formation, and
upon the taste of the audience for whom he wrote. Therefore, in
treating such documents as historical data, we must be upon our
guard. Professor Gnoli, who has recently investigated the whole of
Vittoria's eventful story by the light of contemporary documents,
informs us that several narratives exist in manuscript, all dealing
more or less accurately with the details of the tragedy. One of these
was published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A Frenchman, De Rosset,
printed the same story in its main outlines at Lyons in 1621. Our own
dramatist, John Webster, made it the subject of a tragedy, which he
gave to the press in 1612. What were his sources of information we do
not know for certain. But it is clear that he was well acquainted with
the history. He has changed some of the names and redistributed some
of the chief parts. Vittoria's first husband, for example, becomes
Camillo; her mother, named Cornelia instead of Tarquinia, is so far
from abetting Peretti's murder and countenancing her daughter's shame,
that she acts the _role_ of a domestic Cassandra. Flaminio and not
Marcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's crime and
elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papal
title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of
comparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use his
liberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledge
of the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in which
Vittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, the
Moorish slave, combines Vittoria's waiting-woman, Caterina, and the
Greek sorceress who so mysteriously dogged Marcello's footsteps to the
death. The suspicion of Bracciano's murder is used to introduce a
quaint episode of Italian poisoning.

Webster exercised the dramatist's privilege of connecting various
threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding
an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly
warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and
witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the
Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano
Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him
that, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, the Duchess
Isabella, sister to Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence,
should be murdered at the same time as her own husband, Camillo.