Some known but misinterpreted facts as well as some overlooked evidence helps to establish the date of composition of Romeo and Juliet in the latter half of 1596, a later date than has been traditionally entertained.¹ The evidence now in question revolves around significant verbal parallels, especially the oft-noted important "parallel" between Nashe's lines in Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596)—"not Tibault or Isegrim, Prince of Cattes, were euer endowed with the like Title" (3.51)²—and Shakespeare's description of Tybalt as "more than Prince of Cats" (2.4.17-18). In recorded medieval-Renaissance literature, the name of "Tibault/Tybalt" as a name having feline associations seems to appear only in Nashe's and Shakespeare's passages, spelled as "Tibault" in Nashe and as both "Tibalt" and "Tybalt" in the second quarto and first folio texts of Shakespeare's play. Moreover, the precise title, "Prince of Cattes," used in the same passage with the specific name "Tibault/Tybalt" has been found only in Nashe's and Shakespeare's passages from works of theirs that are very closely related in time. As G. Blakemore Evans (105) observes, if we can reasonably determine who might be the first to use this unusual language, that would contribute significantly to solving the questions at hand. There is nothing like this "parallel" in the acknowledged literary source for Romeo and Juliet, namely Arthur Brooke's The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Nor does Brooke present any witty satire like that of Nashe, involving other significant verbal parallels, such as "fiddlestick" (3.1.42). Moreover, Nashe himself and his Have with You provide telling hints for understanding how Shakespeare developed Mercutio, one of his most memorable characters, from the minimal reference he found in Brooke.

Have with You to Sqffron-Walden is Nashe's long-awaited reply to Gabriel Harvey's attack on him in Pierce's Supererogation (1593), and as G. R. Hibbard explains, Nashe's reply is well worth the wait:

Nashe took his time in order to make something really worth while of his answer, for in its own curious way Have with You is a most accomplished piece of writing, a rich mixture of parody, literary criticism, comic biography and outrageous abuse that nevertheless hangs together by virtue of the art that is lavished on it and of the sheer joy in caricature and in linguistic extravagance and inventiveness that informs it from beginning to end.³

The quarrel with Harvey was one of the most important events in Nashe's life, and the intensity of that quarrel ultimately prompted the authorities to intervene and recall the works of both Nashe and Harvey. Harvey appears to be the first to use feline allusions, negatively for Nashe but positively for himself, and Nashe quotes Harvey to set him up for his own ridicule: "But some had rather be a Pol-cat with a stinking stirre, than a Muske-cat with gracious fauour. "⁴ In Nashe's satiric dialogue, Harvey is answered through a mockery of his pretentiousness: "I, but not onely no ordinarie Cat, but a Muske-cat, and not onely a Muske-cat, but a Muske-cat with gracious fauour (which sounds like a Princes stile Dei gratia): not Tibault or Isegrim, Prince of Cattes, were euer endowed with the like Title."

To begin resolving the question of influence, we must first accurately interpret to whom Nashe's "Prince of Cattes" refers. The traditional reading of the princely title as modifying "Tibault" satisfies logic because in Nashe's "catty" context "Tibault" seems intended to be the name of a cat.⁵ Nashe probably has the Reynardian beast epic in mind when he refers to the famous cat properly named "Tibert," despite Nashe's apparently unique use of the name "Tibault."⁶ Nashe's recollection of the precise name may be faulty due to witty haste.⁷ However, Nashe's own syntax suggests the title is not intended to modify "Tibault" because of its placement; his plural subject ("Tibault or Isegrim") takes the plural verb ("were endowed") so that the singular form for "Prince" appears to be quite intentional on Nashe's part. Nashe's title, however, could syntactically and logically modify "Isegrim" if Isegrim is the name of a cat. One of the main cat characters in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1570) surprisingly is named Isegrim, surprising because that name is otherwise reserved for the wolf in the Reynardian beast epic and because the paucity of references to Isegrim in English literature is striking⁸ Therefore, Nashe's "Isegrim" is not a reference to the Reynardian beast epic, as Ronald B. McKerrow glosses it (4:327), but an allusion to Baldwin's cat named "Isegrim." The language for the specific title, "prince of cats," also appears in Baldwin's marginalia; hence, Baldwin's fictitious prose satire proves an overlooked source for Nashe's language.⁹

