De Cypro
Philostephanus | history | third century B.C.
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw | play | 1912
When the Pygmalion legend recounted in the Hellenistic history De Cyproshowed up in George Bernard Shaw’s comedy of manners, the female subject of the story was not an ivory statue but flesh and blood, the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle. But as far as Professor Henry Higgins is concerned, Eliza may as well be a statue. “You see this creature with her kerbstone English…that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days,” he begins, proposing a wager to his acquaintance Colonel Pickering. “Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.”
The play harks back to King Pygmalion’s dalliance with a statue when Higgins’s mother points out to her son and Pickering, “You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll.” But her protests fall on deaf ears. “What does it matter what becomes of you?” Higgins asks Eliza, who rejoins, “I’m nothing to you—not so much as them slippers.” Shaw summed up their relationship in an afterword to the play: “Galatea [the statue] never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”
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