Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/390

82 The fable of Cymbeline, like that of the Merchant of Venice, is to be found in many different works.

First of all it occurs in the Decamerone, by Boccaccio (ii. 9), whence comes Shakespeare's plot. Then it occurs in numerous other collections: in two old French MSS. from Tours: in the novel, Guillaume de Dole, written between 1199 and 1201: in the Nouvelle de Sens, a fifteenth-century MS.: in Eufemia, a Spanish drama by Lopez de Rueda (in the sixteenth century): in the Italian tale, Justa Victoria, by Feliciano Antiquari, written in 1474: in an anonymous fourteenth-century Italian tale: in The Beautiful Story of the Valiant Francisko and his Wife, a Hungarian poem by Gaspar Raskay, dated 1552: in El Patranello, a Spanish tale, by Timoneda (in the sixteenth century): in an Italian fourteenth-century poem, entitled Elena: in the Miracle of Otho, King of Spain (fourteenth century): in Le Roi Flore et la belle Jehanne, a French prose novel from the thirteenth century: in an ancient French poem called Le Comte de Poitiers: in Le Roman de la Violette, another old French poem. Besides these it occurs in numerous Sicilian, Florentine, German, Scandinavian, Roumanian, Gypsy, Arabian and Jewish folk-tales, in the Russian Ballad poetry, etc.

It is, of course, possible that the Serbian tales are derived from other tales, from Oriental or Roumanian or Gypsy tales, for instance; but it is most likely to be from the Decamerone, as the graceful Florentine writer was doubtless popular in Dalmatia. Marin Drzic, a Ragusan sixteenth-century poet, was most certainly acquainted with Boccaccio, and he took the subject of one of his comedies (Stari pisci, ., com. v.), absolutely from a novel by the celebrated Italian author (vii. 4). Moreover, the Serbian tales we have quoted adhere fairly closely to the tale in the Decamerone.