PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

Histoires tragiques has attracted a great degree of attention from scholars over the
past years. Although a critical edition was published in 1977 by Richard Carr, the
work had already appeared in much earlier studies because of its close association
with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It has been argued that the English translation
of the third story from Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques by William Painter in his
Palace of Pleasure (1567) served as the model for the writing of Shakespeare’s
famous play. 25 This connection of the French writer to English literature was
mentioned as early as 1906 by Harold de Wolf Fuller and 1921 by Henri Hauvette. 26
It was touched upon by many subsequent studies, such as Rene Pruvost’s Matteo
Bandello and Elizabethan Fiction, Henry Carlton’s ‘France as Chaperone of Romeo
and Juliet’, Olin Moore’s The Legend of Romeo and Juliet, and Kenneth Muir’s The
Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays. 27 In fact, Boaistuau and Shakespeare remain a
popular topic, as proved by the publication of recent studies such as Nicole Prustner’s
Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare, which provided an overview of the
relationships between the different versions of the story and reassessed the role of
Boaistuau in the shaping of Shakespeare’s play; 28 or Stephen Sohmer’s Shakespeare
for the Wiser Sort which linked Boaistuau with the issue of time-riddles in Romeo and
25 Others give Arthur Burke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) as Shakespeare’s
direct source. See for more details Bullough, G., Narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, 8
vols (London, 1966).
26 Wolf Fuller, H. de, ‘Romeo and Julliete’, Modern Philology, vol. 4, no. 1 (1906), pp. 75-120;
Hauvette, H., ‘Une variante française de la légende de Romeo et Juliette’, Revue de Littérature
Comparée, I, 3 (1921), pp. 329-37. For more details on Histoires tragiques see Chapter Three.
27 Pruvost, R., Matteo Bandello and Elizabethan Fiction (Paris, 1937); Carlton, H. B., ‘France as
Chaperone of Romeo and Juliet’ in Studies in French Language and Medieval Literature presented to
Mildred K. Pope (Manchester, 1939), pp. 43-59; Moore, O. H., The Legend of Romeo and Juliet
(Columbus, OH, 1950), Chapter X: Pierre Boaistuau; Muir, K., The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays
(London, 1977).
28 Prunster, N. (ed.), Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare: Four Tales of Star-Crossed Love by
Salernitano, Da Porto, Bandello and Boaistuau (Toronto, 2000).
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