This article has two purposes: first, to correct the common misconception that Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) brought more than fifty Greek codices with him from Constantinople to Italy in 1408; second, to discuss his collection of Platonica.

Nowhere in Guarino's own writings nor, so far as I know, in those of any of his humanist contemporaries is there mention of his having returned to Italy with a large collection of Greek manuscripts. The story first appears in the brief biography of Manuel Chrysoloras which Pontico Virunio wrote for inclusion in his edition of Chrysoloras' Erotemata at Reggio Emilia in 1501. Virunio says that Guarino on his way home from Constantinople, where he had studied under Chrysoloras, had two chests of Greek codices, but one was lost overboard, and this caused him to go gray overnight.

A general doubt survives as to Shakespeare's knowledge and use of Italian. In spite of some admissions, there is a tendency to follow Richard Farmer's argument that Shakespeare got such knowledge from English textbooks or translations. For example, it is suggested that the Hero-Claudio story in Much Ado About Nothing comes not from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso but from the English translation by Sir John Harington or from one of the many English versions of the story.

Shakespeare's knowledge and use of Italian, however, can be illustrated and established by reference to cantos IV-VI of Orlando Furioso. These cantos provided Shakespeare with material not only for the Hero-Claudio theme in Much Ado, but also for King Lear and Othello. It was typical of him to conflate several sources in one play. Thus he combined the Hero-Claudio (Genevra-Ariodante) theme with other sources, such as Bandello, Whetstone, or Spenser.

Adaptability enables folktales to survive for long periods of time. What began as an oral tale may become the basis of later literary works. The tale retains its basic elements while undergoing alterations and embellishments to suit its different contexts, both social and literary. The ‘Inclusa’ is such an example. Stith Thompson reduces the tale to its bare essentials as ‘underground passage to paramour's house. Woman goes from one to the other. Her husband is made to believe that the woman next door is her sister.’ The setting, the characterization of the participants, and the actual mechanics of the action are not given; the individual storyteller supplies these elements, so that variants are produced. Although the origins of the Inclusa remain obscure, its written development can be traced.

Few sources or targets of allusion have been adduced for the complex and tragic episode of the Nymph's Well early in Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene; hence we lack that check on our interpretations and that isolation of the individual author's emphases which literary history can provide. Perhaps the only characterization of the episode which all Spenser critics would accept is that it is about acrasia and that it is extraordinarily rich in meanings—one of those which stand out, as Kermode remarked of the Mammon's Cave episode, from the generally thinner allegorical texture of its surroundings. Its resulting complexity and difficulty have divided its many recent critics into two main camps, the secular and the theological.