Pygmalion
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50 free Pygmalion trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pygmalion is the play that made a comedy out of vowels. George Bernard Shaw took an old Greek myth about an artist and his creation, moved it to Edwardian London, and used it to ask an awkward question: if a professor can change the way a street seller speaks, what exactly has he changed, and who does she belong to afterwards? More than a century on it remains his most popular play, and most people have met its story in one form or another without ever reading the script. This quiz covers the play itself, act by act: the wager, the lessons, the disastrous first outing, the triumph and the quarrel that follows it. There are questions on Eliza Doolittle, Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering and the people around them, on the best-known lines and who says them, on the myth behind the title, and on Shaw's life, opinions and battles over the ending. A final group looks at the first productions and the films and musical that carried the story to a far wider audience. It is written for students revising the play for a British literature class or an essay, for teachers who want a quick check on a set text, and for playgoers who simply know the story well. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still leaves you knowing something new.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Shaw's Pygmalion opens with Londoners sheltering from rain under a church portico in which district?
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is home to St Paul's, nicknamed the actors' church, whose portico was designed by Inigo Jones. Shaw used it to crowd people in evening dress beside a street seller.
Q 02In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins boasts that within months he could pass Eliza Doolittle off as what?
A duchess
A duchess is the target of the bet: Colonel Pickering offers to pay for every lesson if Higgins can manage it in six months.
Q 03Which actress played Eliza Doolittle in the 1964 film My Fair Lady, the musical version of Pygmalion?
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn took the role from Julie Andrews, who had played Eliza on Broadway, and most of her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon.
Q 04Shaw named Pygmalion after a figure of Greek myth who fell in love with his own work in which craft?
Sculptor
Sculptor Pygmalion carved an ivory woman so lifelike that he fell in love with her, and a goddess brought her to life. Higgins shapes Eliza in the same way, using speech instead of ivory.
Q 05Which swear word spoken by Eliza Doolittle created a sensation when Pygmalion opened in London in 1914?
Bloody
Bloody caused such a sensation that for years afterwards the word itself was nicknamed a pygmalion. The actress who spoke it in London was thought to be risking her career.
Q 06In Pygmalion, what does a furious Eliza Doolittle throw at Henry Higgins after he wins his bet?
His slippers
His slippers hit him after Higgins and Pickering spend the evening congratulating each other and ignoring Eliza. She had fetched them for him moments earlier.
Q 07George Bernard Shaw, already a Nobel laureate, won which honour for the 1938 film of his play Pygmalion?
An Academy Award
An Academy Award for the screenplay made Shaw the first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. He called it an insult, coming from Hollywood.
Q 08Which 1999 teen comedy about a bet to turn an arty outsider into prom queen is a reworking of Pygmalion?
She's All That
She's All That swaps the professor for a high-school jock and the street seller for an art student. It was remade in 2021, with the roles reversed, as He's All That.
Q 09Pygmalion was first staged not in London but in a German translation in which European capital?
Vienna
Vienna saw Pygmalion at the Hofburg Theatre nearly six months before London did. The English opening was held up partly by its leading lady's nervous breakdown.
Q 10George Bernard Shaw, who mocked the English class system in Pygmalion, was born in which city?
Dublin
Dublin was Shaw's home until 1876, when he moved to London and struggled for years as a novelist before turning to plays.
Q 11Which working-class dialect does Eliza Doolittle speak before Henry Higgins retrains her in Pygmalion?
Cockney
Cockney is the speech of working-class Londoners, and it is the sheer strength of Eliza's that tempts Higgins into accepting the wager.
Q 12In Pygmalion, what job does Eliza's father Alfred Doolittle do before an unexpected fortune makes him respectable?
Dustman
Dustman Alfred Doolittle arrives as if to demand his daughter back, then cheerfully lets her stay in exchange for five pounds.
Q 13Henry Higgins, who can place a stranger's birthplace from a few words in Pygmalion, is a professor of what?
Phonetics
Phonetics fascinated Shaw, who drew Higgins partly on real British experts in the field and wrote a preface to the play about them.
Q 21In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins keeps his laboratory at which London address, also home to the poet Elizabeth Barrett?
