Pyramus and Thisbe by Gregorio Pagani (1558 - 1605): Italian Mannerist painter in Florence (Uffizi Gallery).

Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe in Metamorphoses (IV.55-166) reappears in Giovanni Boccaccio's On Famous Women as biography number twelve (sometimes thirteen). In his Decameron, in the fifth story on the seventh day, a desperate housewife falls in love with her neighbor, and communicates with him through a crack in the wall. Geoffrey Chaucer tells the story in English with his The Legend of Good Women. The "Pyramus and Thisbe" plot is echoed twice in Shakespeare's works: in Romeo and Juliet, the titular characters fall in love but cannot be together easily because their families have "an ancient grudge" (which their deaths end). The comic recapitulation of "Pyramus and Thisbe" which appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, sc 1) is enacted by a group of "mechanicals" for the marriages of Theseus and his friends. Forbidden love is also present in A Midsummer Night's Dream in that Hermia, is not able to marry the man she loves, Lysander, because her father Egeus despises him and wishes her to marry Demetrius. Shakespeare may have drawn directly from Ovid's Latin retelling in the Metamorphoses, or from Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of it.

Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)