The story of the play is taken from the ninth novel of the third day in Boccaccio's "Decameron," of which there was a translation in William Painter's "Palace of Pleasure." With the heroine's name altered to Virginia, there was an early Italian play on this tale of Boccaccio's. It was first acted in Siena at the marriage of the Magnifico Antonio Spanocchi, and it was first printed at Florence. in 1513. Its author was Bernardo Accolti, who died in 1534, aged seventy-six. Shakespeare took Boccaccio's tale doubtless from Painter's translation of it. It could only be read as example of a truth still illustrated daily in the lives of men and women, expressed of old in a ballad, "Love will find out the way," and after Shakespeare's day expressed in a line of Lord Lyttelton's, which says that Love can hope where Reason would despair." Helena's love did not despair of achieving what her reason might have thought impossible. Her courage was at last rewarded, and Love's labour won.

But in the revision, with the change of title, Shakespeare may have wished to indicate the larger human truth of which the love tale was but a particular expression. Not in love only, but in all affairs of a man's life, right spirit and a firm resolve bent fearlessly upon the end that must be laboured for, may conquer difficulties that would seem to most men insurmountable. The end crowns the work : all's well that ends well for this world or for the next. When disappointment came in the expected hour of her success, Helena, labouring on, looked steadily to the end, saying, "All's well that ends well yet." Who has not constant experience of our habitual flinching from the means to a desired end, when the means are by fulfilment of what seem impossible conditions? Whoever under such conditions keeps the end in view, and fearlessly resolves, against all odds, to labour on for its attainment, sets many a weak head shaking at what nowadays is called

his optimism. When he succeeds, he is credited with. the luck that often comes to sanguine people. When he appears to fail, if it be really a good end that he has battled for, what is his loss, although he wait even until the next life before the end proves all was well?

Helena in this play has something to do that looks like an impossibility. She puts her whole heart into it, and does it. In the face of his feudal sense of rank, she wins Bertram, a ward of the king's, on his own ground united to her by his feudal lord. "Strange is it," says the king,

"Strange is it, that our bloods

Of colour, weight, and heat, poured all together
Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off
In differences so mighty."

From that success she is cast out, as it seems, for ever, by Bertram's refusal, though her husband, to live with her, unless she can perform impossibilities which he suggests only as a way of emphasizing his repudiation. With her heart in her work, and an end worth working for, she still finds the way to the end, undaunted by all show of lions in the path and all report of lions round the corner. That is obviously the gist of the tale; it is grounded on a universal truth, with fortitude of love for the particular example.

We may notice a phrase in an answer of the Clown's to the old Lord Lafeu near the close of the Fourth Act, the Clown being one of the added characters. He had been celebrating the devil as the Prince of this World, and adds, "I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for Pomp to enter: some that humble themselves may; but the many will be too chill and tender, and they'll be for the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire." It is but a step from that phrase to the Porter's in "Macbeth" of "The primrose way to the everlasting bonfire."

Characters added by Shakespeare to the tale, to vary and enlarge its action, are all contrived to give elevation to the character of Helena or show at its true worth the world she has to conquer. Not only are touches of womanly tenderness and self-respect made in the character itself to soften incidents that would admit of hard interpretation, but the Countess, Bertram's mother, is added to the story that she may take part with Helena against her son, and that her noble spirit of womanhood may, with a warm zeal, speak Helena's praise. The cheery Lord Lafeu, constant in admiration of her, brings experience of honourable age. to judgment of her worth; and Bertram's follower, Parolles (opposite to Lafeu as a young fop and fool, whom it stirs the old man's bile even to look upon, and who is foil also to the brave Bertram as a bragging coward), represents the sort of man who, while believed in and accepted as companion, can lead a true spirit astray. It is Parolles by whom Bertram is encouraged to spurn true love from his side; it is the same fop, braggart, coward, who is ready to become his pander to the false. Parolles is no part of the original tale. Shakespeare's additions, then, apart from other dramatic uses and all modifications of the tale, were clearly designed to support the character of Helena, by helping us to see dignity and worth in her love and a true heart in her labour.

