User:Douglas Coldwell/Sandboxes/54
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[edit] Adaptations
The story appears in Giovanni Boccaccio's On Famous Women as biography number twelve (sometimes thirteen) [1] and in his Decameron, in the fifth story on the seventh day, where a desperate housewife falls in love with her neighbor, and communicates with him through a crack in the wall, attracting his attention by dropping pieces of stone and straw through the crack. Geoffrey Chaucer was among the first to tell the story in English with his The Legend of Good Women. The "Pyramus and Thisbe" plot appears twice in Shakespeare's works. The plot of Romeo and Juliet may draw either from Ovid's Latin retelling in the Metamorphoses, or from Golding's 1567 translation of that work. A comic recapitulation appears in the play A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, sc 1), enacted by a group of "mechanicals". John Frederick Lampe adapted the story as a "Mock Opera" in 1745, complete with a singing "Wall" described as "the most musical partition...ever heard."[2] Edmond Rostand adapted the tale from Romeo and Juliet, making the fathers of the lovers conspire to bring their children together by pretending to forbid their love in Les Romanesques. Rostand's play, translated into English as The Fantastics was the basis for the musical The Fantasticks. The musical West Side Story, based on Romeo and Juliet, and The Fantasticks, thus have the same ultimate source. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, also wrote a children's version of "Pyramus and Thisbe" in her short story "A Hole in the Wall".
