Pyramus and Thisbe

When Pyramus arrives, he is horrified at the sight of Thisbe's cloak: the lioness had torn it and left traces of blood behind, as well as its tracks.

Ovid's is the oldest surviving version of the story, published in 8 AD, but he adapted an existing aetiological myth.

[1] This alternative version also survives in the progymnasmata, a work by Nicolaus Sophista, a Greek sophist and rhetor who lived during the fifth century AD.

[2][3] The story of Pyramus and Thisbe appears in Giovanni Boccaccio's On Famous Women as biography number twelve (sometimes thirteen)[4] 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.

In the 1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer, in his The Legend of Good Women, and John Gower, in his Confessio Amantis, were the first to tell the story in English.

The earliest version of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1476 by Masuccio Salernitano, while it mostly obtained its present form when written down in 1524 by Luigi da Porto.

[6][7] In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, sc 1), a comedy written in the 1590s, a group of "mechanicals" enact the story of "Pyramus and Thisbe".

Their production is crude and, for the most part, badly done until the final monologues of Nick Bottom, as Pyramus and Francis Flute, as Thisbe.

Primarily based around William Shakespeare's adaptation, the performance featured Paul McCartney as Pyramus, John Lennon as his lover Thisbe, George Harrison as Moonshine, and Ringo Starr as Lion, with Trevor Peacock in the role of Quince.

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.

Bolu Babalola adapted the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in her 2020 anthology Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold.