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Then there are secondary characters like Mrs Pearce, the Housekeeper of Higgins, Mrs Eynsford Hill, her daughter Miss Clara Hill, and her son Freddy Hill. These five are the major characters in the play. That is why Higgins is unable to love and marry any woman and becomes a “confirmed old bachelor” The Minor Figures Professor Higgins regards her as an ideal woman and his attachment to his mother is very much like the “mother-fixation” of Freud.

Then there is Mrs Higgins, the mother of Professor Higgins, gentle and considerate, and in this respect she is sharply contrasted with her son Professor Higgins. He is, indeed, an unforgettable comic character.

He is certainly a triumph of comic characterization. Alfred DoolittleĪlfred Doolittle, the father of Eliza, is also an important character Higgins refers to him as “the most original moralist at present in England known to him. Her education and dual transformation are the central motif of the play, and the chief source of interest in it. By the end of the play, she becomes spirited and independent and can easily hold her own against the bullying and domineering Professor Higgins. She also undergoes another transformation. Professor Higgins undertakes her education and transforms her into a lady who can pass not merely as a duchess but as a princess at an ambassador’s garden party. She speaks a London dialect and is entirely uneducated and uncultured. Next, there is Eliza Doolittle, the flower-girl, the only character in the play that changes and grows under the stress of circumstances. He resides with him and pay his soft, considerate and gentle manners, he throws into sharp relief the tough and bullying ways of Professor Higgins. Then there is Colonel Pickering who is conceived as a foil to Higgins too is a student of Phonetics, has already written a book Spoken Sanskrit and has come all the way from India to meet Prof. While he is a celebrated scholar, he is rough and uncultured in his ways, swears dreadfully, is untidy and slovenly in his manners, and is authoritative and domineering. He can tell the locality in which a person resides simply by hearing the dialect spoken by him or her. He is devoted to his subject and is an expert in his knowledge of various dialects spoken in the city of London. However, these characters are among the immortals of literature and they linger long in the memory once we have made their acquaintance. The number of characters is strictly limited. The canvas of the play is not a crowded one. Cavendish Square, Hanover Square, and Wimbledon Common are some other London localities to which we are introduced. We are also taken to a foreign Embassy in London.

Act Il takes us to Wimpole Street and Act III is laid in Chelsea Embankment, a fashionable London locality. From there it shifts for a moment to Drury Lane and Lisson Grove, a London slum. It opens in Covent Gardena wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

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