FLUTE O sisters three,
Come, come to me,
With hands as pale as milk;
Lay them in gore,
Since you have shore
With shears his thread of silk.
Tongue, not a word.
Come, trusty sword,
Come, blade, my breast imbrue.
[Stabs herself.]
And farewell, friends;
Thus Thisbe ends.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. [Dies.] (5.1.329-340)
And suddenly Thisbe’s speech comes into focus with odd, vivid pathos: O sisters three—she invokes the classical Fates, who spin and wind and cut the thread of life—but it can also seem an appeal to the other three women onstage, Hippolyta and the completely silent Hermia and Helena, a little moment of solidarity among women. Come, come to me, with hands as pale as milk—homely, but resonant, no point crying over spilt, as well as white—and a weird, unsettling contrast with lay them in gore, blood and milk, that’s tragedy, people. Since you have shore with shears his thread of silk. You’ve cut the thread of Pyramus’s life, a silken thread, unlike the hempen homespun or even the good wool which Bottom presumably weaves; so fragile, fine and delicate. (A tiny Ovidian observation: in the Metamorphoses, Pyramus’s blood dyes the fruit of the mulberry tree next to Ninus’s tomb, from white to purple. Mulberry leaves are the food of silkworms.) Tongue, not a word. No more talking. Come, trusty sword—and yes, there can be comedy as Thisbe has to retrieve Pyramus’s sword from wherever it’s currently lodged—come, blade, my breast imbrue. Unlike Pyramus—and like Juliet—it’s a fast death, a single wound. And farewell, friends—again, it can be a direct appeal to the watching lovers, particularly the women?—Thus Thisbe ends. That’s it, no more. Adieu, adieu, adieu: and that is bathetic, the repetition, but also a final romantic gesture, the elevated French, but in the English pronunciation for the sake of the rhyme…
EVERYTHING is in Pyramus and Thisbe. It is SO close to Romeo and Juliet and is surely a playwright demonstrating that, if he just shifts the dial a couple of degrees, he can flip tragedy to comedy and back again…
And within the same scenario he can create such distinctive people. Hermia and Juliet are both caught up in the Thisbe story yet they are not the same. As Hermia escapes with Lysander by moonlight I can’t imagine her taking her own life if she were to find Lysander dead. More likely, Hermia would face death if there was a principle involved, as in the first Act. She is much more like an Antigone, and, and perhaps this goes together, she doesn’t have Juliet’s brilliance of imagination, except for that one extraordinary image of the moon passing through the Earth.