The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream'

r interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe is derived from a well-known classical story. Shakespeare draws them from life, and from his

n Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot," where we may suppose him to have made merry w

e base or foundation of the reel. The names of his comrades have no specific connection with the trades

scredit) 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 int

legend of the reappearance of one of the Popes, a hundred years after his de

n 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 th

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

print in Italy, and continued to be popular in ch

MS. is a Cambridge commonplace book of about 1630, containing poems attributed to Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh and others, though the greater portion of the contents appear to be topical verses and epigrams unsigned. Am

he whole is quite short. The characters consist of Iphidius, father of Pyramus; Labetrus, father of Thisbe; their children, the protagonists; their respective servants,

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