SOURCE: Roy, Emil. “Pygmalion Revisited.” Ball State University Forum 11, no. 2 (spring 1970): 38-46.

In the following essay, Roy analyzes the relationship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.

The structure of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion¹ is perfectly conventional, juxtaposing the personal comedy of Eliza Doolittle's evolution into true independence with the social comedy of her father's sudden rise into middle-class affluence. However, Shaw's denial of a match between Eliza and her mentor Henry Higgins created legendary difficulties which have surrounded the ending for over half a century. The author's inability to create an artist-philosopher who is both constructive and dramatically compelling, thus reconciling his own repressed alienation with social ameliorism, seems to have elicited a corresponding sense of uneasiness in his audiences and their agents in the theatrical establishment. By such devices as Beerbohm Tree's gestural wooing of Eliza and the casting of Leslie Howard as Higgins in the...