Wimpole Street
Wimpole Street, in Marylebone, gives Higgins the house number 27a, which the musical My Fair Lady kept for him.
Q 22In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins hears Eliza speak and correctly names which part of London as her birthplace?
Lisson Grove
Lisson Grove is where Higgins places her from a few words, before tracking the gentleman beside her through Cheltenham, Harrow and Cambridge.
Q 23Colonel Pickering, who funds Eliza's lessons in Pygmalion, is a scholar of the dialects of which country?
India
India gave Pickering his subject, and he has come to London expressly to meet Higgins when the two run into each other by chance.
Q 14In Pygmalion, what post does Mrs Pearce hold in Henry Higgins's home, where she bathes and reclothes Eliza?
Housekeeper
Housekeeper Mrs Pearce is the first to ask what will become of Eliza once the experiment ends, and she scolds Higgins for swearing in front of the girl.
Q 15In the prose sequel Shaw added to Pygmalion, which of the play's men does Eliza Doolittle finally marry?
Freddy
Freddy is the penniless young admirer Eliza chooses. Their troubles afterwards, Shaw wrote, were economic rather than romantic, since he had no money and no occupation.
Q 16For which star actress, aged 49 at the London premiere, did Shaw write the part of Eliza in Pygmalion?
Mrs Patrick Campbell
Mrs Patrick Campbell had the part written expressly for her, and her passionate but unconsummated affair with Shaw produced a legendary exchange of letters.
Q 17For her first social outing in Pygmalion, Henry Higgins restricts Eliza Doolittle to which two safe subjects?
Weather and health
Weather and health sound harmless until Eliza, in flawless vowels, turns the second topic into dark gossip about a suspicious death in her family.
Q 18In Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle first asks Henry Higgins for speech lessons hoping to get a job where?
A flower shop
A flower shop is her way off the street corner where she sells violets, and she knows no owner will hire her until she talks like a lady.
Q 19Which actor played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, the musical of Pygmalion, on both Broadway and film?
Rex Harrison
Rex Harrison won the Best Actor Oscar for the film, having landed the stage role only after Noël Coward turned it down and suggested him.
Q 20ELIZA, a 1960s computer program named after the heroine of Shaw's Pygmalion, was an early example of what?
A chatbot
A chatbot that imitated a psychotherapist, ELIZA got its name because, like Shaw's heroine, it could be taught to speak better.
Q 24In Pygmalion, Alfred Doolittle proudly counts himself among which group, shut out by middle-class morality?
The undeserving poor
The undeserving poor is his own label for men like himself, and the speech so delights Higgins that he hands over five pounds.
Q 25Shaw's preface to Pygmalion says Professor Higgins has touches of which famously prickly Oxford language scholar?
Henry Sweet
Henry Sweet was the cantankerous Oxford expert Shaw had most in mind, though the preface insists that Higgins is not a portrait of him.
Q 26Shaw, who attacks English spelling in the preface to Pygmalion, left money in his will to create what?
A new alphabet
A new alphabet was meant to match letters to sounds, and the money paid for an edition of his play Androcles and the Lion printed in the Shavian script.
Q 27Which star, soon to play Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, was Henry Higgins in the 1938 film Pygmalion?
Leslie Howard
Leslie Howard also co-directed the film, and the part brought him a Best Actor nomination and the top acting prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Q 28Which songwriting team turned Shaw's Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, the Broadway musical that opened in 1956?
Lerner and Loewe
Lerner and Loewe succeeded where Rodgers and Hammerstein had given up, once they saw the play needed little beyond showing what happens between its acts.
Q 29Shaw barred musicals of Pygmalion after a bad experience with The Chocolate Soldier, an operetta based on which play?
Arms and the Man
Arms and the Man became an operetta in 1908, and the experience left Shaw so sour that Pygmalion stayed unsung until after he died in 1950.
Q 30In psychology's Pygmalion effect, which factor, supplied by teachers or bosses, lifts a person's performance?
High expectations
High expectations were put to the test in Pygmalion in the Classroom, a much-debated study of how teachers' beliefs about their pupils shaped the pupils' results.