I suggest Nashe's use of the title "Prince of Cartes" is probably an example of the vocative, not the appositive for either "Tibault" or "Isegrim." The point of his joke on Harvey is that neither of these cats ever was endowed with a princely title that Harvey, the self-styled musk cat assuming princely airs, would arrogantly appropriate to himself. This reading satisfies syntax and logic and reveals Nashe's accurate knowledge of Baldwin's use of this title. Thus, in his parody of Harvey's "flaunting phrases" (3:42), Nashe satirizes Harvey through direct address, giving him a bitter taste of his own medicine through such a mock-heroic title because Harvey had earlier called Nashe's friend, Robert Greene, "the Prince of beggars" (1:170), rallying Nashe to Greene's defense (1:299). There is internal evidence from Nashe's Have with You to Sqffron-Walden to support an argument for the vocative. Nashe uses the vocative several times, for example, "goe and prate in the yard, Don Pedant, there is no place for you here" (3:76; cf. 3:49, 118). Nashe's use of the vocative appears in the midst of the sentence, set off by commas or parentheses, as is the title "Prince of Cartes." Nashe also has a stylistic habit of entitling Harvey's metaphors to ridicule them through direct address, the very habit displayed in calling Harvey the "Prince of Cartes."¹⁰

Shakespeare's use of the princely title in connection with the name of "Tybalt" also captures the spirit of Nashe's vocative usage because Tybalt is directly addressed as "Good King of Cats" (3.1.70). Other aspects of Nashe's passage on Tibault suggest Shakespeare is inventively responding to an outside influence. The subject of cats is a given in Nashe's passage as it is not in Shakespeare's. Because Shakespeare inherits "Tybalt" as a proper name for a man as well as a name signifying manliness, what would ever prompt Shakespeare to associate that manly name with cats?¹¹ The "foreign" nature of Shakespeare's introduction of the "Prince of Cats" title needs to be underscored. This feline satire is a staged "set up" to allow a jeu d'esprit for the wittily loquacious Mercurio of Shakespeare's creation. Consider also the "forced" introduction to this passage. It is Benvolio, playing "straight man" as it were to Mercutio, who sets up the fun for Mercutio. Benvolio asks, "What's he [Tybalt]?" (2.4.17) as if he does not know Tybalt. Yet this is the same Benvolio who was forced to fight Tybalt in the play's opening scene and who has enough first-hand knowledge of Tybalt's fencing style to satirize it to Lord Montague (1.1.99-104). Shakespeare also responds to the braggadocio spirit of Nashe's satiric one-upmanship. Shakespeare does not merely have Tybalt equated with the Prince of Cats, although later he will call him "King of Cats" and "rat-catcher." Mercutio's response to Benvolio's question is that Tybalt is "more than Prince of Cats" (my italics) which is a claim not unlike Nashe's depiction of Harvey as a musk cat pretending to be more than he is by cultivating princely airs. Moreover, the playfully satiric use of the word "prince" in titles is much more characteristic of Nashe than of Shakespeare.¹²

Thus, the merits of the difficult debate over influence regarding the literary use of "Prince of Cartes" as a satiric epithet for an opponent weigh more heavily in favor of Nashe's passage. If Nashe had borrowed from Shakespeare, how can we account for Nashe's knowledgeable use of Baldwin's satire in his borrowing of a name ("Isegrim") and a title ("Prince of Cattes")? On the other hand, Shakespeare's canon reveals no specific knowledge of Baldwin's text.¹³ It would seem likely that Shakespeare would borrow and adapt from Nashe what is useful for his own purposes. Shakespeare's conflation of "Tybalt" as "more than Prince of Cats" suggests derivation from Nashe's original rebuttal of the feline satire Harvey initiated against him. The use of animal names and misplaced titles to emphasize false pride informs the entire quarrel between Nashe and Harvey.

