Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

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7 (p. 399) “his native woodnotes wild”: English poet John Milton (1608-1674) refers thus to Shakespeare in his poem “L‘Allegro” (line 134) in order to distinguish his own art as sophisticated and premeditated from Shakespeare’s spontaneous products of the imagination. Shaw made a similar distinction between himself and Shakespeare, whom he considered to be the master of word music, but poor in ideas. By recalling Milton’s lines here Shaw makes Higgins, the figurative version of himself, a Miltonist; like Milton, Shaw was anxious about his own originality in comparison to Shakespeare. Milton and his creation Satan (in Paradise Lost) and Shaw and his creation Higgins all want to be the authors of themselves.