My Fair Lady

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1956

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I, Scenes 1-11

Act II, Scenes 1-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Literary Context: George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914)

My Fair Lady is based closely on the play Pygmalion by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, which was first published in 1914. Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific and influential English playwrights of the 20th century, penning over 60 plays in his lifetime. Shaw subscribed to the movement of social realism, which aimed to combat the idealization of beauty in art and instead show the ugliness of reality—especially the reality of the lower classes—to reveal oppression and injustice and to advocate for social change. Shaw was staunchly political and believed that all art ought to be didactic for the purposes of teaching the public a new morality. His trademark style of intellectual wit and biting political satire became known as “Shavian.” Some of Shaw’s well-known plays include Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), and Saint Joan (1923).

Pygmalion stands out as one of Shaw’s most popular plays, premiering in Vienna in 1913 and debuting on the West End and Broadway in 1914, the same year it appeared in print. Shaw was inspired by the Greek myth of “Pygmalion and Galatea,” in which Pygmalion is a sculptor who despises women and sees them all as sex workers. He opts to remain single and celibate, but he carves sculptures of women in ivory, and one day, he falls in love with one of his statues. He calls her Galatea, and he prays to Aphrodite to bring her to life. She does, and they marry. Shaw’s Pygmalion is the misogynistic confirmed bachelor Henry Higgins, who sees tutoring Eliza Doolittle and successfully disguising her as an upper-class lady as creating her, as if he carved her out of rough ivory himself.

Pygmalion has been adapted into several films in multiple languages, but arguably the most well-known and enduring adaptation is the 1956 musical My Fair Lady. Perhaps perplexingly, Shaw subtitled the play: A Romance in Five Acts, although Shaw insisted that the dynamic between Higgins and Eliza was not meant to be romantic. Nevertheless, in the 1938 film adaptation and, later, in My Fair Lady, an implied coupling between Higgins and Eliza was added at the end.

Cultural Context: The “Golden Age” of Musical Theater

Musical theater as it is currently recognized is one of the few homegrown American art forms. Although theater with music has existed at least since the ancient Greeks (and undoubtedly earlier), musical theater is a genre of works that include a cohesive mix of music, singing/lyrics, dialogue, and dance. Scholars have generally agreed that the period between 1943 and 1969 was the “Golden Age” of American Musical Theater. It is important to note that “Golden” in this case does not necessarily mean “best”—rather, it denotes a period of high productivity, which led to the solidification of the conventions of musical theater. It is generally suggested that the period begins with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 1943 and ends with Ragni and Rado’s Hair in 1969.

Although there was a set of rules for Golden Age musicals, many of the most well-loved musicals of the era did not follow all of them, including My Fair Lady. First, structurally the musical has two acts; the first act begins with an overture and the second begins with an entr’acte (an interlude). Second, the score is integrated into the libretto, which means that the songs are necessary to the storyline and further the action of the plot. In most earlier musicals popular songs were fit into the script, and the songs were often changed out for more popular songs. In an integrated score, each song is irreplaceable. Additionally, the score is integrated into the world of the play: The songs aren’t simply in the style of popular music, but instead reflect the aesthetics of the characters and the setting. Integrated scores include reprises and motifs to call back to earlier moments in the action.

Narratively, Golden Age musicals usually center on a central love story, with the obstacles faced by the main lovers mirroring the larger social issues of the musical. Those issues are typically resolved by the musical’s end, with the lovers uniting. There is also usually a secondary comic couple that also gets together in the end, resulting in an unambiguously happy ending. These classic musicals laid the groundwork for contemporary musical theater.

Authorial Context: Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe

Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986), a lyricist/librettist from New York, was only 24 when he met 41-year-old Austrian composer Frederick Loewe (1901-1988) by chance while searching for the bathroom in New York’s Lamb’s Club. Their collaboration lasted a total of 30 years and resulted in several of the most significant musicals in American history.

Their earliest works had little to mild success, but in 1947, Brigadoon opened on Broadway and became their first major hit. It ran for 581 Broadway performances, and ran for 685 performances in London after its 1949 opening there. Lerner and Loewe had moderate success with their next musical, Paint Your Wagon (1951), about a father and daughter who live in a mining camp during the California Gold Rush. Reviews were lukewarm, and the 1969 film adaptation, which was heavily rewritten by Lerner and André Previn after Loewe decided not to come out of retirement, was largely unfavorably reviewed.

Their next collaboration was My Fair Lady, which did not follow as straight a path to the stage as their previous works. First, when Gabriel Pascal, the movie producer and director who adapted Shaw’s plays into films, approached Shaw about turning Pygmalion into a musical, Shaw staunchly refused. Shaw was against any musical adaptations of his work after he allowed Arms and the Man (1894) to be turned into an operetta called The Chocolate Soldier (1908) and absolutely hated it. After Shaw died in 1950, Pascal decided to move ahead with the project and contacted Lerner and Loewe to write it. They agreed but discovered that there were seemingly unsurmountable issues in turning the play into musical theater. The play didn’t fit into the accepted conventions of Golden Age musical theater. There didn’t seem to be space for a large ensemble with dance numbers. There was a sort of primary couple, but it could hardly be called a love story, and there was no secondary set of lovers at all. They decided to give up.

However, in 1954, as Lerner and Loewe were working on individual projects, Pascal died. Reading the news in the paper, Lerner thought about the Pygmalion project again. Lerner met with Loewe, and they reexamined the issues with adapting the play. They realized that they could solve some issues by writing some of the scenes that occur offstage in the play, such as Eliza’s training and the Embassy Ball. They didn’t have the rights to the play, which belonged to Pascal’s estate, but they decided to get to work regardless, hoping the estate would ultimately feel obligated to grant permission. It worked, and My Fair Lady became a record-breaking success.