What is of particular interest for Romeo and Juliet is Nashe's penchant for imagery of the duel and fencing for depicting his quarrel in ink with Harvey, and Nashe's references are of two kinds, literal and figurative. Nashe evidently first accused Harvey of being an "old Fencer" (2:232), at least for to Harvey.¹⁴ Nashe later criticized Harvey for his empty boasting about being a good fencer who will defeat Nashe's sword as well as his pen: "And where he terrifies mee with insulting hee was Tom Burwels, the Fencers Scholler. … not all the fence he learnd of Tom Burwell shall keepe mee from cramming a turd in his jawes" (3:134). Nashe also satirizes the idea that Harvey has an unidentified gentlewoman whom Harvey claims has taken his side in the quarrel against Nashe and who will write against Nashe: "Tamburlain-like, hee braues it indesinently in her behalfe, setting vp bills, like a Bear-ward or Fencer, what fights we shall haue and what weapons she will meete me at" (3:121). Finally, the opening of Have with You keynotes the imagery we have discussed. Tobin has already noted the passage in which Nashe claims that Harvey and he "take upon us to bandie factions, and contend like the Vrsini and Coloni in Roome" (3:19), observing Shakespeare's echo of "bandie" in Romeo's use of "bandying" (3.1.81).¹⁵ But Nashe develops the fight imagery much more specifically and figuratively when he says his satiric dialogue involves real friends bearing pseudonyms, and their "honest conference" can supposed to be held "after the same manner that one of these Italionate conferences about a Duell is wont solemnly to be handled, which is when a man, being specially toucht in reputation … calls all his frends together, and askes their aduice how he should carrie himselfe in the action" (3:21). The satirist's metaphoric presentation of a quarrel appeals as well to Shakespeare in his creation of Mercutio's personal satire in his quarrel against Tybalt.

The ingenuity of Shakespeare's use of the feline satire found in Nashe has not been justly appreciated. The title, "Prince of Cats," captures Shakespeare's fancy, and he surpasses Nashe in his brilliant adaptation of the satiric feline title to suit Mercutio's and Tybalt's interest in fencing, a specific focus that is absent from Nashe's "Tibault" passage. Although Nashe uses several different metaphors for a quarrel, such as a cock-fight, a catfight, and a pen fight (3:30, 51, 133), he keeps them separate. Shakespeare, however, adroitly fuses the two metaphors of the catfight and the sword fight through the means of fighting, namely scratching. The rapier is like the cat's claw because it can literally scratch a man to death, as Mercutio gravely laments (3.1.92). Nashe uses "scratching" to signify "fighting," but he does not take Shakespeare's next step and compare the cat's weapon with man's weapon, claw with rapier.¹⁶

Hence, Mercutio's feline satire becomes exquisitely appropriate for the punctilious fencer Tybalt. Shakespeare seems ripe to develop such punning because in The Rape of Lucrece (1594) his readiness for this imagery is revealed in two passages. The first is typical in that the fighting is portrayed as the scratching normally associated with the human hand or nails. But his next example extends this scratching to a weapon held in the hand—a knife.¹⁷ In our play, Shakespeare develops this weapon imagery further to include the rapier, and one of his tragic points about man's innovative technology for destruction is that the new rapier, unlike the old long sword, does not use so much the edge to cut and kill but the point so that a mere "scratch" can be ironically lethal. Moreover, Shakespeare's associations here find no parallel in any of the generally acknowledged literary sources for his play, especially Brooke's poem that serves as his main source. Little notice has been taken of Shakespeare's emphasis on the duello that he adds to his literary sources. In the sources, bands of men fight, but Shakespeare not only cultivates the one-on-one nature of the duel, he also colors it with satiric taunts and name-calling that find an analogue not in Brooke's poem but in the notorious Harvey-Nashe quarrel.

How Shakespeare uses the verbal parallels that abound between Nashe's Have with You and his tragedy is revealing for Shakespeare's command of page and stage and particularly for his masterful characterization of Mercutio, who voices the most Nashean echoes in the play. Some new parallels, and the reconsideration of one previously noted, further expose how Shakespeare found Nashe's prose attractive mettle for his verse.

The most important parallel concerns "fiddlestick" and its satiric contexts in Nashe and Shakespeare that associate imagery of dueling and music, and Shakespeare's use of this once again shows how creatively he responds to the Harvey-Nashe quarrel. "Fiddlestick" appears in Shakespeare's canon for the first time in Romeo and Juliet (3.1.42) and then reappears only once again in quite a different usage: "the devil rides upon a fiddlestick" (1H4 2.4.487). "Fiddlestick" is a crucial insult in the quarrel between Nashe and Harvey. In Pierces Supererogation (1593), Harvey mocks Lyly as "the Vice master of Poules, and the Foolemaster of the Theater … sometime the fiddlesticke of Oxford, now the very bable of London" (2:212). Earlier in this same work in a remarkably similar string of epithets, he scoffs that Lyly is "a professed iester, a Hickscorner, a scoffmaister, a playmunger, an Interluder; once the foile of Oxford, now the stale of London" (2:132).

In his defense of Lyly, Nashe retorts, "With a blacke sant he [Lyly] meanes shortly to bee at his [Harvey's] chamber window for calling him the Fiddlesticke of Oxford" (2:138). Of all Harvey's slurs cited above, the epithet "the Fiddlesticke of Oxford" is the one Nashe chooses to counter Harvey's criticism of Lyly's foolish "leuitie" (2:138) by playing on the musical reference of "fiddlesticke" to forecast an ominous retort, Lyly's black sanctus. What is important to note here is that Nashe ingeniously adds the musical nuance basic to the primary meaning of "fiddlestick." Harvey uses "fiddlesticke" solely as a term of contempt in its secondary meaning to signify something insignificant,¹⁸ and his synonyms in parallel constructions indicate this meaning: "bable / foile / stale." The emphasis on music is lacking from Harvey's bashing of the playwright. Moreover, Harvey does not use metaphors of fighting here, although he does elsewhere.

However, Nashe not only adds the elements of music and fighting to his "Fiddlesticke" passage but also anticipates these elements with language that echoes in Shakespeare's scene. When Tybalt approaches Mercutio in his search for Romeo and uses the verb "consortest" (3.1.39), Mercutio takes great offense and responds aggressively to what he takes to be demeaning inferences, namely that Romeo and his friends are like common servants rather than gentlemen, a company of "minstrels" (3.1.40) at that. "Minstrel" is a term that can be used disparagingly.¹⁹ Nashe anticipates his "Fiddlesticke " allusion with musical imagery that parallels Mercutio's use of "consort." Nashe denounces "Mounsieur Fregeuile Gautius " as "one of the Pipers in this consort" who "befooles and besots " Nashe in his apology on behalf of Harvey (3:136). Seeing that Nashe has just called Fregeville "that prating weazell fae'd vermin" (3:136), the musical description of him as a piper in Harvey's "consort" strikes the same satiric discord. Indeed, Nashe often uses "piper" and "piperly" to convey the sense of "paltry" (5:320). His "consort" passage is preceded several pages earlier by his assertion: "M. Lilly & me by name he beruffianized … & termd vs piperly make-plaies" (3:130).²⁰ These are fighting words, as Nashe explains: "[Harvey] bade vs holde our peace & not be so hardie as to answer him, for if we did, he would make a bloodie day in Poules Church-yard, & splinter our pens til they straddled again as wide a paire of Compasses" (3:130). But Nashe juxtaposes his "Fiddlesticke" counterthreat with the triumphant observation that Gabriel Harvey was not "made to hold his peace, till Master Lillie and some others with their pens drew vpon him" (3:138).

Shakespeare's response to Nashe's imagery of music and duel is once again imaginative. As with his imagistic fusion of the cat's claw and man's rapier in their lethal scratching, so also he fuses into one wholistic metaphor the music and dueling imagery when Mercutio indicates his rapier and calls it his "fiddlestick" (3.1.42), recalling his initial hostility to Tybalt's opening use of "consortest." Later in Much Ado, Shakespeare will again find attractive the imagistic union of opposites (music and sword): "I [Claudio] will bid thee [Benedick] draw, as we do the minstrels, draw to pleasure us" (5.1.128-29). Thus, the satiric use of "fiddlestick" in the Harvey-Nashe quarrel predates Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Nashe's development of the imagery of music and duel in conjunction with this epithet provides one derogatory verbal context that Shakespeare then adroitly adapts for the fatal quarrel midpoint in his play.

