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The list of Shaw's plays is very vast; to his most popular plays also, belong Pygmalion (1912), The Apple Cart, Heartbreak House (1917), Mayor Barbara, Saint Joan.
Heartbreak House was written during World War I. Shaw himself highly appreciated the play and in the preface to it he disclosed the symbolic meaning of the title. In the subtitle he called the play " fantasia in the Russian manner on the English theme". The dramatic pattern of the play is Chekhovian; a group of people in a country house, the collision of their conflicting ideas and their impact on each other.
Shaw sympathized with these people for their culture, sincerity, disgust for business, and at the same time accused them of idleness, of hatred for politics, of being helpless wasters of their inheritance. The author indicated the futility of the life of bourgeois intelligentsia.
Pygmalion. The main hero of this play, Professor Henry Higgins, is presented rather ironically, as a kind of modern Pygmalion. (Pygmalion, a celebrated sculptor of mythological antiquity and King of Cyprus fell in love with a statue of Galatea which he had made of ivory, and at his prayer Aphrodite had given life to it. Pygmalion is often accepted as a symbol of the power to breathe life and soul into inanimate things).
In actual fact the satire implied in the play is directed against Professor Henry Sweet, a well-known English philologist and phonetician. There are touches of Sweet's character in the play, but Henry Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.
Professor Higgins meets Eliza one stormy night selling flowers to a crowd under the portico of St. Paul's Cathedral. The professor, struck by her remarkably pure Cockney pronunciation is making notes of her words with a view of studying them at home. A gentleman seems particularly interested in Higgins, and the conversation, which springs up between them reveals that he is Colonel Pickering, a student of Indian dialects. He and Higgins, it appears, have been interested in each other's work for years. Higgins points out that he can perfect the girl's shocking pronunciation which keeps her selling flowers in the street and prevents her from getting a respectable position as a saleslady in a flower shop.
The remark has made a deep impression on Eliza and the very next day she visits the professor to take lessons in pronunciation, at a price she considers fully sufficient of one shilling an hour. Finding Eliza's offer very interesting professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering make a bet, that in six months Higgins will teach Eliza the language of "Shakespeare and Milton" and pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador's party. If Higgins succeeded Pickering would pay the expenses of the experiment.
Eliza is taken into Higgins' house where during several months she is being taught to speak correct English. While staying at Higgins' home Eliza gets accustomed to professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering. Higgins is not married and lives alone with his servants and his elderly housekeeper. He often finds Eliza amusing and Eliza, grateful for the education he is giving her, makes herself useful to him wherever she can. In order to prove his experiment Higgins dresses Eliza in beautiful clothes and takes her to the Ambassador's Garden Party where she meets the "cream" of society. Everybody takes her for a grand lady.
Higgins wins his bet. But he has forgotten that a flower-girl is a human being with mind and heart. He looks upon her only as a thing. He does not care what is to become of her when he has finished his instruction. He says, "When I've done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter, and then it will be her own business again.” Higgins is not unkind by nature and perhaps he has even grown fond of Eliza without knowing it; but what is an ignorant flower-girl to a gentleman of means and wide education... Eliza teaches him how wrong he is, giving him a lesson of feeling. The lesson costs her some pain because not only has she got accustomed to Higgins, but has also begun to love him.
B. Shaw's play Pygmalion is a satire on higher society. Here aristocrats are opposed to a simple girl. At the very beginning of this comedy Shaw stresses the difference between the speech of educated people and that of the ignorant people (the Cockney speech). In his preface to Pygmalion Shaw wrote: "The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants and not all of them - have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading, and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him. The reformer we need most today is an energetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.
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