How A Midsummer Night’s Dream drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: William Shakespeare demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare · c. 1595
ShakespeareRelevance
8/10
On A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s page
- The bungled tragedy the mechanicals stage in Act V — "Pyramus and Thisbe" — comes straight out of Ovid's Metamorphoses Book IV
- Shakespeare knew it through Arthur Golding's 1567 English translation; the comedy lands harder once you've read Ovid's sincere, mournful original
- Ovid is the well Shakespeare keeps returning to — this is the one place he lets you see the seam
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid's transformations are everywhere in Shakespeare — but in A Midsummer Night's Dream the debt is right on the surface
- The Act V play-within-a-play, the rude mechanicals' "Pyramus and Thisbe," is a direct adaptation of Metamorphoses Book IV
- Shakespeare worked from Arthur Golding's 1567 English translation — read Ovid's version of the doomed lovers first, then watch the Dream play it for laughs