ABSTRACT
Even in this day and time there is, alas, some evidence that Shakespeare’s debts and references to Italian drama are not generally grasped, though it has slowly begun to sink in that his comic dramaturgy was based on the principle of ransacking narratives for plots and accumulating a repertory of units to be recombined in close-knit structures along lines originating in the domestic comedies of Plautus and Terence, a practice that had been in force in Italy for the better part of a century before he left Stratford, whenever that was, exactly.
