<P> In the 1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer, in his The Legend of Good Women, and John Gower, in his Confessio Amantis, were the first to tell the story in English . Gower altered the story somewhat into a cautionary tale . John Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes (1449) is another early English adaptation . </P> <P> The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet ultimately sprang from Ovid's story . Here the star - crossed lovers cannot be together because Juliet has been engaged by her parents to another man and the two families hold an ancient grudge . As in Pyramus and Thisbe, the mistaken belief in one lover's death leads to consecutive suicides . The earliest version of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1476 by Masuccio Salernitano, while it mostly obtained its present form when written down in 1524 by Luigi da Porto . Salernitano and Da Porto both are thought to have been inspired by Ovid and Boccaccio's writing . Shakespeare's most famous 1590s adaptation is a dramatization of Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, itself a translation of a French translation of Da Porto's novella . </P> <P> In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, sc 1), written in the 1590s, a group of "mechanicals" enact the story of "Pyramus and Thisbe". Their production is crude and, for the most part, badly done until the final monologues of Nick Bottom, as Pyramus and Francis Flute, as Thisbe . The theme of forbidden love is also present in A Midsummer Night's Dream (albeit a less tragic and dark representation) in that a girl, Hermia, is not able to marry the man she loves, Lysander, because her father Egeus despises him and wishes for her to marry Demetrius, and meanwhile Hermia and Lysander are confident that Helena is in love with Demetrius . </P> <P> Spanish poet Luis de Góngora wrote a Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe in 1618, while French poet Théophile de Viau wrote Les amours tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbée, a tragedy in five acts, in 1621 . </P>

Who plays thisby in midsummer night's dream