[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 the cause of the ruin alike of the greatest Jew in Elizabethan England and of the greatest Jew of the Elizabethan drama is a curious confirmation of the theory that Lopez was the begetter of Shylock. Cf. the article on Roderigo Lopez in the Dictionary of National Biography; ‘The Original of Shylock,’ by the present writer, in Gent. Mag. February 1880; Dr. H. Graetz, Shylock in den Sagen, in den Dramen and in der Geschichte, Krotoschin, 1880; New Shakspere Soc. Trans. 1887-92, pt. ii. pp. 158-92; ‘The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez,’ by the Rev. Arthur Dimock, in English Historical Review (1894), ix. 440 seq.
[70] Gesta Grayorum, printed in 1688 from a contemporary manuscript. A second performance of the Comedy of Errors was given at Gray’s Inn Hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on Dec. 6, 1895.
[72a] Cf. Swinburne, Study of Shakspere, pp. 231-74.
[72b] See p. 89.
[73] Cf. Dodsley’s Old Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874, vii. 236-8.
[74] See Appendix, sections iii. and iv.
[75a] See Ovid’s Amores, liber i. elegy xv. ll. 35-6. Ovid’s Amores, or Elegies of Love, were translated by Marlowe about 1589, and were first printed without a date on the title-page, probably about 1597. Marlowe’s version had probably been accessible in manuscript in the eight years’ interval. Marlowe rendered the lines quoted by Shakespeare thus: