There is ground for believing it possible that Shakespeare may have used the original murder as part of the groundwork of his _Othello_. If we compare the dates and glance at the history of Italian literature, we may reasonably conclude that Shakespeare, after perhaps planning his tragedy on a tale of Giraldi’s, was much struck by the details of Sanudo’s crime, and especially by the murderer’s wish that his wife should confess before dying. Mr. Rawdon Brown supposed the poet to have used another incident, related by Marin Sanudo in his voluminous journal, but the hypothesis involves an anachronism. _Othello_ is thought by good authorities to have been first played in London in the autumn of 1602, only a few months after the crime in the Giudecca; whereas Mr. Rawdon Brown’s heroine was not murdered until thirteen years later. The legend of the Fornaretto belongs to the beginning of the sixteenth century, a hundred years earlier. Travellers will remember being told by their guides how a poor little baker’s boy, who was carrying bread to a customer on a January morning in 1507, stumbled over the body of a noble who had been stabbed by an unknown hand. The sheath of the dagger lay on the pavement, and the boy was imprudent enough to pick it up and put it into his pocket, for it was richly damascened and very handsome. The police found it upon him, it was considered to be conducive circumstantial evidence, the poor boy confessed under torture that he had committed the crime, and he was hanged on his own confession. A few days later the real murderer was arrested and convicted; and thereafter, in recollection of the tragic injustice that had been done, whenever the magistrates were about to pass a sentence of death, they were admonished to remember the poor Fornaretto. By way of making the story more complete, the guide usually adds that the little lamp which always burns before an image of the Blessed Virgin on one side of the Basilica was lighted as an offering in expiation of the judicial murder, and that it is for the same reason that a bell is rung during twenty minutes on the anniversary of the baker boy’s execution. Strangely enough, there is hardly a word of truth in this story. The only record in the archives of the Ten which faintly suggests it is the trial and execution of a baker named Pietro Fusiol, who had murdered a man of the people in January 1507, and there is no reference to any mistake on the part of the court. The ringing of the bell and the little lamp which burns day and night before the image, are a sort of _ex voto_ offerings left by certain seamen in recollection of a terrible storm from which they escaped. I pass on to speak of the political prisoners of the Republic, who were not by any means all treated alike, since some of them were confined in places of tolerable comfort, whereas others were treated little better than common criminals. [Sidenote: _Dr. Heinrich Thode, Der Ring des Frangipane._]