Gongora and the "Pyramus and Thisbe" Myth from Ovid to Shakespeare
by David Garrison

This book traces the tradition that led to Góngora's bizarre ballad, Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe, the "fórmula completa" of culteranismo or gongorismo. As Ovid first tells the tale, Pyramus and Thisbe converse through a hole in the common wall between their houses after their parents forbid them to marry. Their midnight rendezvous ends in disaster when Pyramus, believing that Thisbe has been killed by a lioness, stabs himself, and Thisbe falls on his sword after she finds him dying. Their mixed blood changes the fruit of a nearby mulberry tree from white to dark red.

Imitated, translated, allegorized, elaborated, decorated, and metamorphosed throughout Europe, this becomes the favorite Ovidian myth among Spanish poets of the 16th and 17th centuries. Several long versions of the poem add layers of exaggerated courtly love rhetoric, until finally, Góngora parodies the whole "Pyramus and Thisbe" tradition in his famous Fábula. And yet Góngora's poem is much more than a parody: it is a reading of classical myth in medieval and Renaissance European literature, a revolutionary aesthetic experiment that fuses many heterogeneous stylistic elements.

Until now, scholars have concentrated almost exclusively on the linguistic complexities of the Fábula. Garrison examines the poem in its relation to Ovid's prototype of the myth, to the allegorized French version ln the Ovide moralisé, and to several Spanish "Pyramus and Thisbe" poems. He demonstrates how Góngora responds to these versions of the myth and why his strange reformulation of the "Pyramus and Thisbe" tradition has such power to haunt the imagination. He then compares Góngora's poem with the most famous representation of the myth in English—Shakespeare's playlet within A Midsummer Night's Dream—and finds striking similarities in the self-conscious way in which both poets destroy and refashion the myth.

All texts, including Ovid's prototype, Góngora's first version of the myth, and the Fábula, are translated into English on facing pages. Extensive footnotes clarify Góngora's maze of allusions and rhetorical devices.

This is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand Góngora and the Ovidian tradition within which Góngora, Shakespeare, and so many other poets found, and still find, their material.

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