From "Speechless Dialect" to "Prosperous Art": Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image

Abstract

In The Winter's Tale, Hermione, long thought dead, comes down from her platform, a living woman walking among us. In presenting this scene, Shakespeare not only gives new life to Greene's pedestrian Pandosto; he also restores to greatness the Pygmalion myth itself. By Shakespeare's time, this myth was clearly in need of such restoration; for the narrative which might seem the perfect celebration of the artist's power to move an audience had itself become sullied, first by medieval commentators and then by the Elizabethans themselves.3 During much of the Renaissance the Pygmalion myth seemed to offer less a portrait of the artist than a warning about the power of women and of art. And if the Elizabethan John Marston made Pygmalion into a doting and foolish lover, the minor characters in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure remind us that Pygmalion's statue had become by then an emblem for a whore.4 In this paper I would like first to outline the deterioration of the Pygmalion image; then by examining three Shakespearean plays, I would like to show how Shakespearean drama treats the myth, comes to terms with its power and its unseemliness, and alters the connotation that it held. To illustrate this, I would first like to return for a moment to Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses, traditionally acknowledged to be the narrative's source. (The Ovidian text was itself an act of recovery; for as Brooks Otis notes, Ovid's version was actually a recasting of a more sensationalist story in Philostephanus' Kypriaka, an ancient collection of erotic tales.)5 The Ovidian narrative depicts the transformation of both the ivory image and the artist, and a temporary recovery of the society