Pygmalion Olio

The name of a legendary king of Cyprus who fell in love with a statue of Aphrodite, or, according to the Roman poet Ovid, fell in love with an ivory statue of his own making, expressing his ideal woman. The sculptor then prayed to Aphrodite for a wife like the statue, and the goddess accommodatingly brought it to life. At an unknown stage in the development of the story, Galatea, the name of a sea nymph, was given to the statue-woman. The Pygmalion theme has regularly recurred in English. The Elizabethan dramatist John Marston told the tale in The Metamorphoses of Pygmalion's Image (1598), the Victorian socialist poet William Morris included it in The Earthly Paradise (1868 - 70), and it was the subject of a comedy by W. S. Gilbert entitled Pygmalion and Galatea (1871).

Pygmalion is the title of a popular play by George Bernard Shaw (1912) that deals with the English language. It is generally classed as a romantic comedy but Shaw saw it as a didactic drama about the power of phonetics and the foolishness of contemporary social attitudes. In the play there is no cross-class romance between phonetician and pupil, but such a romance develops in a film version in 1938; it is also strongly hinted at in the later musical based on the play, Alan Jay Lerner's My Fair Lady (1956) and the subsequent film (1964) starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins. Shaw also had a character called Pygmalion in the futuristic final part of Back to Methuselah (1921), a scientist who artificially creates a humanoid man and woman. The social and linguistic theme has been continued in the title and content of John Honey's Does Accent Matter? - The Pygmalion Factor (Faber, 1989).