been
already dramatized by Richard Edwardes. More certainly direct is his
knowledge of Chaucer's _Troilus_, which, with Caxton's _Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye_, is the main source of _Troilus and Cressida_. The
references to the leprosy of Cressida are due to Henryson's _Testament
of Creseide_, a Scots sequel to Chaucer's poem, printed in the sixteenth
century editions of the older poet's works. In the _Legend of Good
Women_ he may have found the story of Pyramus, and a version of the
tragedy of Lucrece, to supplement his main sources in Livy and Ovid.
Chaucer's contemporary Gower contributed to his stock the story of
Florent (_Taming of the Shrew_, I. ii. 69) from the _Confessio Amantis_,
and from the same collection a version of the tale of _Apollonius of
Tyre_, dramatized by Shakespeare and another in _Pericles_.

[Page Heading: Contemporary Literature]

With the non-dramatic literature produced by Shakespeare's
contemporaries, we naturally find most evidence of his acquaintance in
the case of those books which provided material for his plays. Thus the
otherwise obscure Arthur Brooke, whose poem _Romeus and Juliet_ is the
chief source of the tragedy, is much more prominent in such an
enumeration as the present than he probably was in Shakespeare's view of
the literature of the day. Painter, whose version of the same story in
his _Palace of Pleasure_ cannot be shown to have been used much, if at
all, by the dramatist, seems nevertheless to have been known to him; and
we hardly need evidence that Shakespeare must have kept a watchful eye
on similar collections of stories, such as Whetstone's, Riche's, and
Pettie's. Of the greater writers of imaginative literature there is none
missing from the list of those he knew, though, as has been implied, the
evidence is not always proportionate to the greatness; and some
prominent figures in other fields, such as Hooker and Bacon, do not
appear. Spenser, who is supposed to have alluded to Shakespeare in
_Colin Clout's come home again_ and, less probably, in _The Teares of
the Muses_, is in turn alluded to in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, V. i.
52; and his version of the story of Lear in _The Faerie Queene_, II. x,
is believed to have given Shakespeare his form of the name Cordelia.
Evidence is more abundant in the case of Sir Philip Sidney. The
under-plot of _King Lear_ is based on the story of the blind king of
Paphlagonia in the _Arcadia_, and Sidney's sonnets, along wi