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.
In his commentary on
A Midsummer-Night's Dream
in the larger Temple Shakespeare, Professor Gollancz points out the existence of a Pyramus and Thisbe play, discovered by him in a manuscript at the British Museum.