Belleforest. At the
same time as Shakespeare was writing _Romeo and Juliet_, Lope de Vega was
dramatising the tale in his Spanish play called _Castelvines y Monteses_
(_i.e._ Capulets and Montagus). For an analysis of Lope's play, which
ends happily, see _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821, xxi. 451-60.

{55b} Cf. _Originals and Analogues_, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New
Shakspere Society.

{56} Cf. _Parallel Texts_, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society;
Fleay, _Life_, pp. 191 seq.

{60} Cf. Fleay, _Life_, pp. 235 seq.; _Trans. New Shakspere Soc_., 1876,
pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne, _Study_, pp. 51 seq.

{62} In later life Shakespeare, in _Hamlet_, borrows from Lyly's
_Euphues_ Polonius's advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded
the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the
affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage
in I _Henry IV_, II. iv. 445: 'For though the camomile, the more it is
trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the
sooner it wears.'

{65} Henslowe, p. 24.

{66a} Cf. Cohn, _Shakespeare in Germany_, pp. 155 et seq.

{66b} Arber, ii. 644.

{66c} Cf. W. G. Waters's translation of _Il Pecorone_, pp. 44-60 (fourth
day, novel 1). The collection was not published till 1558, and the story
followed by Shakespeare was not accessible in his day in any language but
the original Italian.

{68} Lopez was the Earl of Leicester's physician before 1586, and the
Queen's chief physician from that date. An accomplished linguist, with
friends in all parts of Europe, he acted in 1590, at the request of the
Earl of Essex, as interpreter to Antonio Perez, a victim of Philip II's
persecution, whom Essex and his associates brought to England in order to
stimulate the hostility of the English public to Spain. Don Antonio (as
the refugee was popularly called) proved querulous and exacting. A
quarrel between Lopez and Essex followed. Spanish agents in London
offered Lopez a bribe to poison Antonio and the Queen. The evidence that
he assented to the murderous proposal is incomplete, but he was convicted
of treason, and, although the Queen long delayed signing his
death-warrant, he was hanged at Tyburn on June 7, 1594. His trial and
execution evoked a marked display of anti-Semitism on the part of the
London populace. Very few Jews were domiciled in England at the time.
That a Christian named Antonio should be th