Shades of Local Color: Pygmalion and Its Translation and Reception in Central Europe, 1913–1914

The controversy surrounding the ending of Bernard Shaw's 1912 Pygmalion—over whether the play was to conclude with a conventional happy ending that saw Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle united, or whether the two characters were to go their separate ways—has been amply documented.¹ Shaw himself penned the 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 the dispute surrounding the play's ending is the 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 the 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 the time of its writing.³ Nevertheless, Shaw also hoped to make a social statement with the play, in keeping with his belief that "the quintessential function of [all] comedy is the destruction of old-established morals."⁴ With Pygmalion in particular, the Fabian Shaw, a known supporter of women's rights, had hoped to advance the feminist cause.⁵ Along with Higgins's own preferred state of bachelorhood and Eliza's father's unorthodox views on matrimony, the play's ending, in which Eliza walks out on Higgins, dramatized Shaw's well-established critique of marriage as a bourgeois institution and the circumstance that a woman "must get married to secure a liveli-hood"—a fact he had decried as recently as 1911 in his preface to Getting Married.⁶

That his audience should have chosen to ignore this point by persisting in its belief that Higgins and Eliza were to marry was a source of frustration for Shaw. It infuriated him, he wrote in his sequel, that "people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that [Eliza] became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero." This assumption was "unbearable," Shaw wrote, and he was fast to assign blame. Aside from the lowly standards of modern audiences, their expectations set by mass culture—"the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of happy endings"—he singled out as particularly misleading the performances of the actors cast for the play's English-language premiere, especially that of Herbert Beerbohm Tree as a love-struck Higgins in 1914.⁷ The fact is, however, that Shaw himself had sown the seed for his play's widespread misinterpretation in Pygmalion's original 1912 text, first published in 1913 in German translation by his longtime translator Siegfried Trebitsch. As the writer upon whose text later translations of Pygmalion also were based—the 1913 Hungarian version, for example— Trebitsch was as important a figure as Shaw himself to the early reception of Pygmalion, especially as it toured Central Europe prior to its London premiere. What particularly troubled Shaw about the play's reception, however—its purported happy ending, and its supposed lack of social and political import—was the playwright's own responsibility, not his translator's.

The professional association between Trebitsch and Shaw began ten years earlier, in 1902, when Shaw agreed to allow Trebitsch a one-year trial period during which the Viennese writer was to translate three plays of his choice and shepherd them through publication and production. The three plays Trebitsch chose were Candida, The Devil's Disciple, and Arms and the Man, all of which he worked on diligently over the next months. Notified that the translations were complete—they were...