Pyramus and Thisbe were young lovers from Babylon. They wanted to marry, but their parents forbade them. They found a crack in the common wall between their houses, and every day they would whisper secretly back and forth to each other. The frustrated pair finally decided that they would escape their houses and run away together, meeting at Ninus’ tomb. Thisbe was the first to arrive, but a lioness came, fresh from the kill, to drink at the nearby spring. Thisbe in her fright dropped her cloak and fled. The lioness drank from the spring, came upon the cloak, and shredded and bloodied it before turning back to the woods. Pyramus arrived, saw the torn cloak, assumed the worst, and stabbed himself, lamenting Thisbe’s death. Thisbe overcame her fright and, not wanting to miss her lover, returned to the tomb. She found Pyramus dying on the ground, saw the torn cloak and the blood-stained sword, and realized what happened. She cried out, “You could be torn away from me, alas!, by death alone; yet you will not be able to be torn away even by death!” [quique a me morte revelli heu sola poteras, poteris nec morte revelli.] Thisbe prays that their parents will grant a common tomb to those “whom firm love, whom the last hour has joined.” [quos certus amor, quos hora novissima iunxit.] She then falls on the sword and dies. When their parents found them, they put the lovers’ ashes in a single urn.
This is one of the more famous stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a miserable story it is. Ovid tells the story to explain why a mulberry tree’s berries are red: the berries had been white, but when Pyramus stabbed himself, the flow of blood sprayed up and turned them all red, and red they have been since. Any further moral is left to the imagination of the keen reader.
Fortunately, we have such a keen reader in William Shakespeare. He knew the original story. He had also read The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, an Italian tale that had been translated into English verse. He altered the story, turned it into the play Romeo and Juliet, and put a better moral to the story than some pseudo-history of the redness of mulberries. The final scene of Romeo and Juliet features the parents of the dead lovers from the houses of Capulet and Montague, families that had long nursed a grudge against each other. The prince berates the fathers: “Capulet, Montague, / See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.” Juliet’s father, Capulet, speaks with Romeo’s father, Montague. (Note: a “jointure” is the gift a groom’s family would give the bride; Capulet asks peace of Montague for the jointure):
CAPULET
O brother Montague, give me thy hand.
This is my daughter’s jointure, for no more
Can I demand.
MONTAGUE But I can give thee more,
For I will ray her statue in pure gold,
That whiles Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.
CAPULET
As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie,
Poor sacrifices of our enmity.
(Romeo and Juliet, V.3)
Thus Shakespeare uses the story of Pyramus and Thisbe to teach a lesson about the horrors of holding a grudge, and he expands on Ovid by including the peace-making of the fathers at the end of the story.
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet around 1594-1595, and was working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream around the same time (1595-1596). A Midsummer Night’s Dream likewise has the theme of forbidden love, except there’s a happy ending, with three couples newly wed. In the final act of the play, these couples decide to have some entertainment between the wedding ceremony and the wedding night. A group of Athenian tradesmen have gotten it into their heads to put on a play for the Duke for his wedding day, and as the Duke is listening to the possible entertainments, he is struck by the option of “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth.” The couples are intrigued and decide to have these players come in and perform their show.
By all theater standards, the play-within-a-play is a trainwreck. The tradesmen are trying their best to put on their little tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, and instead the three couples are just about rolling with laughter the entire time. The main theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that love doesn’t make sense, and that theme culminates in the newlyweds laughing at a tragedy.
One might wonder what to do with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, but Shakespeare has shown us. As a tragedy, the lesson is to avoid family feuds and grudges, which end in death and regret, though the death just might be the spur to reconciliation. As a “comedy,” we see three newlywed couples laughing at what is supposed to be a tragedy, and such is the nature of Christian marriage: even tragedy becomes nothing more than “tragical mirth” in the midst of love. And this is so because of Christ’s love for and marriage to His Church. You can picture Him saying to us Thisbe’s words, “You could be torn away from me, alas!, by death alone; yet you will not be able to be torn away even by death!” Yet rather than killing Himself in despair, Christ gave His life for us that He might take it up again and that we might live with Him forever. Our Lord and we are truly those “whom firm love, whom the last hour has joined,” yes, Jesus’ firm love and last hour on the cross, which was only His last for a moment. Now we sing in the Easter hymn words that we can picture the couples saying at the end of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “My heart from care is free, / No trouble troubles me. / Misfortune now is play, / And night is bright as day” (LSB 467:5).
In Christ,
Pastor Richard
