Among the letters of Savonarola listed as now lost is one to Fra Benedetto di Paolo. The existence of such a letter is known from an entry in the sixteenth-century catalog of Savonarola's letters compiled by Fra Bernardo Castiglione. This catalog has also disappeared but Vincenzo Marchese saw it in the San Marco archives in the mid-nineteenth century and noted Castiglione's seventh entry as follows: 'Scripsit cuidam F. Benedicto Pauli reprehensivam epistolam de quadam eius inobedientia, quae incipit: F. Benedetto. A Dio non è piaciuto questa vostra inobedientia, ec.’ Marchese identified the recipient as Fra Benedetto di Paolo of Florence, the miniaturist and author of Cedrus Libani, a life of Savonarola in verse, which Marchese had just published.The letter itself was lost.

Sometime about 1603, Thomas Hariot (1560-1621) reflected on fame and reputation and on references and allusions that had been made to him personally by contemporary authors. On the back of the final folio of his nearly finished work ‘The Doctrine of Nauticall Triangles Compendious,’ Hariot jotted down a series of references to books which, on examination, seem surely to refer to Hariot or his beliefs. Such a list could have been compiled from curiosity or vanity or for use in conversations with his friends. But it may have had a more specific purpose, since Hariot was a controversial figure frequently called on to account for his ideas or his associations. The making of such a list could therefore have been to forearm himself against the kind of evidence which might be adduced against him from printed sources.

Titus andronicus has long been recognized as a play wherein Shakespeare, as novice playwright, manipulated numerous plots and stage devices into an integrated whole. In an eighteenth-century chapbook, for instance, both R. M. Sargeant and J. C. Maxwell see the possible source of the main story in the prose rendition ‘The History of Titus Andronicus.’ From Kyd, Shakespeare borrowed the revenge play feigned madness of Hieronimo, the Senecan gore, the passive-to-active protagonist. From the morality plays, he borrowed the figures of Revenge, Rapine, and Murder. From Seneca's Thyestes, he borrowed the revenge of Atreus and the mad banquet; from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the rape of Philomela; from Bandello's Novella, the cruel Moor; from North's Plutarch, the revolt of Coriolanus; from the Appius and Virginia story, the sacrifice of the dishonored daughter; from Seneca's Troades, the sacrifice of the innocent captive to the honor of the dead warriors.

Professor Erwin Panofsky in Studies in Iconology points to a particular device, ‘common in late-mediaeval and Renaissance painting,’ that ‘of dividing the landscape background into halves of symbolically contrasting character.’ This technique, Panofsky says, was 'frequent in religious pictures where the “Aera sub lege” is contrasted with the “Aera suh gratia,” ’ but it was by no means confined to sacred pictures as Panofsky goes on to illustrate. In particular he discusses the picture, ‘Hercules at the Crossroads,’ generally attributed to Niccolò Soggi, in the light of this symbolic device. The purpose of this paper is to show how this technique common to Renaissance art also found expression in a dramatic form, that of civic pageantry, in late Tudor and early Stuart England.