When George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925, he was praised for turning “his weapons against everything that he conceives of as prejudice.” This is clearly true of Pygmalion, which was premiered in German in Vienna in 1913. The play is a modern interpretation of an ancient myth, the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion, an artist, falls in love with Galatea, a statue of an ideal woman that he created. Pygmalion is a man disgusted with real-life women, so chooses celibacy and the pursuit of an ideal woman whom he carves out of ivory. Wishing the statue were real, he makes a sacrifice to Venus, the goddess of love, who brings the statue to life. By the late Renaissance, poets and dramatists began to contemplate the thoughts and feelings of this woman, who woke full-grown in the arms of a lover. Shaw’s central character—the flower girl Liza Doolittle—expresses articulately how her transformation has made her feel, and he adds the additional twist that Liza turns on her “creator” in the end by leaving him. In Shaw’s rendition, Higgins, a teacher, “creates” Eliza, his pupil, by teaching her to speak like a duchess—a transformation that allows Shaw to attack the superficial class prejudices of his time. Shaw’s version discards the romantic element, and transposes the Pygmalion myth into pre-war England, a period in which rigid social class structures were being challenged and gender roles were undergoing profound transformations. In Pygmalion, received ideas on the roles of men and women, teacher and student, and upper and working classes are turned on their heads, and Shaw’s essential humanity, feminism, and egalitarianism shine through. Since its initial English staging in 1914 and its first English publication in 1916, the play has been adapted and updated several times, most prominently in the Broadway musical and later film, My Fair Lady. In addition, Shaw attached to the play a “Sequel,” in which he discusses what took place for the characters after the play proper. The rags to (relative) riches aspect of Shaw’s witty and spirited social commentary have helped contribute to its success.