Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Barbara Roche Rico

Critical Essay by Barbara Roche Rico

SOURCE: “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image,” in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 285-95.

In the following essay, Rico follows Shakespeare's treatment of the Pygmalion myth in his dramas The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale.

                                                  Oh, she's warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating.

The Winter's Tale, V.iii, 109-111¹

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...
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