Professor Higgins, baffled by Eliza's emotional departure, delivers this comic tirade about the supposed irrationality of women. Shaw uses Higgins' blindness to his own rudeness as sharp social comedy.
In the play Pygmalion, the equivalent moment is Higgins's exasperated tirade to Pickering and his mother about Eliza's incomprehensible behaviour, after she has thrown his slippers at him. In My Fair Lady the same impulse is consolidated into "A Hymn to Him" / "Why can't a woman be more like a man," typically used as a stand-in for Higgins's argumentative Shavian register. The dramatic situation, in either source, is Act 5: Eliza has left, Higgins is furious and bewildered, Pickering is on stage as the patient audience and partial ally. Higgins is not, in his own view, ranting about women in general; he is using general claims to avoid admitting he misses one specific person. The speech sits at the point where Higgins's intellectual self-defence is most exposed as evasion.
Higgins is brilliant, emotionally late-developing, vain about his lack of vanity, and currently astonished that someone he taught to speak properly has used that gift to defy him. What he wants from Pickering is corroboration — yes, women are impossible; yes, Eliza is ungrateful; yes, the problem is not him. What he actually needs is to talk himself out of feeling something he does not have the vocabulary for. Psychologically he is somewhere between adolescence and genuine misery, and the speech is funny precisely because he is so unaware of how transparent his complaint is. Underneath the comic generalisations is a man who has been startled, for possibly the first time, into noticing his own feelings, and is angrily refusing to do so.
The pitfall is misogyny played straight. Higgins is not a manifesto; he is a man losing an argument with himself in public. Play the bewilderment, not the position. Pickering is essential — you are recruiting him to your view, and his slight unease or quiet enjoyment changes your tempo line by line. Mark the points where Higgins surprises himself by saying something almost true ("I've grown accustomed to her voice") and let the self-noticing happen; in either Pygmalion or My Fair Lady text, the speech only works if we see him glimpsing what is actually wrong. Tempo: fast, articulate, with sudden stops when a thought lands harder than expected. The trap is sing-song delivery imported from the musical; even if you are using the lyric as audition material, treat it as Shavian argument with a tune. Crisp consonants, real intellectual delight in your own phrasing, and an underlying confusion you do not name. Avoid making him hateful — you lose the comedy and the pathos at once.
A useful piece for actors in their thirties and forties auditioning for classical-modern repertory, Shaw/Coward/Wilde seasons, and character-leading roles. It shows comic intelligence, rapid text, and the ability to play a character whose self-knowledge lags his vocabulary — a skill needed for a lot of British and American comedy from Shaw to Stoppard to Sorkin. Casting-wise it suggests the clever-difficult-man register: Higgins, Jack Tanner, the older Benedick, Henry in The Real Thing. Be cautious in current audition climates; a tone-deaf performance reads as endorsement rather than critique, and panels will mark you down. Use the lyric version only if you can clearly distinguish your acting from the cast recording; otherwise go to the Pygmalion source. Not over-used in straight-play auditions; over-used in musical theatre rooms.
Why can't a woman take after a man? Men are so pleasant, so easy to deal with. Why can't a woman behave like a man? I was perfectly happy living alone. Regularly at half past six everything would be done, dusted, swept, and put in its proper place.
One man in a million may shout a bit; now and then there's one with slight defects, but by and large we are a marvellous sex! Why can't a woman take after a man? Why does every one do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head? Why do they do everything their mothers do? Why don't they grow up like their fathers instead? Why can't a woman be more like a man? If I were a woman who'd been to a ball, been hailed as a princess by one and by all, would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing, and carry on as if my home were in a zone of flooding?
Would I run off and never tell me where I'm going? Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so decent, such regular chaps. Ready to help you through any mishaps. Would I slam the door and make an ugly scene?
Would I insult and never speak? Would I behave like a ridiculous queen? Why can't a woman be more like a man?