Finished: Pygmalion (Shaw) Ahhh, I finally read the play that the movie My Fair Lady was based on. :-) It was a good play, and fast paced and witty and busy, just like the other Shaw plays I've read! I really enjoyed it, but of course, couldn't help but picturing the characters from the movie AND somehow humming various songs from the movie as I read. Henry Higgins was as intolerable as ever, Pickering as lovable, Mrs. Higgins as respectable and on spot, and Eliza as saucy as ever. The ending, though, is famously not at all what is implied at the end of the movie. In the play, Eliza actually stands up to Higgins and tells him to buy his own gloves and leaves with his mother, not to return to Higgins, but to eventually marry Freddy, as GBS explains in his "afterward" of the play. Shaw never had any intention of Higgins and Eliza ending up together and thought it went against the very nature of the independent woman she had become for her to continue to live under Henry's thumb with him treating her the way he always had. I say hooray to that! I never did find his character appealing at all, and it always bothered me that Eliza looked like she was going to stay with him because she'd fallen in love. Anyway....such a delight to read the play. :-) I loved this passage where Eliza spelled it out the difference in Colonel Pickering and Henry Higgins:

Pickering: You mustn't mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all over the place.
Liza: I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isn't it? But it made such a difference to me that you didn't do it. You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

Love that, and love the play! :-)