On March 20, 43 BC in Salmo, Ovid was born into a knighted family. He was sent to study law in Rome, but disappointed parental expectations by developing into a poet. Seneca remembered him for not being good with logical arguments and writing briefs. Ovid rather failed at law, but succeeded with poetry, leaving a legacy of The Amores, Tristia and Metamorphoses. Rebelling against the establishment of Virgil and Horace, he associated with the rebels, Propertius, Tibullus and Catullus.
His affairs with the Emperor's daughter, didn't earn him brownie points. In 8 AD, he was packed off to the Black Sea , where he wrote the Tristia. The same year, he published the Metamorphoses. He helped to establish the romantic movement, passed down generation after generation, as medieval romances and Elizabethan literature drew from his writing. His works were standard exercitia tedia for students from the 12th-14th century alongside Petrarch, Virgil, Horace and Cicero. The first known English translation of Metamorphoses came from no one less illustrious than William Caxton, returned to England in 1480. His writing influenced just a few: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chreten de Troyes, Chaucer and Shakespeare.
William Golding is oft accredited for the first English translation in 1567, but never mind. Dryden took him up tenderly in 1657 as a writer to be examined for the divinity of God in man.
Ovid is the crossroad between classical myth and modern romanticism as the emphasis of myth, presented in the Metamorphoses, is not superstition or etiological; but psychological study of man: a rich source for the Renaissance when man became the proper study of man.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe appears in Book IV, introducing and ever memoralizing romantic love in the story of two neighbors, separated by a wall, who whisper through a chink.
Ach yes, who can ever forget the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet:
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/rome...
"Two households, both alike in dignity// In fair Verona, where we lay the scene...
A pair of star-crossed lover's take their lives..."
However, Shakespeare reverses the roles. In Ovid, Pyramus takes his life first on discovery of the bloody cloak and Thisbe does likewise.
And yes, it does appear in Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V. Theseus and Hippolyta enter introducing the theme of romantic love:
http://quarles.unbc.ca/midsummer/amnd5-1... Act V, Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus:
More strange than true: I never may believe// These antik fables nor these fairy toys.//