At first blush "rat-catcher," noted already by J. J. M. Tobin, looks like too common a word to merit attention. But it is not, and Nashe's satirical use of the term is riveting. Contrary to our modern expectations, "rat-catcher" refers not to an animal but rather to a person who catches rats. The first recorded entry in the OED is Shakespeare's use of the term, but the earliest citation for the application of the term to animals dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. "Rat-catcher" applied to a person, however, is native to Nashe's context, and he may have coined the word.²¹ Nashe's context, appearing many lines after his reference to "Tibault, " features no feline references, unlike Shakespeare's context. Instead, Nashe is at his funniest in satirizing Harvey as "a common Mountebanke Rat-catcher" because Harvey is laughed at for catching a rat, anatomizing it, and reading a lecture for three days on it, and moreover, he "hanged her ouer his head in his studie, instead of an Apothecaries Crocodile, or dride Alligatur" (3:67). Tobin has already noted that Shakespeare borrows his unique use of "alligator" from Nashe. I would add here that the fact that the words "Rat-catcher" and "Alligatur" occur so closely together in Nashe's passage is revealing for how Shakespeare remembers both words yet uses them at distantly separated points in his text, reserving the alligator reference for his own apothecary episode (5.1.43). Although "rat-catcher" (3.1.68) is unique in Shakespeare, it is ironic that the first citation in the OED is Shakespeare's because his is the most innovatively atypical. As with his fused use of cat and rapier, so also Shakespeare weds two associations here in his "rat-catcher": Mercutio's criticizing Tybalt as "a braggart, a rogue, a villain" (3.1.92; cf. Nashe's "Mountebanke") plus Mercutio's feline puns for debunking Tybalt, who as the "Prince of Cats" would catch rats. Shakespeare clearly found arresting Nashe's satiric diction for name-calling.

"Princox" is a verbal parallel that has been overlooked. The term is unique in Shakespeare's canon. Capulet, attempting to ridicule Tybalt into obedient behavior at the feast, calls him "a princox" (1.5.85). This term, however, is a favorite of Nashe's, used at least four times in works that predate Romeo and Juliet, including the use of the plural form in Have with You in telling conjuction with the verb "consorted":

Neither of these princockesses (Barnes or Chute) once cast vp their noses towards Powles Church-yard, or so much as knew how to knock at a Printing-house dore, till they consorted themselues with Haruey, who infected them within one fortnight with his owne spirit of Bragganisme. (3:109)²²

In two of his publications in 1593, Harvey offensively borrows Nashe's "princock" to describe the youthful Nashe himself (1:283, 2:7). A good example from Nashe that reveals why the term would be so appropriate for Shakespeare's purposes is the following: "And you shall heare a Cavalier of the first feather, a princockes that was but a Page the other day in the Court … stand vaunting his manhood" (1:205). The use of the term is a particularly effective insult for adolescent males, for a "boy" sensitive to becoming a "man." The inflammatory rhetoric colors Capulet's denunciation of Tybalt as "a saucy boy" (1.5.82) and the "boy" insults of the duel scene (3.1.59).

Another probable verbal parallel involves the use and juxtaposition of the words "demesnes" and "adjacent." Mercutio bawdily conjures Romeo by Rosaline's "quivering thigh / And the demesnes that there adjacent lie" (2.1.19-20). "Demesnes" is rather rare in Shakespeare's canon and is used for the first time in Romeo and Juliet, once here in a figurative sense, once again in its literal sense of "estates" (3.5.180), and once later in Cymbeline (3.3.70). "Adjacent" is likewise uncommon in Shakespeare, and it also appears for the first time in Romeo and then only once again in Antony and Cleopatra (2.2.213).²³ The close juxtaposition of the words "demeanes" and "adiacents," also used in an apparently figurative sense occurs in Nashe's Have with You when Nashe, as he often does, jests about Harvey's Latin verses: "The bungerliest verses … most of them … cut off by the knees out of Virgili and other Authors … and iumpe imitating a verse in As in presenti, or in the demeanes or adiacents, I am certaine" (3:78). McKerrow explains that Nashe's joke is derived from William Lily's Latin Grammar, and Nashe's earlier instance in his Strange Newes (1592) of this jest and its pun on "as" for "ass" offers a clearer context for understanding this joke: "Such is this Asse [Harvey] in presenti, this grosse painted image of pride, who would faine counterfeite a good witte" (1:282).²⁴ The coupling of these two terms in figurative wordplay is very unusual in English literature. At any rate, Shakespeare's use of these two terms is more clearly transformed through bawdy innuendo. However, Shakespeare's use of these terms within the context of Mercutio's bawdy verbal conjuring of Romeo may owe something to Nashe's earlier work. Although the idea of conjuring is commonplace, it is not commonplace to summon up a male contemporary through a witty use of the conjuring metaphor. Nashe, a conjurer of words himself, says he would learn any barbarous language "rather than bee put downe by such a ribauldry" as Harvey is: "Heigh, drawer, fil vs a fresh quart of new-found phrases, since Gabrieli saies we borrow all our eloquence from Tauernes.… I coniure thee.… I drinke to you, M. Gabriell" (1:305). He also provides an apropos description of how to become a conjurer (1:363-67).

