Metamorphoses
Ovid | narrative poem | first century A.D.
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw | play | 1912
If everyone loves a happy ending, an agalmatophiliac, someone sexually attracted to statues, might find Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion in Metamorphosesparticularly cheering. Any reader’s pulse might quicken along with Pygmalion’s when he discovers that his statue’s “breast beneath his fingers bent” and her lips “redden at the kiss.” Ovid’s ending is happy indeed: “To crown their bliss, a lovely boy was born.”
George Bernard Shaw’s spin on the myth, the play Pygmalion, was a hit on the London stage. “There must be something radically wrong about the play if it pleases everybody, but at the moment I cannot find what it is,” Shaw commented. That something turned out to be a twist in the ending. In the final scene Shaw wrote, Eliza sweeps out of the study of Professor Higgins, who has transformed her “out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden,” never to see him again. In the London production, Higgins tossed a bouquet from the window to the departing Eliza, a gesture suggesting the pair’s relationship might end happily. “Your ending is damnable; you ought to be shot,” Shaw told the producer. “My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful,” the latter insisted.
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