Metamorphoseon libri (Metamorphoses) influenced Romeo and Juliet

The plot arrives from Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe by a traceable route: two lovers from neighbouring households forbidden to meet, a plan to escape by night, a misread sign, and a double suicide in which each dies believing the other already dead. Shakespeare's immediate source was Arthur Brooke's poem of 1562, which took the story from an Italian line of novellas that had been reworking the Ovidian tale for a century. He knew the original too, and staged it as the mechanicals' farce in A Midsummer Night's Dream at about the same time, which is a fair indication of how present it was to him.