Pygmalion

Shaw radically reworks Ovid's tale with a feminist twist: while Henry Higgins successfully teaches Eliza Doolittle to speak and act like a duchess, she adamantly refuses to be his creation. This brilliantly witty exposure of the British class system will always entertain-first produced in 1914, it remains one of Shaw's most popular plays.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and political problems with a razor-sharp tongue. He won the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature.

Dan H. Laurence edited Shaw's Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, Shaw's Music, and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces. He is series editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.

Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin.