Giovanni Battista Giraldi

Giovanni Battista Giraldi , 1504-73, Italian author, known also as Cinthio, Cintio, Cinzio, or Cyntius. He wrote tragedies, lyric verse, and tales. Some of the stories in his Ecatommiti [one hundred tales] (1565) were translated by Whetstone and other 16th-century English writers. Shakespeare derived from them the plots of Othello and Measure for Measure.

Giraldi, Giovanni Battista (1504–73), Italian humanist, known as ‘il Cinthio’. He was the author of a number of ‘horror’ tragedies written under the influence of Seneca, of which the first, Orbecche (1541), was performed before the Duke of Ferrara at the house of Alfonso Della Viola. Two of Giraldi's later plays, L'altile (1543) and Epizia (1547), were based on stories which he later included in his Hecatommithi (1565), a collection of novelle in the style of Boccaccio's Decameron. It was from this collection that Shakespeare, who had already used the story of Epizia (translated as Promos and Cassandra, 1578) in his Measure for Measure, took the plot of Othello. For him, as for other English dramatists of the time, Giraldi opened up chivalric sources and provided romantic situations suitable for tragedy and tragi-comedy; but in Italy his work served to strengthen the stranglehold of the neo-classical form.