PIRAMUS ET TISBÉ

Introduction
himself in the text, nor is an author’s name associated with the poem in any of the
surviving manuscripts in which it is found. There are no compelling stylistic or other
reasons to attribute this work to any of the writers of the period whose names we know,
such as Chrétien, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Wace or Marie de France, or even to any of
the anonymous composers of narratives such as Eneas or Partonopeus de Blois. 13 There
are a number of close verbal parallels between Piramus and the so-called lai of
Narcisus, which might suggest common authorship of the two, although these
similarities could also be explained by the author of one poem having read or heard the
other and recalling particular phrases when similar contexts presented themselves in his
own work. It is worth noting, however, that the prologue to Narcisus presents a
rationale for the poem as a cautionary tale about the dangers of fole amor, a rationale
that is also peculiarly applicable to Piramus. Although the two tales are not juxtaposed
in any known manuscript, two of the three earliest witnesses of Piramus also contain the
text of Narcisus.
The place of composition of our poem is equally difficult to establish with
certainty. De Boer argued that the particular combination of linguistic features found in
the text suggested that the author was a native of Normandy, and belonged to the
‘veritable école d’imitation de l’antiquité’ that flourished in north-western France under
the Plantagenets (pp. x-xi). Branciforti tentatively proposed a Picard origin, while
noting that Piramus is one of the ‘least provincial’ products of Old French literature (pp.
152-53). Genaust prefers the western hypothesis, but also notes the ‘supra-regional’
nature of the literary language adopted by the author (‘Bemerkungen’, p. 525).
Whatever his exact place of origin, there is no reason to disagree with Cormier’s
conclusion that ‘the Piramus et Tisbé poet was trained in and imbued with the Latin
classics, particularly Ovid, and that he had studied both Latin and vernacular
composition, versification and thematics’ (p. 3).
Sources and their Treatment
The main source for Piramus et Tisbé is lines 55-166 of Book IV of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Composed shortly before 8 A.D., the Metamorphoses is a ‘vast and
13 Gaston Paris suggested that Piramus might be attributed to Chrétien, but his hypothesis has not been
generally accepted; see ‘Chrétien Legouais et autres imitateurs d’Ovide’, Histoire Littéraire de la France,
29 (1885), p. 497.
13