“Familiar with all garbes gracious in England, Italie, Spaine or France”

The second chapter examines how Massinger, like his contemporaries, drew on the Italian novellistic tradition of Matteo Bandello, Giovanni Boccaccio and Giam Battista Giraldi Cinthio, often mediated by William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The chapter discusses six plays, covering the period 1617−1629, and explores Massinger's strategies in the contaminatio of different intertexts in both collaborative and non-collaborative works. Rather than analysing Italian novellas as mere plot sources, it considers the cultural forces and the ideological reasons behind the playwright's engagement with them, and the way they found their way through translation to Massinger.