PIRAMUS ET TISBÉ

Piramus et Tisbé
a symbol of undue haste, heedlessness and indiscretion. The mulberry, by contrast,
flowers much later, normally when all risk of frost is over, and so became linked with
wisdom, but also with slowness and delay. 47 The proverbial expression ‘between
almond and mulberry’ indicated the middle way between hastiness and slowness, the
golden mean that avoids dangerous extremes. 48
It is surely no coincidence that in Piramus the almond tree is associated with the
heroine, who not only arrives first at the rendez-vous, but also sets in train the whole
tragic course of events with her impulsive plan to leave the city. The hero, on the other
hand, is inextricably linked to the mulberry whose fruit is permanently coloured by his
blood (there is no mention of Tisbé’s blood spattering the tree when she stabs herself).
His lateness leads to the fatal misunderstanding about the wimple, but he was also slow
to spot the hole in the wall, and signally failed to take the initiative at any stage in the
unravelling of the story. Ironically, the roles are reversed in the very last scenes of the
narrative: Piramus concludes too hastily that Tisbé is dead, and kills himself before she
reappears, while she waits too long before returning to the spring, out of fear of the lion
(vv. 690-93), and so arrives too late to prevent him taking his own life. The implication
for the audience is clear: where love is concerned, the correct path lies between almond
and mulberry. Amor is a powerful and dangerous force, to be approached with caution
and due regard for mesure. Combined with feminine indiscretion, masculine inertia, and
adolescent impetuosity, it can have terrible consequences.
The Question of Suicide
The nature of those consequences also takes on a new significance in the transition from
Ovidian tale to courtly narrative. In Ovid’s society, suicide was not regarded as
transgressive; indeed, it was often regarded as an honourable response to an intolerable
situation. In the Christian Middle Ages, the situation was very different: suicide was a
sin for which there was no forgiveness, ‘the ultimate act of religious defiance [that]
renders the suicide God’s enemy’. 49 It was also, according to St Augustine, contrary to
47 This second interpretation was probably encouraged by the fact that morus in Latin meant both a
mulberry tree and a fool or simpleton. It is interesting to speculate whether the portrayal of Piramus was
also influenced by this second meaning of the name of the tree with which he became associated.
48 See Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, 2nd edn (Amsterdam & London: North-Holland,
1976), and Gertrude Jones, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols (New York: Scarecrow Press,
1961).
49 Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), I, p. 12.
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