Московский государственный институт международных отношений (университет) мид россии
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Кафедра английского языка № 2
К. А. Голота
Разработка по домашнему чтению для студентов II курса факультета МЭО
по произведению
Б. Шоу
Пигмалион
Москва, 2005 г.
Ifyouhave comments or suggestions about this lesson plan, do not hesitate to mail them to golota@mgimo.ru or drop into Box C32, Room 2012.
Act I
Comments
Background
Pygmalion, a king of Cyprus, finding no mortal woman worthy of his love, carved a statue in ivory of his ideal mate and promptly fell in love with it. In answer to his prayer, Aphrodite brought the image to life and Pygmalion married her. (Ovid, Metamorphoses) The name Galatea was applied to the statue-woman only in modern times.
For information of Pharisees see any source of information, for example, the Catholic Encyclopaedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11789b.htm.
Publishing Plays Instead of Staging
George Bernard Shawwas a journalist-critic of books, pictures, music and the drama before he turned to writing for the stage. But he himself stated, “A perfectly adequate and successful stage representation of a play requires a combination of circumstances so extraordinary fortunate that I doubt whether it has ever occurred in the history of the world… I have seen 23 of Shakespears plays publicly acted. But if I had not read them as well, my impression of them would be not merely incomplete, but violently distorted and falsified… The fact that a skillfully written play is infinitely more adaptable to all sorts of acting than available acting to all sorts of plays (the actual conditions thus exactly reversing the desirable ones) finally drives the author to the conclusion that his own view of his work can only be conveyed by himself. And since he could not act the play single-handed even if he were a trained actor, he must fall back on his powers of literary impression, as other poets and fictionists do”.
Punctuation and spelling retained as in the printed text. Shaw intentionally spelt many words according to a non-standard system. For example, “don’t” is given as “dont” (without apostrophe), “Dr.” is given as “Dr” (without a period at the end), and “Shakespeare” is given as “Shakespear” (no “e” at the end) Also there is no apostrophe to indicate possessive case.
Cockney
The flower girl in Act I is speaking cockney, a peculiar dialect of informal English. Find out some information on cockney using any resource available or this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney
Location
That’s where Freddy was trying to catch a cab.
Portico of St. Paul’s Church (located at Covent Garden Market). Don’t forget to take a picture of yourself under the portico next time you are in London.
http://www.coventgardenlife.com/sightseeing/reviews/st_pauls_church.htm
Historic British Coinage
Nowadays United Kingdom still uses pound sterling, which is equal to 100 pence. Earlier the system was much more complicated.
1 pound sterling = 12 shillings = 144 pence = 576 farthings (1 shilling = 12 pence, 1 penny = 4 farthings)
Mind, use one penny (sg.), but two pence (pl.). It is possible to say 2 pennies when speaking about two different 1-penny coins.
tuppence = 2 pence (1/6th of a shilling, 1/72nd of a pound)
sixpence = 6 pence (half a shilling, 1/24th of a pound)
tanner = sixpence (syn.)
eightpence = 8 pence (2/3rd of a shilling, 1/16th of a pound)
eighteenpence = 18 pence (1.5 of a shilling, 1/8th of a pound) (See Act II for this one)
hapence = half a pence (1/24th of a shilling, 1/1152nd of a pound)
half-a-crown = 2 shillings and a sixpence
crown = 5 shillings
sovereign = 1 pound, a golden coin, which was valued more than a 1-pound banknote
guinea = 1 pound + 1 shilling (13 shillings), also a golden coin (See Act II for this one)
fiver = a five-pound banknote (See Act II for this one).
There were many more coins of different value. See more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_coinage