Pygmalion

Pygmalion Summary | Preface to Pygmalion. A Professor of Phonetics Summary

Shaw starts out telling his readers that the English are not speaking properly and do not teach their children to speak properly either. He believes that the English study other languages, but not their own. He pays tribute to Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis and Tito Pagliardini but holds none in higher regard Henry Sweet.

Sweet was not an amiable man and detested academics who did not respect his field of study. Shaw tried to foster Sweet's career, but the man wrote a libelous article so Sweet's career became tenuous. According to Shaw, Sweet continued to write accusatory and defamatory articles, but nothing he wrote could be published for some time. Sweet was not malicious for the sake of being that way; he was, in fact, impatient with silliness and stupidity.

According to Shaw, he alludes to Sweet in the third act of this play. Mrs. Higgins describes postcards done in Sweet's script. A discussion of shorthand methods follows: Sweet, of course, preferred his own, yet not many knew it. Sweet, in typical fashion, criticized other methods.

Shaw makes the point that Sweet is not Higgins in his play, although there are some similarities. Shaw laments the point that his own country and university, Oxford, did not appreciate his greatness, yet Europe did. According to the playwright, though, he understands the university's need for some appropriateness and discretion, and Sweet could not expect to be recognized when he did not abide by that.

G. Bernard Shaw hopes his play will make people aware that phoneticians exist and provide valuable services. He also hopes his play instructs, for he sees that as the job of literature. He wants readers to know that such a transformation that occurs in Eliza is possible if done "scientifically." In Shaw's opinion, untrained imitation of a dialect is far worse than an authentic course speech pattern.