Page:Twelfth Night (1922) Yale.djvu/118

Cesare, which will be easily admitted to have suggested the name Cesario in Shakespeare. Beyond this, however, the resemblance is not striking.'

Hunter, however, discovered an earlier Italian comedy, Gl' Ingannati [The Deceived], which seemed to him unquestionably the real Italian source of Shakespeare's plot. Acted as early as 1531, by a literary society of Siena, it was first printed at Venice in 1537. In its main outlines it resembles Twelfth Night, containing counterparts to the characters of Viola, Sebastian, Orsino, and Olivia. In its humorous and farcical elements have sometimes been found other foreshadowings in character and situation of Shakespeare's comedy, but many of the alleged resemblances—such as that between the pedant Piero and Malvolio—seem vague and inconclusive. The popularity of Gl' Ingannati is shown both by the frequency of Italian editions and by its translation into French, Spanish, and Latin. A Latin version, based apparently on a French translation rather than on the Italian original, was acted at Queens' College, Cambridge', under the title of Lælia, probably in 1595, possibly in 1598—at all events, but a few years before the production of Twelfth Night. Even Shakespeare's 'small Latin' might have sufficed to interpret some of the essential situations of the Latin text, or he might have heard general reports of the Cambridge performance. Recent positive assertion that Lælia is 'the undoubted immediate source of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night' seems, however, to lack proof equally positive.

As early as 1753, Mrs. Charlotte Lennox suggested the similarity between Twelfth Night and one of the stories in Bandello's collection of tales (1554). A French version by Belleforest of Bandello's story seems, in turn, to have inspired an English rendering by Barnabe Riche. Riche, by birth a 'gentleman,' by