Pygmalion
A professor of phonetics bets a colleague that he can pass a flower seller off as a duchess by teaching her to speak. Shaw wrote the play as an argument about class and language, and the comedy works because Higgins is genuinely unpleasant rather than merely eccentric.
The ending caused trouble from the first performance, and Shaw added an essay explaining what happens afterwards because audiences kept inventing a romance he had not written. Read the play, then read the essay: together they are a lesson in how hard it is to hear what a story actually says.
Public-domain status
First published in 1913. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Bernard Shaw died in 1950, so this work has been free to republish there since 2021.
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