{"id":255,"date":"2020-10-03T16:19:15","date_gmt":"2020-10-03T20:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/?p=255"},"modified":"2020-10-03T16:19:15","modified_gmt":"2020-10-03T20:19:15","slug":"pygmalion-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/?p=255","title":{"rendered":"PYGMALION REVISITED"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my previous post on \u201cMy Fair Lady Revisited,\u201d I described how, along with the writer and the actor, the audience also has an immense influence on the screenplay\/play.\u00a0 (Of course, the director also has a significant influence\u2014indeed he or she may be a credited\/uncredited writing collaborator\u2014but I reserve that subject for another blog post.)\u00a0 On the influence of the audience (particularly their expectations), I used the example of My Fair Lady<\/em>, the musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw\u2019s play\/screenplay entitled Pygmalion<\/em>. In the aforementioned post, I recounted how the interpreters and audiences of Shaw\u2019s famous play demanded a different outcome for the characters, particularly Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins, than the playwright had envisioned.\u00a0 However, I may have given the erroneous impression that the audience was right and the writers and interpreters and adapters of the work were wrong.\u00a0 In fact, what I do believe is that they were all wrong.\u00a0 Why do I believe so?\u00a0 It is simple if you heed what the very perceptive dramatic theorist Lajos Egri advocated most strenuously in the previous century:\u00a0 When it comes to character ask not what you the playwright would do or what the audience would want the character(s) to do, but instead ask the character what he or she would do.<\/em><\/p>\n

As I have pointed out in an earlier post, according to Egri, if you know your characters well your play will write itself.\u00a0 Very simplistically, what Egi is saying is what a character is will determine what he or she will do.\u00a0 For example, if a character is a coward, he or she will do cowardly things in a crisis; on the other hand, if the character is brave, he or she will do heroic things.\u00a0 An example of how this relates to Pygmalion<\/em> can be found in a comment by the late Anthony Asquith, the co-director of the 1938 eponymous film adaptation.\u00a0 Asquith related how he had asked Shaw to write a scene depicting the ball at which Eliza Doolittle passes herself off as someone of aristocratic blood, the depiction of which was not included in the original play.\u00a0 Asquith\u2019s thinking was that the audience would have felt cheated if they did not witness Eliza\u2019s greatest triumph.\u00a0 Indeed, the audience would have felt cheated if such a scene wasn\u2019t included.\u00a0\u00a0However, what Asquith failed to realize was that this was not Eliza\u2019s greatest triumph or a triumph at all; it was Professor Higgin\u2019s, her Svengali, \u00a0greatest triumph.\u00a0 There was no glory for her to be an imposter, to pull off a grand hoax in which she reverts back to being Cinderella when the clock strikes twelve.\u00a0 Yet Asquith would have known this if only he had bothered to ask the character, Eiza.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, we cannot ask such questions of fictional characters because they don\u2019t actually exist. \u00a0What we can do is the next best thing: study the text and draw inferences.\u00a0 In examining the text we will rely on the 19 12 version of Shaw\u2019s play (first performed in German in 1913), along with the epilogue which was published a few years later.\u00a0 (It is important to bear in mind that audiences would have been unaware of this epilogue unless they had read the published play beforehand.)<\/p>\n

The essential question that I wish to address here (as I did in the prior post on My Fair Lady<\/em>) is whom should Eliza choose to marry:\u00a0 Professor Higgins or Freddy Einsford Hill?\u00a0 Shaw in his epilogue and in his screenplay for the 1938 eponymous film was emphatic that Eliza marry Freddy not Professor Higgins.\u00a0 However I \u00a0indicated in my prior post that the central premise of My Fair Lady<\/em> is that Eliza is\u00a0indeed mi love with Professor Higgins, which is undeniably indicated when she sings the musical number \u201cI could have danced all night,\u201d after having just danced with the Professor.\u00a0 But whether Eliza was ever in love with Professor Higgins, or he with her, is irrelevant to the present discussion; what is relevant is whom she chooses to marry: Freddy, Professor Higgins or anyone else?<\/p>\n

Shaw settles that question in his epilogue: \u00a0\u00a0Eliza marries Freddy, who I indicated in my previous post was not the audience\u2019s choice.\u00a0 Shaw\u2019s reasoning follows:<\/p>\n

