Machiavelli's controversial reputation secured an easy, though ambiguous, success to the Discours … Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin. While the author, the Huguenot jurisconsult Innocent Gentillet, remained virtually unknown outside of Geneva and the Dauphiné even to his contemporaries, his work, first published anonymously in 1576, was for a long time widely read and discussed in the light of the controversy stirred up by Machiavelli's doctrines. As early as 1580, Montaigne very likely alludes to Gentillet's work and puts it alongside Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy.

The texts of the early sixteenth-century madrigal are markedly uniform in their content. Love is the main theme, treated in as many variations as issue from the vagaries of the amorous condition (longing, despair, concupiscence, hate, disenchantment, etc.). So uniform, in fact, is the subject matter that when a poem departs from convention, it warrants attention as something of a rara avis. This is the case with the sonnet Trist’ Amarilli mia set to music by Philippe Verdelot, a French (or Netherlandish?) composer residing in Italy during the second and third decades, or more, of the century. Its (anonymous) poet delineates the sort of bucolic scene one happens upon more often in the later madrigal, and peoples it with Amaryllis, Tityrus, Atalanta, and a company of shepherds and flocks.

The celebrated opening of T. S. Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi' adapts a passage from Lancelot Andrewes’ fifteenth sermon on the Nativity (1622). This is well known, but less familiar may be the fact that Andrews himself was making free use of St. John Chrysostom's Homily vi on Matt. 2:1,2—the scriptural text which describes the coming of the ‘wise men’ from the east to Jerusalem to worship Jesus. The number of wise men (once thought to be twelve), their station in life, their origin, and the nature and meaning of their journey were questions which gave rise to a long tradition of patristic and later commentary on the Epiphany, as the manifestation of Christ to the world and the commemorative feast of the Church came to be called.

It Is a commonplace of criticism that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor is an altogether different comic from the ready and resourceful, the irrepressible Sir John of Henry IV. Could it have been otherwise? If the Queen wished to see Falstaff'in love,’ that would mean unsuccessfully in love, and nothing would do but to make Falstaff an amorous buffoon taken in repeatedly by transparent devices and exposed to the ridicule of ordinary minds. The tradition of the Queen's command aside, making Falstaff the dupe in a domestic comedy would require a radical change in character. And had not the real, the original knight died babbling of green fields and gone to Arthur's bosom? Finally, if Shakespeare had in mind Ralph Doister (or some other strictly thrasonical figure) while he was making Merry Wives, as it seems possible he did, would not the lusterless Sir John wooing citizens’ wives be more fully accounted for?