the lovers by a quarrel between their fathers, a detail that probably underlies the Romeo
and Juliet story.
Narcisse, just over 1,000 lines long and preserved in four manuscripts, develops
Ovid’s story of the youth who scorns the love of the nymph Echo and many others, one
of whom prays that he himself may suffer unrequited love. Seeing his reflection in a pool,
Narcisse falls in love with himself, wastes away, and dies. The French poem concentrates
narratively and psychologically on the anonymous girl, giving her a name, Dané, and
letting her take the place of Echo (whose role is reduced to echoing Narcisse’s cries).
Dané, like Tisbé, decides to die after Narcisse. This poem, too, is written in a richly
rhetorical style, with far more emphasis on motivation than in Ovid’s version.
In his prologue to Cligés, among other Ovidiana he claims to have written, Chrétien de
Troyes mentions the subject of Philomena. This work appears to survive only in the
Ovide moralisé, where it is attributed to “Chrestiiens li Gois.” The story (1,468 lines),
related with all Chrétien’s psychological insight and technical skill, tells of the illicit love
of King Tereus for Philomena (Philomela in Ovid), sister of his wife, Progné. Having
persuaded their father, King Pandion, to let him take Philomena over the sea to visit her
sister, Tereus rapes her and cuts out her tongue to prevent her accusations; she
embroiders her story on a tapestry that she sends to Progné. The latter rescues Philomena,
kills her own son, Itis, and serves his cooked body to her husband. When Tereus seeks to
avenge himself, he is miraculously transformed into a hoopoe, Progné into a swallow,
and Philomena into a nightingale. The story is reasonably close to Ovid but, again, much
expanded, especially in the physical description of Philomena, in analysis of feelings, and
in dialogue.
The three surviving tales and the Piramus fragment no doubt represent a small fraction
of the production of such poems, reworkings of the Metamorphoses in the romance style
of the 12th century.
Wolfgang G. van Emden
[See also: ANTIQUITY, ROMANCES OF; IDYLLIC ROMANCE; LAI,
NARRATIVE; OVID, INFLUENCE OF; OVIDE MORALISÉ
Branciforti, Francesco, ed. Piramus et Tisbé. Florence: Olschki, 1959.
Chrétien de Troyes. Philomena, conte raconté d’après Ovide, ed. Cornelius de Boer. Paris:
Geuthner, 1909.
Cormier, Raymond, ed. and trans. Three Ovidian Tales of Love (Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisus et
Dané, and Philomena et Procné). New York: Garland, 1986.
Thiry-Stassin, Martine, and Madeleine Tyssens, eds. Narcisse, conte ovidien français du XIIe
siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976.
Cadot, A.M. “Du récit mythique au roman: étude sur Piramus et Tisbé.” Romania 97 (1976):433–
61.
van Emden, Wolfgang G. “A Fragment of an Old French Poem in Octosyllables on the Subject of
Pyramus and Thisbe.” In Medieval French Textual Studies in Memoiy of T.B.W.Reid, ed. Ian
Short. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1984, pp. 239–53.
Vinge, Louise. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century.
Lund: Gleerup, 1968.
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