Because Eliza possesses such a strong personality (Shaw\u2019s opinion, not necessarily mine), she could never marry a man similarly strong willed such as Professor Higgins.\u00a0 As Shaw points out, when one has strength enough for two, they never seek out such a quality in a partner.\u00a0 And who could be more devoid of strength than Freddy: the epitome of a weak man. \u00a0Or as Shaw puts it, \u201cWill she [Eliza] look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers?\u201d To Shaw, it is obviously the later. Or as Professor Higgins\u2019 mother points out (in Shaw\u2019s 1938 screenplay), after living with her bully of a son, \u201cEliza wants the kindly little baby man whom she can bully.\u201d Shaw is absolutely right: Eliza will marry Freddy.\u00a0 In fact she couldn\u2019t have made a better choice, but not for the reasons that Shaw gives.\u00a0 You see, Eliza is not<\/em> looking for someone to use as a punching bag\u2014someone that she can bully the way Professor Higgins bullied her.\u00a0 What she is looking for is a kindred spirit: a soulmate that she can share her life with.\u00a0 How do we know this?\u00a0 From the text itself, which I refer to mow. It is important to understand that Eliza and Freddy are very much the same.\u00a0 They are both what Shaw would refer to as \u201cdisclassed.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 And what does that mean? It simply means they both don\u2019t \u201cfit in\u201d in their original social classes or any other class for that matter.\u00a0 Eliza is from the lower class, and she can never forget it.\u00a0 For example, after her \u201ctriumph\u201d at the Embassy garden party\/ball, she reverts back to her true class, addressing Professor Higgins as \u201cSir,\u201d and expressing a fear of the police because they are prone to look at any member of the lower class with suspicion.\u00a0 Yet she knows that after having lived with Higgins and Colonel Pickering for six months, she can never ever live with a \u201ccommon\u201d man.\u00a0 And as for Freddy, although he comes from the Upper Class by birth, he is a total social failure with no talent for work and no inherited money.\u00a0 And for just these reasons they are a perfect match.\u00a0 He accepts her for what she is and is madly in love with her; and she accepts him for the penniless social failure that he is\u2014at least he is not a \u201ccommon\u201d man and\u00a0 he is completely devoted to her.\u00a0 And as Shaw indicates, their marriage is completely blissful except for the fact that they have no money.\u00a0 But thanks to Eliza\u2019s kindly and wealthy benefactor, Colonel Pickering, that \u201cminor\u201d impediment is effectively removed.\u00a0 Pickering provides them with a sizable wedding gift (a large sum of money) and then sets them up in a small shop.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the two have no head for business and would surely have faced bankruptcy after a few months if it had not been for the generosity of Colonel Pickering, who continued to bail them out financially.\u00a0 Despite the fact that the Colonel has very deep financial pockets, he finally tires of saving Eliza and Freddy from bankruptcy over and over again, and gives them an ultimatum:\u00a0 They must hire people who know what they are doing to help them run their modest flower shop\/green grocery.\u00a0 This they reluctantly do, and, voila<\/em>, the business begins to prosper.<\/p>\n

PS.\u00a0 I do not wish to end this post leaving you with the impression that although the marriage of Eliza to Freddy for the aforementioned reasons was perfectly consistent with her character as presented in the text, I necessarily endorse her decision.\u00a0 I think that it is a shame that Eliza was never able to figure out Professor Higgins, assuming that she attempted to figure him out at all.\u00a0 As Show points out, \u201cEliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins’s formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at the first glance.\u201d\u00a0 Frankly, I am incapable of explaining it either; but it might have been in her interest to try to find out.\u00a0 Eliza believed that Higgins, like her father, didn\u2019t need her; but in fact, he did.\u00a0 Unfortunately when Higgins attempted to convey that to her, she misconstrued it as an attempt to lure her back to be nothing more than a domestic servant\u00a0 .Eliza wasn\u2019t the only character that Higgins played the role of Pygmalion to.\u00a0 There was her dustman father, Alfred P. Doolitle, who as a result of the Professor\u2019s whimsy, obtained modest wealth and became a minor celebrity.\u00a0 Mr. Doolittle was well aware that by accepting this good fortune and the obligations it entailed, he was leaving his \u201cundeserved poor\u201d comfort zone.\u00a0 Nevertheless, he fully embraced his new role in life and became the darling of the highest levels of society, even becoming someone who was frequently consulted by Cabinet Ministers.\u00a0 For better or worse, this ability to move effortlessly from social class to social class was not something that Eliza inherited from her father.\u00a0 In the musical adaptation, My Fair Lady<\/em>, Doolittle tells his daughter, \u201cYou\u2019re a Lady now.\u00a0 You can do it!\u201d\u00a0 But, alas, she couldn\u2019t do it, nor had she any desire to do so. Contrary to the way she was depicted in the eponymous 1938 film and in My Fair Lady, <\/em>Eliza was no dummy.\u00a0 In fact she was rather bright and, according to the Professor, she had a better ear for phonetics than he did.\u00a0 If the two could have formed a partnership\u2014and I don\u2019t necessarily mean a romantic one\u2014think what they might have achieved together.<\/p>\n

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In my previous post on \u201cMy Fair Lady Revisited,\u201d I described how, along with the writer and the actor, the audience also has an immense influence on the screenplay\/play.\u00a0 (Of course, the director also has a significant influence\u2014indeed he or … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[77,68,9,69,67],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theiory","tag-anthony-asquith","tag-george-bernard-shaw","tag-lajos-egri","tag-my-fair-lady","tag-pygmailion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screenplayasliterature.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}