Book excerpt: Excerpt: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." (Pygmalion, Preface) Named after a Greek mythological character the play was first presented on stage to the public in 1913. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence and has been successfully adapted into a motion picture and a musical comedy. George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) was an Irish playwright, essayist, novelist and short story writer and wrote more than 60 plays. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938).