Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion (1913) is the most popular and best known of Bernard Shaw’s plays. It tells the story of the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, a coarse Cockney flower-girl with an accent, vocabulary and grammar unfettered by education, into a facsimile of a proper Victorian lady through the tutelage of Professor Henry Higgins. Higgins, a phoneticist who believes that correct speech is the key to gentility, takes her in and drills her on proper speech so that he can win a bet with a colleague, Colonel Pickering, that he can pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador’s ball. The circumstances are ripe for misunderstandings and the clash of the classes, which unspool over the course of the play’s five acts.
The play takes its name from the character Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has carved, which is then brought to life by the goddess Aphrodite. The play, in turn, became the inspiration for the 1956 musical and the 1964 film My Fair Lady. Shaw turns it on its side to satirize the rigid British class system and comment on the issue of women’s independence. A goodly number of versions have been spawned from its different productions. The initial London production featuring the famed Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree made changes to the ending, which Beerbohm defended by saying “My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful”, to which Shaw replied “You ending is damnable; you ought to be shot.”
Play sample:
Product Details
| Read by: | Multiple readers |
| Length: | 2 hours and 53 minutes |
| Type: | Dramatic reading |
| Media: | MP3 CD |
| Package: | Paper sleeve |
| Item No.: | CD-1182 |
| List Price: | $3.99 |
| Artwork: | Disc contains 300 dpi image files for printing |
| CD label art: | Includes both square JPG and round PNG formats |
| CD jewel case art: | Includes cover, inner insert, and J-card |
| DVD case art: | Includes wrapper for Amaray box and inner insert |
Credits
Cast
Narrator – Kirsten Ferreri & Mary Anderson
The Daughter / Miss Clara Eynsford Hill – Susie G.
The Mother / Mrs Eynsford Hill – Gesine
A Bystander – Peter Yearsley Freddy Eynsford Hill – ianish
The Flower Girl / Liza Doolittle – Kristin Hughes
A Gentleman / Captain Pickering – Martin Clifton
The Note Taker / Professor Henry Higgins – Alex Foster
A Sarcastic Bystander – Peter Yearsley
Mrs Pearce – Christiane Levesque
Alfred Doolittle – David Barnes
Mrs Higgins – Larysa Jaworski
Parlour-Maid – Linda Wilcox
Director/File editor – David Lawrence
Production
Book Coordinator: Gesine
Meta Coordinator: Gesine
Artwork
Cover: A street flower seller, 1882, by Augustus Edwin Mulready
Inset: First American serialized printing of Pygmalion, November 1914
Inset: George Bernard Shaw, March 1915, New York Times
The Recordings
About MP3 Audio
This MP3 digital audiobook is duplicated on compact disc in the MP3 audio format and is designed to play on any computer. It will play on CD and DVD players that are designed with MP3 capability. The files contained in an MP3 CD can be imported and played on mobile devices such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and smart phones and on PSP (Play Station Portable) and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) devices. Your CD/DVD player or mobile device owner’s manual should specify whether the device has MP3 compatibility. If the device is not directly compatible with the MP3 Audio format, the files on the MP3 CD can be copied onto a computer drive and then played on the computer media player or transferred to a mobile device.
The Recordings
These recordings were made using the author’s original published work, which is in the public domain. The readings were recorded by members of Librivox.org, which has generously made the recordings available to the public domain. While Librivox condones the sale and distribution of these recordings, it is not associated with the management or operations of MP3 Audiobook Classics. The audio files have been lightly edited and have been engineered using professional audio tools for maximum sonic quality. We spend considerable time and effort to ensure the recordings are free of noise, equalized for maximum listener pleasure, and that tracks are leveled and normalized to provide a consistent listening experience.
Table of Contents
| Track |
Section | Length |
| 1 | 0 - Introduction | 10:13 |
| 2 | 1 - Act I |
15:01 |
| 3 | 2 - Act II |
43:53 |
| 4 | 3 - Act III | 23:05 |
| 5 | 4 - Act IV | 13:51 |
| 6 | 5 - Act V | 37:52 |
| 7 | 6 - Conclusion | 29:24 |
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