1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page

I. "SHALL I BE HEARD?"

To apprehend the burden Shakespeare assumes when he has Paulina tell Hermione to "bequeath to death" her "numbness," we must remember the symbolic and libidinal economy that informs the Pygmalion story in the two chief texts that gave it such tenacity as a fiction about voice, masculinity, and desire: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Petrarch's Rime Sparse. As Leonard Barkan writes, Hermione's metamorphosis enacts "a kind of marriage of Pygmalion and Petrarchanism."⁵ In the Rime Sparse, Petrarch draws on numerous Ovidian characters to represent his own situation of unfulfilled desire; and in a pair of sonnets that praise Simone Martini's portrait of Laura, he brings Ovid's story of Pygmalion into the cycle as a particularly compelling analogue for his own predicament.⁶ Two rhetorical issues are central to both Petrarch's and Shakespeare's versions of Ovid's Pygmalion: the trope of apostrophe and the language...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. I. "Shall I Be Heard?"
3. Ii. "Not Guilty"
4. Iii. "Be Stone No More"
5. Copyright