Metamorphoseon libri (Metamorphoses) influenced A Midsummer Night's Dream

The play within the play is Ovid. Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the mechanicals in the last act, is a tale from the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare plays it as farce. The frame is Ovidian too, and more deeply. Bottom is given an ass's head and is still himself inside it, which is the Metamorphoses' whole subject: a body changed by a power that is not interested in consent, and a mind left to cope. Elizabethan schoolboys read Ovid in Latin, and Shakespeare is quoting a text his audience knew.