Stony Limits and Envious Walls: Metamorphosing Ovid in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Authors

  • David Lucking Università del Salento

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v6i2.274

Abstract

This paper examines the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which entered the European literary tradition by way of the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as it informs Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The discussion of the manner in which Ovid’s tragic tale haunts these Shakespearean works involves a consideration of the specular relation existing between the two plays that, among other things, also helps to explain some of the apparently anomalous elements in each. Attention is given to the manner in which Shakespeare’s works reflect the influence not only of the Ovidian original but of the different versions of the tale elaborated by Chaucer and Golding, and in particular to the emblematic image of the wall which, variously developed by his predecessors, plays a crucial role in both of Shakespeare’s plays.


Keywords: Shakespeare; Ovid; Chaucer; Golding; Metamorphoses; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Author Biography

  • David Lucking, Università del Salento

    Department: Studi Umanistici

    Rank: Full Professor (Ordinario)

     

Downloads

Published

2020-12-23

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 2 (2020): Jewish Theatres

Section

Miscellany

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).

  1.  The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
  2. The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
  3.  The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.