Apuleius of Madaura, the rhetorician and neo-Platonic philosopher of the second century A.D., had a reputation in the Renaissance sufficiently great to have the Humanists, Vives and Erasmus, urge the study of his works for their logic and matter. Many poets and dramatists of the Elizabethan period, including Chapman, Dekker, Thomas Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, and Spenser, did read the one work of Apuleius which we still enjoy today, the Metamorphoses, a comic novel of bestial transformation ending in a religious conversion. The work was translated as The Golden Asse by William Adlington in 1566 and proved so popular that it went through four more editions before the end of the sixteenth century. In 1582 Gosson included the novel among those works which the dramatists were ransacking ‘to furnish the Playe houses in London’.