Page:Much Ado About Nothing (1917) Yale.djvu/138

126 such a drama has been found in a record of the Revels Accounts for December 18, 1574, which shows that the Earl of Leicester's players acted a piece called 'theier matter of Panecia' (i.e. Phenicia or Fenicia, Bandello's heroine?), when Shakespeare was ten years old.

For one of Shakespeare's divergences from Bandello noted above—the introduction of Margaret in Hero's clothes—a source exists in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Book V (published, 1516), where a story somewhat similar to Bandello's is related. In all other details Ariosto's version is far less like Much Ado than Bandello's, but the former clearly foreshadows the part of Margaret in his Dalinda, whom he makes the narrator of the tale. In the fourth canto of the second book of the Fairy Queen (published, 1590), Spenser introduces an adaptation of Ariosto's story, again changing the names and putting the narrative into the mouth of the figure corresponding to Claudio. Thus the latter portrays his sentiments while the deception is being practiced upon him:

The figures of Dogberry and his companions and their whole connection with the plot were original with Shakespeare, as has been said. How truly the poet depicted the actual