Strange rules and compacts are imposed, strange understandings come to, such as the winning of husband or wife upon the solution of an enigma, or upon the discovery of some object; then there is the bet as to the virtue of a woman, won with a trick by the punster or by the perfidious accuser; the betrothed or unwilling husband, finally obtained by the substitution of another person; there are miraculous events, dreams, magical arts, work of spirits of earth and sky ... Men and women are tossed from land to sea, from city to forest and desert, from court to country, from a civil and cultured, to a rustic and simple life. These latter situations are peculiar to romance in the form of the idyll, which is really the most romantic of romanticisms, though it may seem to be the opposite. This is so true that even Don Quixote, when he saw the way closed for the time being to the performance of chivalrous feats of knight errantry, thought of retiring to the country, there to pasture herds and to pipe songs to the beloved, in the company of Sancho Panza. Several of Shakespeare's plays derive both plot and material from suchlike things and persons, as for instance, _As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure._ These plays may be said to be altogether or in part, of literary origin, or suggested by books, in a sense different from that in which Shakespeare treated the other plays, where, although not bookish, he gathered his raw materials from the English chroniclers, from ancient historians, or Italian novelists, breathing upon it a new spirit and thus making of it something altogether new to the world. Here on the other hand, he found the spirit itself, the general sentiment, in the literature of his time. Italy had worked upon the ancient poetry of Greece and Rome, upon Hellenistic and Byzantine romances, upon mediaeval romances, upon poems and plays, novels and comedies, and with Italy was also Spain, whose _Amadigi_ and _Diane_ were known throughout Europe. The genesis of these themes and of his attraction towards them, is to be sought, therefore, rather in the times than in Shakespeare himself, and for this reason we shall not delay our progress, to show how the play of sentiment within made dear to him that wandering away in imagination to the idyllic life of the country, far from pomp and artifice, the deceits and the delusions of courts; though this idyllic life itself became in its turn refined and artificial at his hand, a pastoral theme. It is important to note, too, that all the above-mentioned material of situations and adventures had already been fashioned and arranged for the theatre, in the course of the second half of the century. This was especially due to the Italian theatre of improvisation or of "art," as it was called. This literature, so often