Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620 - book 2 p.13v
Fine printing in Shakespeare's time.
This volume was printed by Isaac Jaggard who worked alongside his father, William, and later inherited the family printing house. Isaac’s fine edition of ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620 - book 2, p.112r detail
Fine printing in Shakespeare's time.
The engravings in Jaggard’s edition of Boccaccio do not illustrate the individual stories, but were used to decorate title page and then, possibly to save ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620 - Book 2, p.112r.
A ribald tale in a Shakespeare sourcebook
Shakespeare’s wide range of reading gave him a knowledge of many Italian writers and their work that he might potentially use in his plays, or poems. ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620 -Book 2, title page
A Shakespeare source translated into English.
The two volumes of the Decameron in the English translation by John Florio came from the workshop of the same printer, Isaac Jaggard, who was responsible ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620 - title page, book 2
A Shakespeare source with a fine binding.
This volume's fine binding given to it by a nineteenth-century owner, is in green Morocco goatskin, with fine gold-tooling, including decoration along the ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620 [and] 1625- binding, spine detail
A Shakespeare source with a fine binding.
The finely detailed gold tooling on Boccaccio's Decameron, in the Shakespeare Centre Library, is the work of a skilled member of the nineteenth-century London ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1620, [&] 1625 - binding view
A Shakespeare source with a fine binding.
The elegant binding of this volume dates from the late nineteenth-century and replaced whatever original leather was given to the volume in 1625 when it was ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1625 - Book 1, p.107v
A source for Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well.
It is possible that Shakespeare may have been able to read, or knew the Decameron in its original Italian. His patron the Earl of Southampton employed ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The modell of wit [Decameron], Book 1, 1625 Novel 9, 3rd Day (T5 recto), detail
Ornamental illustration in a Shakespeare sourcebook.
Elizabethan book illustrations are frequently simple woodcuts, although other volumes, such as Jaggard’s Boccaccio use fine engravings. This ...
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Modell of witt [Decameron Book 1], 1625 - title page, p.A2r.
Italian stories provide source material
Giovanni Boccaccio is known chiefly for Decameron, which was written in 1353. This is a collection of a hundred tales told by ten people who have taken refuge ...
Henri Estienne, A mervaylous discourse upon... Katherine de Medici, 1575 - inside frontboard
Thomas Phillipps' ownership of a book Shakespeare may have owned.
The great nineteenth century collector of manuscripts and books, Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), marked his books MHC for his ‘Middle ...
John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, [London], 1634 - p. 18, D1v
A Shakespeare collaboration.
The Two Noble Kinsmen includes pageantry in the 'masque' style that Shakespeare introduced to his late 'romance' plays like The Tempest and Pericles, and has scenes reminiscent ...
John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, [London], 1634 - p.19, D2r.
Shakespeare writes of Palamon and Arcite in prison.
The story of the Theban princes Palamon and Arcite is that told by the Knight in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. From their prison window the princes ...
John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, [London], 1634 - title page
Shakespeare collaborates on writing a play.
Towards the end of his career in London Shakespeare collaborated with the younger playwright, John Fletcher in the writing of Henry VIII in 1612, and then ...
John Gerarde, The Herball, 1597 - Goosetree [barnacles], detail, p.1391, detail.
Truth and Myth in Shakespeare's books of reference: The Barnacle Goose Tree.
Shakespeare includes, in The Winter's Tale (4.4), a similar myth to Gerarde’s tale of a barnacle-goose tree in the ...
John Gerarde, The Herball, 1597 - Goosetree [Barnakle tree], p.1391.
The Elizabethan myth of the goose-tree.
Myth and legend, passed on by word of mouth until it was written down and becomes almost a fact, included the story that Gerarde records at the end of his herbal, ...
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 1634 - Decorative printer's borders around a plot summary, Book 5, p.32 detail.
A printer's heading ornament in a Shakespeare sourcebook.
The finely engraved illustrations in this edition of Ariosto contrast with the simple printer’s border with decorative ornaments above ...
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 1634 - Ariodante and Dalinda, illustration pl.V, p.31.
Illustration for the story on which Shakespeare based a comedy sub-plot.
The tale of Ariodante, and Ginevra impersonated by Dalinda is the subject of a fine engraving in the 1634 edition of Harington's ...