“Romeo and Juliet" and its Intertexts

It sometimes happens that texts generally categorized as sources for a Shakespearean play are in fact so overtly invoked by the work itself that they should be regarded not only as genealogical antecedents or imaginative influences but as implicit intertexts in relation to which it elaborates its own meanings. Such is the case with some of the works inspiring Romeo and Juliet, and in particular with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This tragic little tale is frequently cited as being that from which Romeo and Juliet ultimately derives, and what is of considerable interest in this connection is that it is also explicitly referenced in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that might in certain respects be read as a comic pendant to Shakespeare’s Veronese tragedy and indeed as a kind of intertext in its own right. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is however one that has appeared in a variety of guises in the course of the centuries, and to the degree that these versions are also echoed in Romeo and Juliet they too might be considered to constitute intertexts in the broadest sense of the term.