Ado About
Nothing."

"Much Ado About Nothing" was first printed in quarto in the year 1600. In the register of the Stationers' Company, on the twenty-third of August, together "Much with the Second Part of "Henry IV.," it was entered to Andrew Wyse and William Aspley, for whom it was printed by Valentine Sims in the same year 1600. Meres's list of 1598 does not include "Much Ado About Nothing," and the "Henry IV." included in that list may have been only the First Part. The Second Part of "Henry IV.," therefore, may have been written

between 1589 and 1600, followed within the same period by "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Henry V." Of "Henry V." we have internal evidence that it was finished between April and September, 1559. These plays, therefore, evidently lie together in Shakespeare's course of work.

The chief characters in Shakespeare's comedy are Benedick and Beatrice; but the story of Hero, with which they are interwoven, provides all the action. There is, as we shall find, good reason for this in Shakespeare's conception of the play. The story of Hero is taken, with Shakespeare's variations, from one of Bandello's tales-his twenty-secondwherein the Signor Scipione Attellano narrates how the Signor Timbreo di Cardona, being with the King Piero (that is Pedro) of Aragon, in Messina, fell in love with Fenicia Lionata, and the various and fortunate accidents that happened before he took her for his wife. There is no known translation of this tale; but before 1600 there was in England a great demand for novels translated from the Italian. Bandello himself may have borrowed the ground-plan of his tale from Ariosto, whose story of Ariodantes and Geneura, beginning towards the close of the fourth canto of his "Orlando Furioso," extends over the fifth canto and into the beginning of the sixth. That part of the "Orlando Furioso" had been first published in 1515, nearly forty years before Bandello wrote his tale. We may regard, therefore, the story of the fraud practised against Hero as having its origin from Ariosto, in 1515, from whom Spenser adapted it as― in the abused lover-an image of intemperate haste, in the Second Book of his "Faerie Queene," the Book of Temperance. The tale of the Squire who was brought to mischief through Occasion, and made the victim of Furor, begins at the eighteenth stanza of the fourth canto of Spenser's Book of Temperance. Here, as in Ariosto and in Bandello, the deceiver is not a hard-natured Don John, as Shakespeare

wisely represents, but a bosom friend who slips into falsehood through a secret rivalry in love. Shakespeare's Hero is Spenser's Claribella, Shakespeare's Margaret is Spenser's Pryene, Don John is "Philemon, false faytour Philemon," and Claudio is Phedon; but Phedon in mad fury slew Claribella, poisoned Philemon, and was chasing Pryene when Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, saved him from Fury. And when he had told his tale,

"Said Guyon, Squire, sore have ye been diseased,

But all your hurts may soon through Temperance be eased."

Spenser took his tale from Ariosto, but one or two touches in it suggest that he may also have read Bandello, the dates of the several versions being, Ariosto, 1515; Bandello, 1554; Spenser, 1590. At a time when all the polite world of England read Italian tales, it is not unlikely that Shakespeare thought it worth while to pick up as much Italian as would enable him also to read them; but Sir John Harrington's translation of Ariosto appeared in 1591, a year after the publication of the first three cantos of the "Faerie Queene."

Bandello's tale was Ariosto's "Ariodantes and Geneura,” translated into an Italian prose romance of daily life, according to the custom of that skilful story-teller. It was Bandello's custom to connect incidents of his stories in a definite way with places and persons, and with actual historical events, which gave them an air of exact record; he was ingenious also in the invention of details that filled in the outline of his story and served well to realise its incidents. It was from Bandello only that Shakespeare could have taken Messina as the scene of his tale, Leonato as the name of Hero's father, and brought in Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon. This particular tale of Bandello's has not come down to us in an old translation, and there is no modern translation of it; but Bandello's stories were familiar in England. The

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