Rabelais's Gargantua is explicitly mentioned in _As You Like It_, III,
ii. 238, and the great humorist is possibly the inspirer of some of Sir
Andrew's nonsense in _Twelfth Night_, II. iii. 23. Many of the Sonnets
contain reminiscences of the French sonneteers of the sixteenth century,
and it is thought that in some cases Shakespeare shows direct
acquaintance with Ronsard. He was thus acquainted with the three
greatest French writers of his century, and French may well have been
the medium through which he reached authors in other languages.

[Page Heading: French and Italian]

The class of Italian literature with which Shakespeare shows most
acquaintance is that of the _novelle_, though there is no proof that he
could read the language. The _Decameron_ of Boccaccio contains the
love-story of _Cymbeline_, though there may have been an intermediary;
the plot of _All's Well_ came from the same collection, but had been
translated by Painter in his _Palace of Pleasure_; and the story of the
caskets in _The Merchant of Venice_ is found in a form closer to
Shakespeare's in the English translation of the _Gesta Romanorum_ than
in the _Decameron_. Thus we cannot conclude that the poet knew this work
as a whole. Similarly with Bandello and Cinthio. The plot of _Much Ado_
is found in the former, and is translated by Belleforest into French,
but at least one detail seems to come from Ariosto, and here again an
intermediary is commonly conjectured. The novel from Cinthio's
_Hecatommithi_ which formed the basis of _Othello_ existed in a French
translation; and his form of the plot of _Measure for Measure_ came to
Shakespeare through the English dramatic version of George Whetstone.
The version of the bond story in _The Merchant of Venice_ closest to the
play is in _Il Pecorone_ of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, but the tale is
widespread. Incidents in _The Merry Wives_ have sources or parallels in
the same work, in Straparola's _Piacevoli Notti_, and in Bandello, but
in both cases English versions were available. A mass of Italian and
French prototypes lies behind the plot of _Twelfth Night_, but most of
the details are to be found in the English _Apolonius and Silla_ of
Barnabe Riche, and there is reason to conjecture a lost English play on
the subject. _The Taming of the Shrew_, based on an extant older play,
draws also on Gascoigne's version of Ariosto's _I Suppositi_; and the
echoes of Petrarch in the Sonnets may well have come thro