Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Thisbe.
The gallery
Thisbe
John William Waterhouse, 1909
Waterhouse's Thisbe listens at the crack in the wall — Pre-Raphaelite stillness for Ovid's Babylonian maiden who loved through a chink her fathers could not close.
Thisbe
Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1872–1876
Burne-Jones' Birmingham panel isolates Thisbe at the wall — part of his Pyramus and Thisbe cycle, the maiden framed as patient listener before the mulberry tragedy.
Thisbe (Sarjeant Gallery)
Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1860s–1870s
Another Burne-Jones Thisbe in the Sarjeant Gallery — the same Ovidian heroine as solitary figure, cloak and wall, waiting for a voice that will not save her.
Thisbe and Pyramus (House of Dionysos mosaic)
Unknown (Roman), c. 2nd–3rd century AD
Floor mosaic from the House of Dionysos: Thisbe and Pyramus with the lion and mulberry already in the scene — Ovid's lovers as Roman domestic pavement myth.
In play
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book IV — the wall, the lioness, the sword, and the mulberry stained forever: Thisbe's defining telling.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
Flute as Thisbe — Shakespeare's mechanicals turn the Babylonian maiden into the funniest tragic heroine on stage.
The Legend of Good Women
Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's Thisbe among the good women — medieval English reception of Ovid's wall-split romance.
Pyramus and Thisbe
The maiden who fled a lioness and died on her lover's sword — Ovid's template for tragic misunderstanding.