Pyramus and Thisbe are two characters of Roman mythology, whose love story of ill-fated lovers is also a sentimental romance.
The tale is told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.
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In the Ovidian version, Pyramus and Thisbe is the story of two lovers in the city of Babylon who occupy connected houses/walls, forbidden by their parents to be wed, because of their parents' rivalry. Through a crack in one of the walls, they whisper their love for each other. They arrange to meet near at Ninus' tomb under a mulberry tree and state their feelings for each other. Thisbe arrives first, but upon seeing a lioness with a mouth bloody from a recent kill, she flees, leaving behind her veil. The lioness drinks from a nearby fountain, then by chance mutilates the veil Thisbe had left behind. When Pyramus arrives, he is horrified at the sight of Thisbe's veil, assuming that a fierce beast had killed her. Pyramus kills himself, falling on his sword in proper Roman fashion, and in turn splashing blood on the white mulberry leaves. Pyramus' blood stains the white mulberry fruits, turning them dark. Thisbe returns, eager to tell Pyramus what had happened to her, but she finds Pyramus' dead body under the shade of the mulberry tree. Thisbe, after a brief period of mourning, stabs herself with the same sword. In the end, the gods listen to Thisbe's lament, and forever change the colour of the mulberry fruits into the stained colour to honour the forbidden love.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe 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. Most famously, the plot of Romeo and Juliet, in which the titular characters, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, fall in love at a party the Capulet family hosts, but they cannot be together because the two families hold "an ancient grudge" (which the young lovers' deaths eventually squash), and because Juliet has been engaged by her parents to a man named Paris. Romeo and Juliet may draw either from Ovid's Latin retelling in the Metamorphoses, or from Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of that work. Most modern tales of "forbidden love" are seen as having been based on Shakespeare's play, rather than "Pyramus and Thisbe."
A comic recapitulation of "Pyramus and Thisbe" appears in the play A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, sc 1), enacted by a group of "mechanicals". Their production is crude and, for the most part, badly done until the final monologue of Nick Bottom as Pyramus and the final monologue of Francis Flute as Thisbe. The theme of forbidden love is also present in A Midsummer Night's Dream (albeit a less tragic and dark representation) in that a girl, Hermia, is not able to marry the man she loves, Lysander, because her father Egeus despises him and wishes for her to marry Demetrius, and meanwhile Hermia and Lysander's confidant, Helena, is in love with Demetrius.
Spanish poet Luis de Góngora wrote a Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe in 1618. French poet Théophile de Viau wrote Les amours tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbée, a tragedy in five acts (1621).
François Francoeur et François Rebel composed Pirame et Thisbée, a liric tragedy in 5 acts and a prologue, with libretto by Jean-Louis-Ignace de la Serre; it was played at the Académie royale de musique, on October 17, 1726. The story was adapted by John Frederick Lampe as a "Mock Opera" in 1745, containing a singing "Wall" which was described as "the most musical partition that was ever heard."[2] In 1768 in Vienna, Johann Adolph Hasse composed a serious opera on the tale, titled Piramo e Tisbe.
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 Romancers was the basis for the musical The Fantasticks. The musical West Side Story, based on Romeo and Juliet, and The Fantasticks, thus has the same ultimate source. Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, also wrote a children's version in her short story "A Hole in the Wall".
There is a chapter entitled "Pyramus and Thisbe" in Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, alluding to the secret romance between Maximillian Morrel and Valentine de Villefort.
In Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, during his "nose monologue", Cyrano mocks his "traitorous nose" in "parody of weeping Pyramus."
In Edith Wharton's short story "The House of the Dead Hand", the romance between Sybilla and Count Ottoviano is seen as "a new Pyramus and Thisbe."
In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, two of the story's lovers are killed under a Mulberry Tree.
In Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, when Cardenio is relating the story of he and Luscinda, he refers to "that famous Thisbe."