There are possibly several other overlooked verbal parallels that need to be considered, especially in terms of how they might shed light on Shakespeare's adaptation of his borrowings. Nashe uses "gear" twice, once straightforwardly (3:90) and once bawdily (3:129). Romeo concludes Mercutio's extraordinarily bawdy punning as Juliet's Nurse and her man, Peter, enter: "Here's goodly gear!" (2.4.82). Evans suggests the pun on "gear" revolves around its senses of "rubbish, nonsense" and "the organs of generation" that "link[s] perfectly with Mercutio's wit-play."²⁵ We might suggest another possibility here. Regardless of whether the stage direction is placed before or after Romeo's line, his line could Janus-like refer before and after, refer back to Mercutio's speech as well as look toward the Nurse and Peter who could be seen approaching Romeo across the large stage platform. I suggest this because Romeo's use of "gear" may well convey another sense, a nautical pun that has gone unnoticed. Romeo's "Here's goodly gear!" is immediately followed by his next line, a curious description of the Nurse indeed: "A sail, a sail!" (2.4.83). "Gear" in its nautical sense refers to rigging of any spar or sail. However, the earliest citations in the OED for "gear" in its nautical sense, as well as its slang sense, significantly postdate both Shakespeare's and Nashe's works.²⁶ Shakespeare's punning, then, is remarkable indeed. His main literary source for his play, Brooke's poem, has several passages of nautical imagery, but perhaps only Shakespeare could fuse so many meanings in one so apparently insignificant term as "gear." Although "gear" in its various senses is a common word in Shakespeare's works before and after Romeo and it even appears again at the end of this play (5.1.60), this is the only instance in which he puns on the slang sense of "gear" for genitalia.

In Have with You, Nashe has two separate uses of "gear" where he employs the same two senses of "nonsense" and "sexual organs" found in Shakespeare's line, but unlike Shakespeare, Nashe does not fuse the two meanings in one wonderful pun. Nashe's first instance almost parallels Romeo's line when Nashe ridicules Harvey's Latin language as nonsense: "here is such geere as I neuer saw" (3:90). But in a passage we have already noted in relation to Love's Labor's Lost, Nashe uses "gear" in its slang sense for his bawdy putdown of Harvey: "let her [Harvey's "gentlewoman"] bee Prick-madam, of which name there is a flower; & let him take it to himselfe; and raigne intire Cod-pisse Kinko, and Sir Murdred of placards … as long as he is able to please or giue them geare" (3:129). "Placard/ placket," used with sexual innuendo, appears in Nashe for the first time in Have with You, here and in a venereal depiction of the Harvey brothers (3:82). It is similarly used for the first time by Shakespeare in Love's Labor's Lost and Romeo but is not used again until Troilus and Cressida.

Finally, Shakespeare's oxymoron, "merry dump," may derive from the surprisingly comical context for "dump" in Have with You. Shakespeare's other earlier instances of "dump" for "a mournful tune" employ the term straightforwardly, without any hint of oxymoron.²⁷ Near the end of Nashe's Have with You, in a particularly witty passage featuring facetious titles of works Nashe will write on Harvey, Nashe quips that he will write many comedies on Harvey and one shall be called "The Doctors dumpe": "But wee shall lenuoy him [Harvey], and trumpe and poope him well enough … and he will needes fall a Comedizing it. Comedie vpon Comedie he shall haue, a Morali, a Historie, a Tragedie, or what hee will. One shal bee called The Doctors dumpe" (3:114).

