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.
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