since
these two parts are the main, inner action the omission of the climax of the
outer action—the ambassador’s reception—will seem particularly discreet,
economical, and dramatic. The movie version of Pygmalion was not the
richer for its inclusion. To include a climax that is no climax only blurs the
outline of the play. Pygmalion is essentially theatrical in
construction. It is built in chunks, two by two. The fluidity of the screen is
quite inappropriate to it. On the screen, as in the novel, a development of
character naturally occurs gradually and smoothly. Natasha in War and
Peace passes imperceptibly from girlhood to womanhood; Eliza in
Pygmalion proceeds in dramatically marked stages—one, two, three, four,
Act by Act. Perhaps we never realized before the Shaw movies how utterly “of the
theater” the Shaw plays are.
As we might have learned to expect,
Pygmalion follows the pattern of earlier Shavian works, not duplicating
them but following up another aspect of a similar problem. We have seen how the
eponymous character is often the representative of vitality and that he remains
constant like a catalyst while producing change in others, especially in the
antagonist whom he is educating, disillusioning, or converting.
Pygmalion diverges from the type in that the life-giver, for all his
credentials, and his title of Pygmalion, is suspect. He is not really a
life-giver at all.…The “education of Eliza” in Acts ? to Ш is a caricature of
the true process. In the end Eliza turns the tables on Higgins, for, she,
finally, is the vital one, and he is the prisoner of “system,” particularly of
his profession.
Ironically parallel with the story of Eliza is the story
of her father. Alfred Doolittle is also suddenly lifted out of slumdom by the
caprice of Pygmalion-Higgins. He too has to break bread with dukes and
duchesses. Unlike his daughter, however, he is not reborn. He is too far gone
for that. He is the same rich as he was poor, the same or worse; for riches
carry awful responsibilities, and Doolittle commits the cardinal sin on the
Shavian scale—he is irresponsible. In the career of the undeserving poor who
suddenly become undeserving rich Shaw writes his social comedy, his Unpleasant
Play, while in the career of his deserving daughter he writes his human
comedy, his Pleasant Play. Those who think that Pygmalion is about
class society are thinking of Doolittle’s comedy rather than Eliza’s. The two
are carefully related by parallelism and contrast. One might work out an
interpretation of the play by comparing their relation to the chief “artificial
system” depicted in it—middle-class morality.
In short, the merit of
Pygmalion cannot be explained by Shaw’s own account of the nature of
modern drama, much less by popular or academic opinion concerning Problem Plays,
Discussion Drama, Drama of Ideas, and the like. It is a good play by perfectly
orthodox standards and needs no theory to defend it. It is Shavian, not in being
made up of political or philosophic discussions, but in being based on the
standard conflict of vitality and system, in working out this conflict through
an inversion of romance, in bringing matters to a head in a battle of wills and
words, in having an inner psychological action in counterpoint to the outer
romantic action, in existing on two contrasted levels of mentality, both of
which are related to the main theme, in delighting and surprising us with a
constant flow of verbal music and more than verbal
wit.
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Source: Bernard Shaw, New
Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957. Pp124-26.