The episode of Bottom's "translation," or transformation into an ass, may have been suggested to Shakespeare by a passage in Reginald Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584)--a book with which he must have been acquainted, as we shall see in discussing the fairy-section of the play. Scot mentions the supposed power of witches to change men into animals, and quotes (in order to discredit) some recorded instances. Chief among these is the story[21] of an English sailor abroad, who got into the power of a witch and was transformed by her into an ass, so that when he attempted to rejoin his crew, he was beaten from the gangway with contempt. This will be found in the third chapter of Scot's fifth book: _Of a man turned into an asse, and returned againe into a man by one of Bodin's witches: S. Augustine's opinion thereof_. "Bodin" is Jean Bodin, who wrote a book _de Magorum Daemonomania_ (1581; a French version was published in the previous year), and mentions this story (lib. 2, cap. vi.). According to Scot, Bodin takes the story "out of _M. Mal._ [_Malleus Maleficarum_], which tale was delivered to _Sprenger_ by a knight of the Rhodes." Scot mentions further the famous story of the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius[22]; a legend of the reappearance of one of the Popes, a hundred years after his death, with an ass's head; and gives a charm to put an ass's head on a man.[23] From these instances a literary origin for Bottom's transformation seems probable but Shakespeare may himself have fallen in with a survival of the witch-superstition Almost while writing these words I receive first-hand evidence that such a tradition is not yet extinct in Welford-on-Avon, a village, four miles from Stratford, with which Shakespeare must have been perfectly familiar. The witch, as usual, was an old woman, credited with the "evil eye" and the power of causing the death of cattle and farm-stock by "overlooking" them; and the native of Welford, from whom the story was communicated to me, would be prepared to produce eye-witnesses of various transformations of the old woman into some kind of animal--transformations effected not only at Welford, but even in the centre of Stratford on market-day! Shakespeare had probably met with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in more than one form. Golding's translation in 1575 of the story in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_[24] is reprinted in this book[25]; Chaucer included the _Legend of Thisbe of Babylon_ as the second story in the _Legend of Good Women_; and there appears to have been also "a boke intituled Perymus and Thesbye," for which the Stationers' Register record the granting of a license in 1562. There is, too, a poem on the subject by I. Thomson in Robinson's _Handeful of Pleasant Delites_ (1584). The _Historia de Piramo e Tisbe_ was very early in print in Italy, and continued to be popular in chap-book form until the nineteenth century at least.