How A Midsummer Night’s Dream drew on The Golden Ass
A documented line of influence: William Shakespeare demonstrably engaged Apuleius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Golden Ass
Apuleius · c. 170
Ancient RomeThe influenced
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare · c. 1595
ShakespeareRelevance
6/10
On A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s page
- Bottom's ass-head and his night with Titania are a rework of Apuleius's man-turned-donkey, bedded by a noblewoman who can't get enough of the beast
- Shakespeare almost certainly knew it through Adlington's 1566 translation, whose phrases echo through his work
- The Golden Ass gives the Dream's strangest joke its pedigree — the transformation isn't whimsy, it's a 1,400-year-old comic inheritance
On The Golden Ass’s page
- The only Latin novel to survive whole — and the seed of Shakespeare's most famous transformation
- Lucius, turned into an ass, is taken to bed by a noblewoman who adores the beast; Shakespeare hands Bottom an ass-head and a doting queen of the fairies
- Adlington's 1566 English version put Apuleius within Shakespeare's reach — phrasings from it surface across his plays