Professor Henry Higgins – pretends to be a professor of phonetics
Colonel Pickering – pretending to be a colonel
Eliza Doolittle is pretending to be a flower seller on a street near Covent Garden.
Alfred Doolittle – Pretends to be a Scavenger
Freddie Eynsford Hill – Pretends to be in love with Eliza Doolittle
Professor Henry Higgins’ mother is pretending to be his mother.

The whole play is a complete hoax, where all the characters behave like Shakespeare, who said: “The whole world is a theater, and the people in it are actors.”
Let’s take a quick look at the play itself. What is its main meaning and plot? A bet made by Colonel Pickering and Higgins. The bet is as follows: in half a year, the Professor undertakes to teach Eliza to speak English in SUCH a way that she can be shown in high society as a kind of noble and mysterious aristocrat. Almost a duchess or a princess! That is, from the very beginning, a hoax is being played out in front of us, conceived by Bernard Shaw and attributed to his two heroes.

But let’s say that “all the power now lies in phonetics.” And in six months, Eliza learned how to pronounce the words of her native language CORRECTLY.  But this is the same as teaching a man-eating savage from the Mumbo-Yumbo tribe to pronounce words CORRECTLY in Mumbo-Yumbo! The same 300 words. After six months of studying PHONETICS, what can Eliza talk about in her squalid Cockney street jargon? After all, in an aristocratic salon, and even more so at a diplomatic reception, IT is necessary to have conversations on general cultural topics accepted in this circle of educated people! This means that in six months Eliza had to master not only and not so much the PHONETICS of words, it’s just nonsense, as well as expand her vocabulary a hundred times and her THESAURUS, horizons, that is, a certain amount of cultural terms, signs, skills, topics accepted in an aristocratic environment, and a huge amount of knowledge required to understand and maintaining an appropriate cultural dialogue, and moreover with different, often very educated people!

Question: Is it really possible to gain all these wisdoms in six months?

The answer is NO! This requires many years and decades of reading serious literature, reflecting on it, constantly participating in such discussions and techniques in order to know by heart the general topics that are “fashionable” to discuss at a given time, and so on and so forth. All this, we see, is completely unrealistic!

Nevertheless, Eliza passes the “exam” brilliantly! WHY AND HOW?
Yes, because she was NOT a street vendor of flowers, but a highly educated professor of philology! And she pretended to be a street vendor in order to infiltrate Professor Higgins and find out all his phonetic and other educational secrets! That’s why she could easily keep up a conversation at a diplomatic reception with high-brow aristocratic snobs, because in terms of general knowledge she was not only not inferior to them, but surpassed her interlocutors.

THE CHAMELEON!!!

Professor Higgins is not a professor of phonetics at all, because if he were REALLY an expert in this and only in this field, he, the son of an aristocrat and educated, would NEVER have made an expensive and certainly gambled bet! So he was not a professor, but a wandering collector of different dialects and knew nothing but them! He didn’t even know WHERE to buy A DRESS for a LADY!!! All this gives him away as a pretender, a conman.

THE CHAMELEON!

Colonel Pickering, who came to London from India to meet Higgins. A connoisseur of Sanskrit! Did the colonel just leave the service and command of the expeditionary force and arrive in the metropolis without the slightest military, strategic or tactically justified reason? Leave with pay? After all, he had the money to make SUCH a bet! In fact, he was also a collector of Indo-Chinese-English and Anglo-Asian jargons called PIDGIN ENGLISH. And he was well acquainted with Professor Doolittle, on whose assignment he came to London to help her penetrate the secrets of Higgins!
THE CHAMELEON!

“Scavenger Alfred Doolittle” is the same scavenger as all the previous are scavengers! A famous English philosopher and thinker! And he gives himself away by his inept behavior in the very first scenes. Admiring his eloquence and iron logic, Higgins recommends Doolittle to an American millionaire as England’s most original thinker!  And his name is clearly not just a scavenger, Alfred! Not Sam or John of some kind!!!
THE CHAMELEON!

Freddie Eynsford-Hill is an agent of Scotland Yard, the only one who sensed something was amiss in this whole adventure. But how does he get into the game? Wearing the uniform of a policeman or a detective? Of course not! He pretends to be some kind of rake in love with Eliza. And so he tries to get into the essence of this complex, intellectually intense scam.
THE CHAMELEON!

Professor Higgins’ mother is not his mother at all, but Pickering’s accomplice who conspired with Eliza and his morganatic wife! No wonder, when Eliza feels after the ball at the embassy that Higgins will almost certainly expose her now, (see above) runs away to her house, seeking refuge from an enraged Higgins! So the “mother” is not a mother at all. What kind of real mother, when she sees her SON, will say: “Henry, what an unpleasant meeting!” Although he did not open his mouth and did not show any disrespect to her! Not to mention that this “pseudo-lady” generously distributes money to all sorts of false bishops and other visitors! But she tries to hide THIS from her “son,” saying again: “Professor and bishop? I’ll be excommunicated!”
THE CHAMELEON!

Now about the author of this play, George Bernard Shaw. For many years he wrote critical articles on musical topics. Then he got carried away with aphorisms. What does this have to do with a play about an alleged professor of phonetics who allegedly made a bet with an alleged colonel, allegedly teaching an alleged flower girl, and so on and so forth!
George Bernard Shaw did not write the play “CHAMELEON” in 1912 and never at all!!!

This is a sad truth for all English literature!
Then who wrote this strange play in which everyone is pretending?
Probably an “author” who also pretends to be an author!

5 X 2014