PIRAMUS ET TISBÉ

Introduction
cannot marry her (vv. 163-64), 45 lamenting the fact that he has loved her for so long
without being able to faire son talent (vv. 421-23), and fantasising about tearing the
wall apart with his bare hands and dragging her into his chamber (vv. 452-56). Lucken
suggests that the lion should be seen as the hero’s double, representing the ardor that he
has only been able to express verbally up to this point. Not only does the animal arrive
at the meeting-place instead of the hero, it also engages in a symbolic deflowering of
Tisbé’s wimple, which functions as a metonym of the heroine’s sexual self (p. 386). 46
On finding the bloodstained wimple under the mulberry tree, Piramus accuses the lion
of being sated with her flesh (vv. 723-24), a phrase which is clearly open to a sexual as
well as a carnivorous interpretation. This displacement of the sexual act into the
metaphorical sphere allows the poet to preserve the outline and the pathos of Ovid’s
tale, in which the lovers die without ever having been together, while at the same time
linking illicit sex with death, as the lion’s defilement of the wimple is the direct cause of
the protagonists’ double suicide.
A similar cautionary note is sounded by another aspect of nature symbolism in
the text. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the purpose of the tale is to provide a poeticomythological
explanation of a natural transformation, namely the fact that the fruit of
the mulberry tree is whitish when immature, but ripens to a deep blackish red colour. In
the Old French text the focus is displaced from metamorphosis to moral behaviour, and
there is a corresponding shift in the significance of the tree under which the tragic
dénouement takes place. The mulberry here is paired with the almond tree in whose
shadow Tisbé takes refuge from the lion (vv. 666-67; in Ovid, Thisbe hides in a cave
rather than under a tree). Both trees had strong symbolic associations in the Middle
Ages. The almond tree was often regarded as a herald of spring, since it is the first
flowering tree to bloom and forms fruit earlier than any other. However, because its
precocious blossoms are more liable to be destroyed by frost, it also came to be seen as
45 Lucken interprets these lines as an expression of desperate desire (Piramus will force himself upon
Tisbé if she does not give herself to him willingly), as well as a threat to take her away from her parents
(p. 380).
46 The wimple’s shape (a tube of cloth placed over the head) and strong association with married (and
hence sexually active) women make it an appropriate symbol for Tisbé’s ardor. It may also have another
symbolic function in this context. Given that a wimple was normally worn with one open end secured
around the face, it is difficult to imagine how Tisbé could have dropped hers unless she had already
removed it before the lion appeared. If we are intended to infer that this is what had happened, we can see
the removal of the headdress as a sign that by leaving her father’s house and city the heroine has
deliberately renounced her membership of society and the role she would have been expected to play in it.
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