Comment on the mingling of genres in Pygmalion by GB Shaw

Shaw’s masterpiece, Pygmalion is a quaint amalgamation of myth, legend and fairy-tale. In addition the element of romanticism disguised as anti-romanticism serves well through the wraps of plot, characters and theme.
In the first place, Shaw applied the Pygmalion-Galatea legend perfected by the Roman poet, Ovid in Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion having successfully translated his ultimate concept of beauty into a form falls in love with it and later marries it, by virtue of Aphrodite’s blessing. There is an apparent metaphor at work in this union of creator and his creation:
The consummation of creation and creator; or more precisely on the metaphoric level the thirst for perfection and its subsequent fulfillment in creation that is both ecstatic and cathartic.
Theologically however this applies even to the relation of God with the church or more directly with His people.
Shaw however deviating from this line provided a vein of comic element into the whole affair. The orchestration of natural phenomenon like rain, thunder etc coupled with coincidence running parallel to that of Cinderella’s fairy tale gives the play a rich staple of romance and comedy, which not only includes verbal but also situational. Also there is a streak of Shavian comic inversion in which the outcome is the reverse of what is expected.
The play does not end as did Pygmalion legend or Cinderella’s fairy tale, but ironically opposite that is mundane and down to earth. At the end the inclusion of a long epilogue takes it characteristically closer to a part of a novel than to a play.
Thus Pygmalion is not a play that has the symmetry and convention of a pure genre but a culmination of eclectic influences.