The Abraham Cowley
Text and Image Archive
Liebestod and the Pissing Boy: Pyramus and Thisbe. From Ovidii Metamorphoses Illustratae, engr. Virgil
Solis (Frankfurt, 1563); editor's copy. Like Shakespeare (MND) and Ovid himself, the engraver at work here cannot resist treating the two storybook-lovers' deaths somewhat facetiously; click here for the Ovidian subtext (Met. 4.118-66) and see Ursula Härting, ed., Gärten und Höfe der Rubenszeit (Munich, 2001), 427-36, for some droll pissing-boy fountain analogues.
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