In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion, a celibate by choice, sculpts a beautiful woman in ivory and falls in love with her. “He kisses it and feels his kisses are returned.” Nearly two thousand years later, in 1913, George Bernard Shaw uses Ovid’s story as the basis for his play Pygmalion, in which the phonetics professor Henry Higgins teaches the cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle to speak the King’s English and in the process becomes...