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Updated: June 6, 2025
HENRY VI. 1, 2, and 3 Retouched old plays, probably with Marlowe. TITUS ANDRONICUS Probably chiefly by Kyd, retouched. KING JOHN Old play retouched. SECOND PERIOD 1596-1601-2 MERCHANT OF VENICE Italian novels, Gesta Romanorum, and earlier plays. MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM North's Plutarch, Chaucer, Ovid. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL Painter's Palace of Pleasure.
There remains yet the fifth act in which one would think they should show their mastery. And here they bring in some foolish insipid fable out of Speculum Historiale or Gesta Romanorum and expound it allegorically, tropologically, and anagogically. And after this manner do they and their chimera, and such as Horace despaired of compassing when he wrote "Humano capiti," etc.
Frederick is said to have interrupted the Legates in a rage before they could finish their address, and to have replied with angry contempt. The speech put into his mouth is probably a rhetorical composition, but it may have expressed his sentiments. 'Multa de Romanorum sapientia seu fortitudine hactenus audivimus, magis tamen de sapientia.
Myles was replete with old Latin gestes, fables, and sermons picked up during his school life, in those intervals of his more serious studies when Prior Edward had permitted him to browse in the greener pastures of the Gesta Romanorum and the Disciplina Clericalis of the monastery library, and Gascoyne was never weary of hearing him tell those marvellous stories culled from the crabbed Latin of the old manuscript volumes.
"The King of the Germans he is," retorted Herbert, "though when he writes, he signs Imperator Romanorum semper Augustus." "Shame!" cried the king, "here is an outrage! Why should this son of a priest disturb my kingdom and disquiet my peace?"
There have been at least three writers of English fiction who, borrowing this germ-plot from the Gesta Romanorum, have handled it with distinction and originality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed its period and given it an Italian setting, wove about it one of the finest and most imaginative of his short-stories, Rappaccini's Daughter.
The Gesta Romanorum is a wonderful storehouse of these mediaeval stories. In the Decameron Boccaccio deals with traditional and contemporary materials. He is a born story-teller and presents many interesting and well-told narratives, but as Professor Baldwin has said, more than half are merely anecdotes, and the remaining stories are bare plots, ingeniously done in a kind of scenario form.
And if we go further back we find in chapter clv. of the printed editions of the "Gesta Romanorum" an interesting picture of domestic life. The whole family is portrayed gathering round the fire in the winter evenings and beguiling the time by telling stories. Such we are informed was the custom among the higher classes.
Whatever be the final solution to this problem, enough has been said to show that the beast-fable is, in all probability, the most primitive form of short-story which we possess. For our purpose, that of tracing the evolution of the English short-story, its history commences with the Gesta Romanorum. At the authorship of this collection of mediaeval tales, many guesses have been made.
In this we can trace the influence of Aesop's beast-fables, which were moral lessons drawn from the animal creation for the instruction of mankind. Every chapter of the Gesta Romanorum consists of a moral tale; so much so that in many cases the application of the moral is as long as the tale itself.
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