P. 12. _Boccaccio_, Giovanni (1313-1375), Italian poet and novelist. Among the English his best known work is the "Decameron," a collection of a hundred prose tales. Versions of some of these stories appeared in various Elizabethan collections, such as the "Tragical Tales" translated by George Turberville in 1587. The first complete translation was published in 1620 and reprinted in the Tudor Translations in 1909. _Petrarch_ (1304-1374), Italian humanist and poet, whose sonnets were widely imitated by French and Italian poets during the Renaissance. _Dante_ (1265-1321). The author of the "Divine Comedy" was not very well known to Elizabethan readers. There was no English translation of his poem attempted till that of Rogers in 1782, and no version worthy of the name was produced till H. F. Cary's in 1814. _Aretine_. The name of Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), an Italian satirist who called himself "the scourge of princes," was well known in England, but there was no translation of his works. _Machiavel_. Nicolo Machiavelli (1468-1527), a Florentine statesman, whose name had an odious association because of the supposedly diabolical policy of government set forth in his "Prince." But this work was not translated till 1640. His "Art of War" had been rendered into English in 1560 and his "Florentine History" in 1595. _Castiglione_, Baldassare (1478-1529). "Il Cortegiano," setting forth the idea of a gentleman, was translated as "The Courtier" by Thomas Hoby in 1561 and was very influential in English life. _Ronsard_, Pierre de (1524-1585), the chief French lyric poet of the sixteenth century, whose sonnets had considerable vogue in England. _Du Bartas_, Guillaume de Saluste (1544-1590), author of "La Semaine, ou la Creation du Monde" (1578), "La Seconde Semaine" (1584), translated as the "Divine Weeks and Works" (1592 ff.) by Joshua Sylvester. P. 13. _Fortunate fields_. "Paradise Lost," III, 568. _Prospero's Enchanted Island_. Eden's "History of Travayle," 1577, is now given as the probable source of Setebos, etc. _Right well I wote_. "Faerie Queene," II, Introduction, 1-3. P. 14. _Lear is founded_. Shakespeare's actual sources were probably Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain" (c. 1130) and Holinshed's "Chronicle." _Othello on an Italian novel_, from the "Hecatommithi" of Giraldi Cinthio (1565). _Hamlet on a Danish, Macbeth on a Scottish tradition_. The story of Hamlet is first found in Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish chronicler of the tenth century. Shakespeare probably drew it from the "Histoires Tragiques" of Belleforest. "Macbeth" was based on Holinshed's "Chronicle of Scottish History." P. 15. _those bodiless creations_. "Hamlet," iii, 4, 138. _Your face_. "Macbeth," i, 5, 63. _Tyrrell and Forrest_, persons hired by Richard III to murder the young princes in the Tower. See "Richard III," iv, 2-3. _thick and slab_. "Macbeth," iv, 1, 32.