the Elizabethan dramatists would have been equally ready to tell of English vice and criminality. They used Holinshed and Fabyan readily enough for their “Histories.” They would have used an English Bandello with equal readiness had he existed. But an English Bandello could not have existed at a time when the English folk had not arrived at self-consciousness, and had besides no regular school of tale-tellers like the Italians. It was then only from the Italians that the Elizabethan dramatists could have got a sufficient stock of plots to allow for that interweaving of many actions into one which is the characteristic of the Romantic Drama of Marlowe and his compeers. [Footnote 19: A partial exception is to be made in favour of the Spanish school, which broke loose from the classical tradition with Lope de Vega.] [Footnote 20: It is probable however that the “mixture of tones” came more directly from the Interludes.] [Footnote 21: _Euphorion_, by Vernon Lee. Second edition, 1885, pp. 55-108.] [Footnote 22: It has, of course, been suggested that Shakespeare visited Venice. But this is only one of the 1001 mare’s nests of the commentators.] That Painter was the main source of plot for the dramatists before Marlowe, we have explicit evidence. Of the very few extant dramas before Marlowe, _Appius and Virginia_, _Tancred and Gismunda,_ and _Cyrus and Panthea_ are derived from Painter.[23] We have also references in contemporary literature showing the great impression made by Painter’s book on the opponents of the stage. In 1572 E. Dering, in the Epistle prefixed to _A briefe Instruction_, says: “To this purpose we have gotten our Songs and Sonnets, our Palaces of Pleasure, our unchaste Fables and Tragedies, and such like sorceries.... O that there were among us some zealous Ephesian, that books of so great vanity might be burned up.” As early as 1579 Gosson began in his _School of Abuse_ the crusade against stage-plays, which culminated in Prynne’s _Histriomastix_. He was answered by Lodge in his _Defence of Stage Plays_. Gosson demurred to Lodge in 1580 with his _Playes Confuted in Five Actions_, and in this he expressly mentions Painter’s _Palace of Pleasure_ among the “bawdie comedies” that had been “ransacked” to supply the plots of plays. Unfortunately very few even of the titles of these early plays are extant: they probably only existed as prompt-books for stage-managers, and were not of sufficient literary value to be printed when the marriage of Drama and Literature occurred with Marlowe. [Footnote 23: Altogether in the scanty notices of this period we can trace a dozen derivatives of Painter. See Analytical Table on Tome I. nov. iii., v., xi., xxxvii., xxxix., xl., xlviii., lvii.; Tome II. nov. i., iii., xiv., xxxiv.]