Metamorphoseon libri (Metamorphoses) influenced Pygmalion

Shaw's title names the sculptor of Metamorphoses X, who makes a statue of a woman, falls in love with it, and sees it brought to life by Venus. The play turns the story into phonetics and class: Higgins remakes Eliza Doolittle's speech and treats the result as his creation. MEDIUM because the debt is to the myth, which Ovid's is the classic telling of, rather than to anything particular in his text; Shaw's ending pointedly refuses the lovers' union the myth ends with.