Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

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6 (p. 397) “You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me.... I cant account for it”: Higgins’s lack of self-knowledge in regard to his domineering nature is comparable to Lady Britomart’s similar disingenuousness in Major Barbara. Ultimately, though, Shaw’s comic motif of willful egotists who fail to recognize themselves as such probably derives from Sir Anthony Absolute (in Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, 1775), who, in the midst of a passionate fury, asks his son Jack to be “cool” like his father.