recent date, that among the novelle of Massuccio of Salerno (1476), which narrates the loves of Mariotto Mignanelli and Giannozza Saraceni of Siena, has a sufficient number of points of resemblance to Romeo and Juliet to warrant our placing it in the genealogy of the drama. The lovers are secretly married by a Friar; Mariotto quarrels with a citizen of note, strikes him a fatal blow with a stick, is exiled, and flies from Siena to Alexandria. The father of Giannozza urges her to marriage with a suitor of his choice; she resolves to feign herself dead, and the Friar provides the sleeping potion; she is buried in the church of St. Augustine; is delivered from the tomb by the Friar, and sails for Alexandria disguised as a monk. The messenger whom she had despatched with letters to her husband is captured by pirates; Mariotto hears of her death; in the garb of a pilgrim visits her tomb, which he attempts to open; is seized, condemned, and beheaded. Giannozza returns from Alexandria to Siena, and in a convent the brokenhearted wife dies.

Some fifty years after the publication of Massuccio's tale Luigi Da Porto wrote his Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili Amanti, and here the scene is Verona, and the lovers are named Romeo and Giulietta.

the portion which has some resemblance to the story of Juliet will be found in pp. 124-139. In the anonymous play, How a Man may choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602), which is founded on a novel (Decade III., Novella v.) of Cinthio's Hecatommithi, the incidents of an opiate given for poison to a young wife by her faithless husband, her burial, and revival in the coffin, are turned to comic uses. It is perhaps worth noting that here, as in Romeo and Juliet, the sale of poisons is spoken of as illegal :

some covetous slave for coyne, Will sell it him, though it be held by law, To be no better than flat fellony.

1

Da Porto's novel was published posthumously at Venice without date, about the year 1530. It is substantially the story familiar to us, but there are variations in detail, and certain personages of the drama are wanting. Romeo masks not as a pilgrim but as a nymph; the lovers touch hands and whisper their passion in the torch-dance; the wooing and winning are not swiftly accomplished; the sentence of banishment is not pronounced until after some happy bridal days and nights have followed the secret marriage; the nurse has not yet appeared in the story; for Paris we have here the Count of Lodrone; Juliet awakens from her drugged sleep in the tomb before the poison has quite overcrowed the spirit of her husband, and a dialogue ensues, the motive of which has been idealised and exalted in the opera of Gounod. This form of the tragic scene was unknown to Shakespeare, who could have conveyed into it the beauty and dignity of passion; when Otway, and subsequently Garrick, with Otway as his guide, varied from the Shakespearian close, they struck false notes and fell into the phrases of convention and pseudopathos.2

Adrian Sevin's French transformation of the story of Romeo and Juliet into the story of Halquadrich and Burglipha (1542) has little interest, and does not take a place in the direct line of the development of the tale

1 The reader will find both the Italian text and an English translation in The Original Story of Romeo and Juliet, by G. Pace-Sanfelice, 1868. Mr. Rolfe has reproduced Brydges' rare translation, with the addition of omitted passages: Juliet and Romeo, Boston, 1895. For short accounts, see Daniel or my article already mentioned.

2 It is needless here to give any account of Otway's strange appropriation and transformation of Shakespeare's play in his Caius Marius.

b

from Da Porto to Shakespeare. Nor does there appear to be, except through a certain influence exercised on Bandello, any real connection between Shakespeare's tragedy and the poem in ottava rima published at Venice in 1553, possibly the work of Gherardo Bolderi assuming the name of Clitia or Clizia. It will be found in Torri's volume already mentioned. Mr. Daniel points out certain variations from Da Porto, of which the most interesting is that here for the first time Tebaldo's death is supposed by Lady Capulet to be the cause of Juliet's grief. An attempt was made by J. C. Walker, in his Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy, 1799 (pp. 49–64), to show that Shakespeare had utilised to some extent as a source the Hadriana, a tragedy of the year 1578, by the blind poet Luigi Groto. The loves of Latino and Hadriana are unquestionably derived in part from the loves of Da Porto's Romeo and Giulietta; but Mr. Daniel, who gives a complete analysis of the play, is right in saying that the resemblances between La Hadriana and Shakespeare's tragedy are rather to be sought in special passages than in the general conduct of the two plays. Following Walker and Lloyd, and adding to their enumeration, he notices the song of the nightingale when the lovers part, the description of the effects of the opiate, the consolation offered to the father on the supposed death of his daughter, and other seeming points of contact; yet, although Groto was known in England in Shakespeare's time, Mr. Daniel's conclusion is expressed in the words: "Notwithstanding these resemblances, I find it difficult to believe that Shakespeare could have made use of Groto's

play' a conclusion with which I am in entire agreement.

Bandello's novel, of which Boisteau's is a translation, stands of course in the direct line of the ancestry of Romeo and Juliet. It appeared among his novelle published at Lucca in 1554. Referring the reader to Mr. Daniel's more detailed account of the points in common between Bandello and Shakespeare, I may quote what I have elsewhere written: "Bandello dwells on Romeo's amorous fancy for a hard-hearted mistressShakespeare's Rosaline-to which Da Porto only alludes. An elder friend-Shakespeare's Benvolio-advises the enamoured youth to 'examine other beauties,' and to subdue his passion. Romeo enters Capulet's mansion disguised, but no longer as a nymph. The Count of Lodrone is now first known as Paris. The ladder of ropes is now first mentioned. The sleeping potion is taken by Juliet, not in presence of her chamber-maid and aunt, but in solitude. Friar Lorenzo's messenger to Mantua fails to deliver the letter because he is detained in a house suspected of being stricken with plague. In particular we owe to Bandello the figure of the nurse, not Shakespeare's humorous creation, but a friendly old woman, who very willingly plays her part of go-between for the lovers. One more development and all the materials of Shakespeare's play are in full formation. From Bandello's mention of one Spolentino of Mantua, from whom Romeo procures the poison, Pierre Boisteau creates the episode of the Apothecary, and it is also to this French refashioner of the story that we must trace the Shakespearian close; with him, Juliet does not wake

from her sleep until Romeo has ceased to breathe; and she dies, as in our tragedy, not in a paroxysm of grief, but by her own hand, armed with her husband's dagger." 1

The Quartos and Folios do not divide Romeo and Juliet into acts and scenes. Mr. Daniel suggests that Act III. should end with scene iv., making Act IV. begin with the parting of the lovers. The interposition," he writes, " of the short scene iv. alone, between the arrangement made at the Friar's Cell for the meeting of the lovers and the scene in which they part, does not give a sufficiently marked interval for the occurrence of all the events which are supposed to have passed in the interim moreover the addition of scene v. to Act III. has the disadvantage of making that act inordinately long. Capell made the division I here suggest; but his example does not appear to have been followed by any subsequent editor." The suggestion seems to me well worthy of consideration, and I may call attention to the fact that in QI the first of those ornamental dividing marks which appear on several of the later pages occurs at this point. The same ornamental division occurs in the scene of the lovers' parting at the entrance of Juliet's mother, and, I think, it was intended that there should here be a change of scene. It appears again at the close of our present Act III., at the close of IV. i., the close of IV. ii.,

1 Transcripts and Studies, pp. 389-390. To the study from which I quote I may refer the reader for an account of Lope de Vega's Castelvines y Monteses and of Los Bandos de Verona, by Francisco de Rojas y Zorrilla (both of which may be read in privately printed translations by Mr. F. W. Cosens). The strange conjunction of Shakespeare's lovers with Dante's Ugolino in the Roméo et Juliette of Ducis is also noticed in the same study.