How Romeo and Juliet 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
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare · c. 1595
ShakespeareRelevance
6/10
On Romeo and Juliet’s page
- The forbidden-lovers, mistaken-death plot was already perfected in Ovid — Pyramus and Thisbe, Metamorphoses Book 4
- Shakespeare's direct source was Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, but the tragic mechanism descends from the Ovidian tradition, and the play is studded with named allusions like Juliet's Phaethon
- Read the Pyramus tale first and the lovers' deaths feel like the fulfillment of an old, inevitable pattern
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid wrote the original forbidden lovers — Pyramus and Thisbe of Book 4, kept apart, undone by a mistaken death
- That double-suicide mechanism is the engine of Romeo and Juliet; Shakespeare knew it so well he staged it outright in A Midsummer Night's Dream the same season
- The line runs through Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, but the death-pact archetype is Ovid's invention