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