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Giraldi Cinthio, Giovanni Battista (1504-1573) De Gli Hecatommithi.
Mondovi: Apresso Lionardo Torrentino, 1565.
First edition, two thick octavo volumes; woodcut printer's device to each title page; some dedication leaves in the second volume extended, first issue, containing the early version of the author's "L'autore all'opera" at the end of the second volume; bound in uniform full olive morocco tooled in gilt by J. Leight, aeg.; pages washed and pressed, some marginal paper repairs; 6 3/8 x 4 in. (2)
This collection of tales includes the germ of the story for Shakespeare's Othello and Measure for Measure. Giraldi's work is similar to Boccaccio's Decameron, and supplied English Elizabethan poets with many story ideas. William Painter borrowed from Giraldi, as well as Whetstone, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
"The source for Othello is Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi. As the same collection contains a version of the story which provided the plot of Measure for Measure, and as that play written about the same time as Othello, Shakespeare was presumably scanning Cinthio's book in his search for plots in the early years of the 17th century. [...] In reading Cinthio's tale, he would have felt challenged by the magnitude of the difficulties involved in making a tragedy from it, but he would nevertheless have found several hints in the tale itself how the subject might be treated --the suggestion that Desdemona had fallen in love with the Moor's virtues and not from lust, her decision to brave the dangers of the sea, her later remark about mixed marriages, and the statement after the murder that the Moor loved her more than life." (Quoted from Kenneth Muris' The Sources of Shakepseare's Plays.)
