Pyramus and Thisbe

Pyramus and Thisbe

Pyramus and Thisbe are two characters of Roman mythology, whose love story of ill-fated lovers is also a sentimental romance.

[edit] Plot

Thisbe, by John William Waterhouse, 1909.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.

[edit] Adaptations

Pyramus and Thisbe by Gregorio Pagani. Uffizi Gallery.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.

[edit] Shakespeare

[edit] Romeo and Juliet

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. Interestingly, most modern tales of \"forbidden love\" are seen as having been based on Shakespeare's play, rather than \"Pyramus and

Thisbe.\"

[edit] A Midsummer Night's Dream

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.

[edit] Other adaptations

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).

Fran?ois Francoeur et Fran?ois 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\".

[edit] Allusions

Thisbe \"of the many doves\" is mentioned as a city in Boeotia in the Catalogue of Ships, from The Iliad[3]. Pausanias mentions a Boeotian nymph named Thisbe for whom the city is named[4].

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\

between Sybilla and Count Ottoviano is seen as \"a new Pyramus and Thisbe.\"

In John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In, a drunk who witnesses the murder by the story's vampire child Eli has a cat named \"Thisbe\". The boy in the novel communicates with the vampire via Morse Code between his bedroom wall and a room in the ajoining apartment where the vampire lives with the paedophile caretaker.

In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, two of the story's lovers are killed under a Mulberry Tree.

Quotes About Choice

No matter what happens, we always have a choice. Even when it seems that there is no option, there is always something else that can be done. What happens in our lives is the result of decisions that we make. This list of quotes about choice reminds us to make the correct choice.

George Eliot

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

Denis Waitley

There are two primary choices in life; to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.

Benjamin Franklin

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

John Wayne

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.

Kahlil Gibran

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Frank Swinnerton

We would rather be in the company of somebody we like than in the company of the most superior being of our acquaintance.

Leo Buscaglia

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Edgar A. Guest

You are the person who has to decide. Whether you'll do it or toss it aside; you are the person who makes up your mind. Whether you'll lead or will linger behind. Whether you'll try for the goal that's afar. Or just be contented to stay where you are.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. ~Mother Teresa

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. ~Albert Einstein

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder. ~Charles Morgan

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip. ~Jonathan Carroll, \"Outside the Dog Museum\"

Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. ~Ovid

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ~Eric Fromm

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. ~Kahlil Gibran

Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway. ~Judith Viorst,

Redbook, 1975

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. ~W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

When love is not madness, it is not love. ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river. ~Malagasy Proverb

Do I love you because you're beautiful,

Or are you beautiful because I love you?

~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

For you see, each day I love you more

Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

~Rosemonde Gerard

Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate! ~Sandra J. Dykes

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense. ~Mark Overby

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end. ~Author Unknown

Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker. ~Author Unknown

Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly. ~Proverb

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods. ~Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. ~Peter Ustinov

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595

The art of love... is largely the art of persistence. ~Albert Ellis

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that. ~Michael Leunig

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law. ~Boethius,

The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame. ~Henry David Thoreau