# Pygmalion: every role by lines, words, and stage time > George Bernard Shaw. 16 speaking roles, 19,299 words, about 138 minutes of speech. - URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/pygmalion - Last updated: 2026-10-08 **Higgins** has the most to say in Pygmalion: about 845 lines and 6,860 words, 35.5% of the play. Pygmalion is Shaw’s comedy about a phonetics professor who bets he can pass off a flower seller as a lady. Higgins carries more than a third of the words and Liza nearly a quarter; in Act 1 the edition calls them The Note Taker and The Flower Girl, and we count those lines as theirs. Doolittle packs about a seventh of the words into Acts 2 and 5. - Speaking roles: 16 - Scenes: 5 - Words: 19,299 - Speech time: 138 min ## Every role, largest first | Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Higgins | 845 | 6,860 | 35.5% | 49.0 | 5 | | Liza | 537 | 4,419 | 22.9% | 31.6 | 5 | | Doolittle | 306 | 2,713 | 14.1% | 19.4 | 2 | | Pickering | 214 | 1,553 | 8% | 11.1 | 5 | | Mrs. Higgins | 181 | 1,367 | 7.1% | 9.8 | 2 | | Mrs. Pearce | 130 | 1,049 | 5.4% | 7.5 | 1 | | Mrs. Eynsford Hill | 67 | 460 | 2.4% | 3.3 | 2 | | Miss Eynsford Hill | 30 | 201 | 1% | 1.4 | 2 | | A Bystander | 22 | 186 | 1% | 1.3 | 1 | | Freddy | 27 | 165 | 0.9% | 1.2 | 2 | | Clara | 14 | 108 | 0.6% | 0.8 | 1 | | The Parlormaid | 18 | 80 | 0.4% | 0.6 | 2 | | A Sarcastic Bystander | 11 | 77 | 0.4% | 0.6 | 1 | | The Bystanders Generally | 5 | 50 | 0.3% | 0.4 | 1 | | The Japanese Lady | 1 | 7 | 0% | 0.1 | 1 | | Several Bystanders | 1 | 4 | 0% | 0.0 | 1 | ## Who speaks in which scene Words each role speaks in each scene (scene: words). Scenes: Act 1 = Act 1; Act 2 = Act 2; Act 3 = Act 3; Act 4 = Act 4; Act 5 = Act 5. - **Higgins**: Act 1 (482), Act 2 (2,485), Act 3 (1,029), Act 4 (1,024), Act 5 (1,840) - **Liza**: Act 1 (534), Act 2 (1,246), Act 3 (437), Act 4 (435), Act 5 (1,767) - **Doolittle**: Act 2 (1,460), Act 5 (1,253) - **Pickering**: Act 1 (182), Act 2 (458), Act 3 (342), Act 4 (224), Act 5 (347) - **Mrs. Higgins**: Act 3 (612), Act 5 (755) - **Mrs. Pearce**: Act 2 (1,049) - **Mrs. Eynsford Hill**: Act 1 (188), Act 3 (272) ## The longest speeches | Speech | Scene | Words | Lines | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Doolittle: “It ain’t the lecturing I mind. I’ll lecture them blue in the face, I will, and not turn a hair. It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money. It’s a fine thing for you, says my solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it’s a good thing for you, I says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of me and got me shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the doctors: used to shove me out of the hospital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and nothing to pay. Now they finds out that I’m not a healthy man and can’t live unless they looks after me twice a day. In the house I’m not let do a hand’s turn for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for it. A year ago I hadn’t a relative in the world except two or three that wouldn’t speak to me. Now I’ve fifty, and not a decent week’s wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle class morality. You talk of losing Eliza. Don’t you be anxious: I bet she’s on my doorstep by this: she that could support herself easy by selling flowers if I wasn’t respectable. And the next one to touch me will be you, Henry Higgins. I’ll have to learn to speak middle class language from you, instead of speaking proper English. That’s where you’ll come in; and I daresay that’s what you done it for.” | Act 5 | 326 | 33 | | Doolittle: “Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.” | Act 2 | 283 | 29 | | Higgins: “There! That’s all you get out of Eliza. Ah—ah—ow—oo! No use explaining. As a military man you ought to know that. Give her her orders: that’s what she wants. Eliza: you are to live here for the next six months, learning how to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist’s shop. If you’re good and do whatever you’re told, you shall sleep in a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy chocolates and take rides in taxis. If you’re naughty and idle you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. At the end of six months you shall go to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out you’re not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not found out, you shall have a present of seven-and-sixpence to start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl; and the angels will weep for you. Now are you satisfied, Pickering? Can I put it more plainly and fairly, Mrs. Pearce?” | Act 2 | 222 | 23 | | Doolittle: “That’s the tragedy of it, ma’am. It’s easy to say chuck it; but I haven’t the nerve. Which one of us has? We’re all intimidated. Intimidated, ma’am: that’s what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age? I have to dye my hair already to keep my job as a dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor, and had put by a bit, I could chuck it; but then why should I, acause the deserving poor might as well be millionaires for all the happiness they ever has. They don’t know what happiness is. But I, as one of the undeserving poor, have nothing between me and the pauper’s uniform but this here blasted three thousand a year that shoves me into the middle class. (Excuse the expression, ma’am: you’d use it yourself if you had my provocation). They’ve got you every way you turn: it’s a choice between the Skilly of the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the middle class; and I haven’t the nerve for the workhouse. Intimidated: that’s what I am. Broke. Bought up. Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their tip; and I’ll look on helpless, and envy them. And that’s what your son has brought me to.” | Act 5 | 222 | 23 | | Higgins: “It’s all you’ll get until you stop being a common idiot. If you’re going to be a lady, you’ll have to give up feeling neglected if the men you know don’t spend half their time snivelling over you and the other half giving you black eyes. If you can’t stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work ’til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink ’til you fall asleep. Oh, it’s a fine life, the life of the gutter. It’s real: it’s warm: it’s violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.” | Act 5 | 203 | 21 | | Higgins: “I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don’t and won’t trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn’t buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch your slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you’ll get nothing else. You’ve had a thousand times as much out of me as I have out of you; and if you dare to set up your little dog’s tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my creation of a Duchess Eliza, I’ll slam the door in your silly face.” | Act 5 | 173 | 18 | | Liza: “Wring away. What do I care? I knew you’d strike me some day. Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertise it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.” | Act 5 | 162 | 17 | | Higgins: “Oh, that’s what’s worrying you, is it? I shouldn’t bother about it if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in settling yourself, somewhere or other, though I hadn’t quite realized that you were going away. You might marry, you know. You see, Eliza, all men are not confirmed old bachelors like me and the Colonel. Most men are the marrying sort (poor devils!); and you’re not bad-looking; it’s quite a pleasure to look at you sometimes—not now, of course, because you’re crying and looking as ugly as the very devil; but when you’re all right and quite yourself, you’re what I should call attractive. That is, to the people in the marrying line, you understand. You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then get up and look at yourself in the glass; and you won’t feel so cheap.” | Act 4 | 148 | 15 | | Liza: “Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can’t talk to you: you turn everything against me: I’m always in the wrong. But you know very well all the time that you’re nothing but a bully. You know I can’t go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldn’t bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it’s wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street because I have nowhere else to go but father’s. But don’t you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled on and talked down. I’ll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he’s able to support me.” | Act 5 | 144 | 15 | | Liza: “Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But then he did not keep it up regular. On the burst, as you might say, from time to time. And always more agreeable when he had a drop in. When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and not come back until he’d drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. You see, it’s like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy. Here! what are you sniggering at?” | Act 3 | 135 | 14 | ## Small roles that can be doubled These pairs of small roles never speak in the same scene, so one actor could play both. Check entrances and silent appearances in your script before you cast it this way. - Mrs. Eynsford Hill and The Japanese Lady - Miss Eynsford Hill and The Japanese Lady - A Bystander and Clara - A Bystander and The Parlormaid - A Bystander and The Japanese Lady - Freddy and The Japanese Lady - Clara and A Sarcastic Bystander - Clara and The Bystanders Generally - Clara and The Japanese Lady - Clara and Several Bystanders - The Parlormaid and A Sarcastic Bystander - The Parlormaid and The Bystanders Generally ## Questions actors ask ### Who has the most lines in Pygmalion? Higgins, with about 845 lines and 6,860 words, 35.5% of everything spoken in the play. Liza is next, with about 537 lines (22.9%). ### How long is Pygmalion? The full text has 19,299 spoken words, about 138 minutes at 140 words a minute before pauses, scene changes, and cuts. Most productions cut the text, so running times vary. ### How many speaking roles are in Pygmalion? 16 named roles speak in this edition, across 5 scenes. 9 of them have less than 2% of the words, which is why small parts are often doubled. ## How we count Counts are computed from the full text of the [Standard Ebooks edition](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion) (public domain; retrieved 2026-10-08). Words are every spoken word, with stage directions removed. Lines are verse lines as printed, plus prose at 10 words a line, because prose has no fixed line breaks; editions differ, so other sources give slightly different line counts. Time is words at 140 words a minute, before pauses and stage business. A role is counted in a scene when it speaks there. To count a script that is not in the library, paste it into the [script line counter](https://www.offbook.com/tools/script-line-counter).