The Transformation of Bottom 
By John Robert Moore, Associate Professor of English 
in Indiana University 
For students of A Midsummer Night’s Dream who remain 
unsatisfied with such explanations as Schlegel’s, that “the 
droll wonder of Bottom’s transformation is merely the trans- 
lation of a metaphor in its literal sense,” it is customary to 
seek out analogues for the weaver’s experience in the litera- 
ture and oral tradition of magic and witchcraft. In the 
present paper it is my purpose to show that altho the widely 
accepted doctrine of the possible transformation of man into 
the likeness of an ass was no doubt familiar to Shakespeare, 1 
as well as to his audience, the actual performance of the feat 
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream owes much to the stage con- 
ventions of the later moralities and interludes. 
Many of the stories or instructions concerning magical 
practice which have been cited as possible source-material for 
the play have no direct relation to the transformation of 
Bottom, except in so far as they attest a widespread popular 
curiosity in occult matters of the sort. The hero of Apuleius 
was not crowned with an ass’s head, but was entirely trans- 
formed; and the change was not effected without his knowl- 
edge by an unseen spirit, but was due to his own unlucky 
use of the wrong ointment, as he was in the act of attempting 
to assume the likeness of a bird. The young Englishman in 
the kingdom of Cyprus, whose story is retold from Bodin by 
Reginald Scot ( The Discoverie of Witchcraft , 1584, Book V, 
chap, iii), was at first unconscious of his transformation by 
the witch, but he soon discovered his misfortune. He, too, 
was completely changed into the physical likeness of an ass, 
so perfectly that during the three years of his servitude only 
the witches were able to recognize him as a man. Scot him- 
1 Frank Sidgwick remarks, in his discussion of the folk-lore of transformations, that 
“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 Sources and Analogues of “ A Mid- 
summer-Night’s Dream,” New York and London, 1908, p. 81. 
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