has stood some very severe things
about the Bible, which is even yet reckoned of higher sanctity than
Shakespeare. And certainly there is as much cant about Shakespeare to be
cleared away as about the Bible. However this is scarcely the place to
do it. It is clear enough, however, from his usage of Painter, that
Shakespeare was no more original in plot than any of his fellows, and it
is only the unwise and rash who could ask for originality in plot from a
dramatic artist.

[Footnote 27: The other Elizabethan dramatists who used Painter
are: Beaumont (I. xlii.; II. xvii.), Fletcher (I. xlii.; II. xvii.,
xxii.), Greene (I. lvii.), Heywood (I. ii.), Marston (I. lxvi.;
II. vii., xxiv., xxvi.), Massinger (II. xxviii.), Middleton
(I. xxxiii.), Peele (I. xl.), Shirley (I. lviii.), Webster (I. v.;
II. xxiii.). See also I. vii., xxiv., lxvi.]

[Footnote 28: Shakespeare also used Arthur Brook's poem. On the
exact relations of the poet to his two sources see Mr. P. A.
Daniel in the New Shakespere Society's _Originals and Analogies_,
i., and Dr. Schulze in _Jahrb. d. deutsch. Shakespeare
Gesellschaft_ xi. 218-20.]

[Footnote 29: Delius has discussed _Shakespeare's "All Well" und
Paynter's "Giletta von Narbonne"_ in the Jahrbuch xxii. 27-44,
in an article which is also reprinted in his _Abhandlungen_ ii.]

[Footnote 30: I hope to publish elsewhere detailed substantiation
of this contention.]

But if the use of Italian _novelle_ as the basis of plots was an evil
that has given an air of unreality and extraneousness to the whole of
Elizabethan Tragedy, it was, as we must repeat, a necessary evil.
Suppose Painter's work and those that followed it not to have appeared,
where would the dramatists have found their plots? There was nothing in
English literature to have given them plot-material, and little signs
that such a set of tales could be derived from the tragedies going on in
daily life. But for Painter and his school the Elizabethan Drama would
have been mainly historical, and its tragedies would have been either
vamped-up versions of classical tales or adaptations of contemporary
_causes celebres_.

And so we have achieved the task set before us in this Introduction to
Painter's tales. We have given the previous history of the _genre_ of
literature to which they belong, and mentioned the chief _novellieri_
who were their original authors. We have given some ac