[Footnote 538: The royal Henries. Among the dramas popular in Shakespeare's day which he retouched or rewrote are the historical plays. Henry IV., First and Second Parts; Henry V; Henry VI., First, Second, and Third Parts; and Henry VIII.] [Footnote 539: Italian tales. Italian literature was very popular in Shakespeare's day, and authors drew freely from it for material, especially from the _Decameron_, a famous collection of a hundred tales, by Boccaccio, a poet of the fourteenth century.] [Footnote 540: Spanish voyages. In the sixteenth century, Spain was still a power upon the high seas, and the tales of her conquests and treasures in the New World were like tales of romance.] [Footnote 541: Prestige. Can you give an English equivalent for this French word?] [Footnote 542: Which no single genius, etc. In the same way, some critics assure us, the poems credited to the Greek poet, Homer, were built up by a number of poets.] [Footnote 543: Malone. An Irish critic and scholar of the eighteenth century, best known by his edition of Shakespeare's plays.] [Footnote 544: Wolsey's Soliloquy. See Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._ III, 2. Cardinal Wolsey was prime minister of England in the reign of Henry VIII.] [Footnote 545: Scene with Cromwell. See _Henry VIII._ III, 2. Thomas Cromwell was the son of an English blacksmith; he rose to be lord high chamberlain of England in the reign of Henry VIII., but, incurring the King's displeasure, was executed on a charge of treason.] [Footnote 546: Account of the coronation. See _Henry VIII._ IV, 1.] [Footnote 547: Compliment to Queen Elizabeth. See _Henry VIII._ V, 5.] [Footnote 548: Bad rhythm. Too much importance must not be attached to these matters in deciding authorship, as critics disagree about them.] [Footnote 549: Value his memory, etc. The Greeks, in appreciation of the value of memory to the poet, represented the Muses as the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.] [Footnote 550: Homer. A Greek poet to whom is assigned the authorship of the two greatest Greek poems, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; he is said to have lived about a thousand years before Christ.] [Footnote 551: Chaucer. (See note 33.)] [Footnote 552: Saadi. A Persian poet, supposed to have lived in the thirteenth century. His best known poems are his odes.] [Footnote 553: Presenting Thebes, etc. This quotation is from Milton's poem, _Il Penseroso_. Milton here names the three most popular subjects of Greek tragedy,--the story of Oedipus, the ill-fated King of Thebes who slew his father; the tale of the descendants of Pelops, King of Pisa, who seemed born to woe--Agamemnon was one of his grandsons; the third subject was the tale of Troy and the heroes of the Trojan war,--called "divine" because the Greeks represented even the gods as taking part in the contest.] [Footnote 554: Pope. (See note 88.)] [Footnote 555: Dryden. (See note 35.)]