. Throughout the Middle Ages, Ovid was read, glossed, imitated, and translated. It is not surprising that the 12th century, the aetas Ovidiana, should have produced, among other works based on Ovid, French versions of some of his Metamorphoses. Those that survive, all from the second half of the century, are Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisse, and Philomena, corresponding, respectively, to Metamorphoses 4.55–166, 3.339–512, and 6.426–74; in addition, a fragment of some 120 lines of a hitherto unknown 13th-century rival version of Piramus has recently been published. Like the related Romances of Antiquity, these brief stories tend to elaborate the feelings of the characters in long lyric and dramatic monologues and dialogues, based on Ovidian writings on love but having no equivalent in the immediate source. They tend to reduce the role of the pagan gods and (except for Philomena) the idea of metamorphosis. All are written in couplets of octosyllabic lines, though Piramus has some vers libres in the added monologues.
Piramus, which expands Ovid’s 112 hexameters into some 920 lines as published, is preserved in three independent manuscripts as well as in the influential early 14th-century compilation Ovide moralisé, whose author used the poem instead of translating the metamorphosis himself. (Via a later prose version of the Ovide moralisé, the poem indirectly influenced several authors, including Shakespeare and Théophile de Viau.) Freely and with fine lyrical monologues and dialogues, Piramus retells the story of the young Babylonian lovers separated by their parents and imprisoned in neighboring houses; through a chink in the wall they converse and agree to meet by Ninus’s tomb under a mulberry tree; Tisbé arrives first and is frightened away by a lion, which bloodies a veil she lets fall; Piramus draws the wrong conclusion, stabs himself, and dies in the arms of Tisbé, who commits suicide with the same sword. Ovid’s metamorphosis of the mulberries’ color is omitted. The French poem, unlike Ovid, motivates the separation of the lovers by a quarrel between their fathers, a detail that probably underlies the Romeo and Juliet story.
Narcisse, just over 1,000 lines long and preserved in four manuscripts, develops Ovid’s story of the youth who scorns the love of the nymph Echo and many others, one of whom prays that he himself may suffer unrequited love. Seeing his reflection in a pool, Narcisse falls in love with himself, wastes away, and dies. The French poem concentrates narratively and psychologically on the anonymous girl, giving her a name, Dané, and letting her take the place of Echo (whose role is reduced to echoing Narcisse’s cries). Dané, like Tisbé, decides to die after Narcisse. This poem, too, is written in a richly rhetorical style, with far more emphasis on motivation than in Ovid’s version.
In his prologue to Cligés, among other Ovidiana he claims to have written, Chrétien de Troyes mentions the subject of Philomena. This work appears to survive only in the Ovide moralisé, where it is attributed to “Chrestiiens li Gois.” The story (1,468 lines), related with all Chrétien’s psychological insight and technical skill, tells of the illicit love of King Tereus for Philomena (Philomela in Ovid), sister of his wife, Progné. Having persuaded their father, King Pandion, to let him take Philomena over the sea to visit her sister, Tereus rapes her and cuts out her tongue to prevent her accusations; she embroiders her story on a tapestry that she sends to Progné. The latter rescues Philomena, kills her own son, Itis, and serves his cooked body to her husband. When Tereus seeks to avenge himself, he is miraculously transformed into a hoopoe, Progné into a swallow, and Philomena into a nightingale. The story is reasonably close to Ovid but, again, much expanded, especially in the physical description of Philomena, in analysis of feelings, and in dialogue.
The three surviving tales and the Piramus fragment no doubt represent a small fraction of the production of such poems, reworkings of the Metamorphoses in the romance style of the 12th century.
Branciforti, Francesco, ed. Piramus et Tisbé. Florence: Olschki, 1959.
Chrétien de Troyes. Philomena, conte raconté d’après Ovide, ed. Cornelius de Boer. Paris: Geuthner, 1909.
Cormier, Raymond, ed. and trans. Three Ovidian Tales of Love (Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisus et Dané, and Philomena et Procné). New York: Garland, 1986.
Thiry-Stassin, Martine, and Madeleine Tyssens, eds. Narcisse, conte ovidien français du XIIe siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976.
Cadot, A.M. “Du récit mythique au roman: étude sur Piramus et Tisbé.”Romania 97 (1976):433–61.
van Emden, Wolfgang G. “A Fragment of an Old French Poem in Octosyllables on the Subject of Pyramus and Thisbe.” In Medieval French Textual Studies in Memoiy of T.B.W.Reid, ed. Ian Short. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1984, pp. 239–53.
Vinge, Louise. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century. Lund: Gleerup, 1968.
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