recent date, that among the novelle of Massuccio of Salerno (1476), which narrates the loves of Mariotto Mignanelli and Giannozza Saraceni of Siena, has a sufficient number of points of resemblance to Romeo and Juliet to warrant our placing it in the genealogy of the drama. The lovers are secretly married by a Friar; Mariotto quarrels with a citizen of note, strikes him a fatal blow with a stick, is exiled, and flies from Siena to Alexandria. The father of Giannozza urges her to marriage with a suitor of his choice; she resolves to feign herself dead, and the Friar provides the sleeping potion; she is buried in the church of St. Augustine; is delivered from the tomb by the Friar, and sails for Alexandria disguised as a monk. The messenger whom she had despatched with letters to her husband is captured by pirates; Mariotto hears of her death; in the garb of a pilgrim visits her tomb, which he attempts to open; is seized, condemned, and beheaded. Giannozza returns from Alexandria to Siena, and in a convent the broken-hearted wife dies.
Some fifty years after the publication of Massuccio's tale Luigi Da Porto wrote his Istoria novellamente ritrovata di due nobili Amanti, and here the scene is Verona, and the lovers are named Romeo and Giulietta.
the portion which has some resemblance to the story of Juliet will be found in pp. 124–139. In the anonymous play, How a Man may choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602), which is founded on a novel (Decade III., Novella v.) of Cinthio's Hecatommithi, the incidents of an opiate given for poison to a young wife by her faithless husband, her burial, and revival in the coffin, are turned to comic uses. It is perhaps worth noting that here, as in Romeo and Juliet, the sale of poisons is spoken of as illegal:
some covetous slave for coyne,
Will sell it him, though it be held by law,
To be no better than flat fellony.
