been gathered, as it were, in the street, or at the Ordinary. INTROJohn Florio, too, with whose remarkable dictionary, Queen DUCTION Anna's New World of Words (1611), he was so familiarly acquainted, may have taught him much; while another informant, his fellow-actor, Robert Armin, must surely have contributed to his knowledge-himself a good Italian scholar, and one who had the signal honour afterwards of being left a sum of money under his friend Shakespeare's will, wherewith to buy himself a memorial ring. What more likely, then, than that Shakespeare should seek to supplement the information he had already gleaned by going to such a work as the Civile Conversation? It is even possible that John Florio himself may have been the one who suggested that he should do so.

I have attempted elsewhere to show that Shakespeare was well acquainted with Pettie's translation,1 and that he used his recollections of it with much freedom in many of his works; and although unwilling to dogmatise on such a subject, I suggest with some confidence that the parallels to which I am about to draw attention are so numerous, and are found so continuously through nearly the whole of Shakespeare's plays, that they cannot be accounted for on any rational basis of explanation without assuming that Shakespeare was a borrower from the Civile Conversation.

Professor Warwick Bond has already clearly shown the extensive use that Shakespeare made of Lyly's works; 2

1 See Nineteenth Century and After, Feb. 1904: 'A Forgotten Volume in Shakespeare's Library.'

* See Complete Works of John Lyly, 1902, vol. i.

INTRO- Mr. John M. Robertson has given many examples of the
DUCTION poet's borrowings from Montaigne; while Dr. A. W.

Ward has tabulated the numerous passages in which
Shakespeare's Shylock has followed Marlowe's Barabas.2

Illustrative commentaries on Shakespeare's works abound with quotations from earlier and contemporary writers, and many interesting parallels are pointed to with a view to showing that the national poet had made himself a debtor to authors, great and small, with whose works he had an opportunity of making himself acquainted; but, for all the erudition of the commentators in this direction, I think it would be difficult to name any one work, from which Shakespeare is supposed to have borrowed, that contains a larger number of suggestive parallels than Pettie's Civile Conversation.

6

Sir Walter Raleigh, in his highly interesting account of the Courtier, raises a question that many Shakespearian scholars must at times have put to themselves: Why did Shakespeare make so little use of that famous book? It has been described as the greatest Curtesy-Book in the world' it embraced all that was best in Italian society : the English version by Hoby was a veritable classic in our literature: it was lying ready within Shakespeare's reach, capable of supplying much of the information in which the young dramatist was deeply interested: it was talked of much, and praised wherever mentioned: and yet, as Professor Raleigh himself admits, it is not

1 See Montaigne and Shakespeare, 1909.

2 See History of English Dramatic Literature, 1899, i. 346.
3 Op. cit. p. lxxix.

clear that Shakespeare knew the Courtier '-meaning, of INTROcourse, that there is little of Hoby's translation to be met DUCTION with in the works of Shakespeare. Sir Walter refers to a few distantly similar thoughts which were shared by the two great writers, but attaches little importance to them; and the best reason he can suggest for this apparently unaccountable omission on Shakespeare's part is that perhaps the Courtier was a book too widely read to furnish comic surprises' in drama. One cannot help feeling that had Sir Walter known the Civile Conversation he would at once have recognised the stronger attraction that that volume must have had for Shakespeare, as a treatise on a less courtly kind of life, a life lived by folk of a more genuine, human, and everyday type, though one in which occasional glimpses of a higher society were not altogether excluded. In this respect it is a fact worthy of notice that the parallels I am about to cite are infinitely fewer from the Fourth Book than from any of the othersthat being the section which more closely approaches the character of Castiglione's work.

The Shakespeare plays here following are set out in alphabetical order.

All's Well that Ends Well.

At Act II. ii. 41 we read: I will be a fool in question, hoping to be the wiser by your answer.' While Pettie has Of the wise thou shalt learne to make thy selfe better, of fooles, to make thy selfe more advised' (Bk. 11. 117).

When the King reprimands Bertram for his unwillingness

INTRO- to marry the virtuous Helena on account of her lowly birth, DUCTION he says:

' that is honour's scorn

Which challenges itself as honour's born,

And is not like the sire.

(11. iii. 135-7.)

And Pettie gives us these halfe Gentlemen, who beeing

' not by nature indued with any vertue, make boast of the 'woorthinesse of their auncestours, are to be laughed at ' (Bk. 11. 177-8).

The King continues his speech with:

'honours thrive

When rather from our acts we them derive

Than our foregoers.'

(Ib. 137-9.)

6

And in the same spirit Pettie writes: not considering 'how we deserve no prayse for that, which God or Nature hath bestowed upon us, but only for that, which we purchace by our owne industry'; and again later: gentry by byrth costeth you nothing, but that you have it by succession, mary gentry by vertue you have gotten hardly, having first passed thorowe the pykes, and a 'thousande daungers' (Bk. 11. 178); and three pages later : 'Another Philosopher affirmeth likewise, that it is in vaine 'called gentry, whiche referring it selfe to the worthinesse ' of blood, is not ours, but others' (Bk. 11. 181).

In fact, in this speech of the King-about twenty lines in length-there is hardly a sentiment or sentence the prototype of which is not to be found in the Civile Conversation.

1 Preface to the Readers, p. 8.

As You Like It.

INTRO

In this play there are many striking echoes of Pettie's DUCTION work. To begin with, when Oliver dismisses the aged

Adam his words are: Get you with him, you old dog.' To which the old man replies: "Is " old dog " my reward? Most true. I have lost my teeth in your service' (1. i. 87-9). There is a singular similarity between this and a passage in Bk. iv. 119-20, where the question is raised as to who should go out so as to avoid having more than nine present at a banquet. An old Lord Cane, punning on his own name, suggests that the unprofitable Dogge' should be the one to leave. Another pleads for him as being likely to prove a watchfull keeper of this flocke.' 'I could yet barke,' replies the old man, but for my biting, or wounding, these Ladies esteeme not a rush, knowing, 'that by reason of my olde age, I have neither teethe in my mouth, nor strength in my pawes.'

6

6

Charles the wrestler, speaking of the exiled Duke and his companions, says they 'fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world' (1. i. 127). He means, of course, the golden age.' Pettie had also used the former phrase, the golden world being gone' (Bk. 111. 101). The very well known

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players :

And one man in his time plays many parts

(11. vii. 139 sqq.)

has been traced to many sources, both Latin and English. Shakespeare repeats the main idea in The Merchant of