SHADES OF LOCAL COLOR: PYGMALION AND ITS TRANSLATION AND RECEPTION IN CENTRAL EUROPE, 1913-1914

Abstract

controversy surrounding ending of Bernard Shaw's 1912 Pygmalion over whether play was to conclude with a conventional happy ending that saw Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle united, or whether two characters were to go their separate ways has been amply documented.1 Shaw himself penned play's 1916 Sequel to establish clearly that Eliza marries not Higgins, but Freddy. The notion of her marrying Higgins is disgusting, he later wrote.2 Less well known than dispute surrounding play's ending is fact that, from its very beginning, even before its English-language premiere, Pygmalion had generated this and other misunderstandings. First published in a German-language translation, in 1913, and premiered in Vienna (followed by successful performances in Berlin, on German immigrant stage of New York, and in Budapest, Stockholm, Warsaw, and Saint Petersburg all before its 1914 English-language debut), Pygmalion, while prone to subtle shadings of local color in each of its new translations, was pegged as pure romance and comedy, void of political implications, wherever it went. This, however, had not been Shaw's intention. True, Pygmalion was a play he consciously wrote in an effort to make money after all, one has to write a box-office success now and then, as he remarked at time of its writing.3 Nevertheless, Shaw also hoped to make a social statement with play, in keeping with his belief that the quintessential function of [all] comedy is destruction of old-established morals.4 With Pygmalion in particular, Fabian Shaw, a known supporter of women's rights, had hoped to advance feminist cause.5 Along with Higgins's own preferred