There is possibly another Nashean verbal influence for how originally Shakespeare uses the rope ladder as a symbolic prop for the stage. Tobin notes that the Nurse talks of "'ropery'/'roperipe' at II.iv.146 , and Romeo refers to a rope ladder at II.iv.189 ." Tobin juxtaposes this with the unique use of the phrase '"with an R'" in both Nashe and Shakespeare, this phrase appearing in Nashe's recurrent attack on Harvey's father for being a ropemaker, a man whose living ironically depends on death, on the gallows and the making of ropes.²⁸ Nashe himself explains that Harvey told some of Nashe's friends that "the onely thing that most set him afire against" Nashe was Nashe's calling Harvey and his brothers "sonnes of a Rope-maker" (3:56-57).²⁹ Nashe's emphasis on "the hempen mysterie" behind the names of the Harvey brothers (3:58) and his reiterated wordplay on "rope" cannot be missed (3:57-59). The satirical importance of this matter is highlighted in Nashe's subtitle for Have with You: "Containing a full Answere to the eldest sonne of the Halter-maker. " Even in his dedicatory epistle, Nashe refers to "the Doctors Paraclesian rope-rethorique" (3:15). Shakespeare, of course, did not need to read Nashe to know the associations between "rope" and "ladder" (the steps of the gallows) in the hangman's profession. But if he were reading Nashe's work, these very associations would be strongly underscored for him because they are so pivotal in Nashe's quarrel.

Shakespeare's "ropery" seems to recall Nashe's, but he newly integrates the verbal nuances in his symbolic use of the rope ladder. Shakespeare had earlier used the prop of a "ladder made of cords" (TGV 2.4.182) in another romantic adventure, and he may have even introduced this lover's prop to the English stage from the Italian novelle.³⁰ The literary tradition of this "lover's ladder" is common in Italy, and the ladder of cords originates as a motif for the Romeo and Juliet story in Boccaccio's Il Decamerone, passed down through Shakespeare's possible literary sources.³¹ However, no one in Elizabethan literature, other than Shakespeare, forges such a startling paradoxical fusion of meanings in the use of this prop when the instrument for fuller life and love is quickly transformed within the same scene, in keeping with the play's tempo of haste, to an instrument of despair and death (3.2.132-37). As in Shakespeare's transformation of "fiddlestick" from mere word to actual rapier, his finely tuned sense of prop deployment balances Juliet's newly transformed "poor ropes" with Romeo's dagger in a similarly forestalled suicide attempt in the subsequent scene (3.3.108). Neither of these dramatic actions appear in Brooke's poem where Juliet's response to the tragic news is a passive swoon (lines 1159-92) and frantic Romeo falls down and tears his hair (lines 1291-1300); both wish for death but do not seek instruments to effect it.

Romeo initially describes his ladder as "cords made like a tackled stair / Which to the high top-gallant of my joy / Must be my convoy in the secret night" (2.4.157-59), and herein Shakespeare refashions the much more frankly sexual imagery he found in Brooke's nautical motif: the "betost" ship [Romeus] may "boldly … resort / Unto [his] wedded ladies bed, [his] long desyred port" (lines 799-808). Brooke's nautical imagery probably inspired Shakespeare's "tackled stair." However, neither Brooke nor Painter nor Shakespeare himself in The Two Gentlemen of Verona ever use the word "rope" to describe this traditional lover's ladder of cord. This is understandable because the Italian and French words for "cord" (corda, corde) closely approximate the English word. The deadly nuance of "rope" is significantly added to Juliet's perception of this prop as she recasts her epithalamium that opens this scene—"Come, Night, come, Romeo"—to its deadly opposite as the scene closes:

Take up those cords. Poor ropes…
He made you for a highway to my bed,…
Come, cords, come, Nurse, I'll to my wedding
  bed,
And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!)
                            (3.2.132-37)

Romeo's emphasis on joyful ascent becomes tragically ironic for Juliet's intended "ascent" on these ropes by hanging that would result in a permanent and "grave" descent.³² Shakespeare once again surpasses our expectations in a stunning fusion of meanings that fuel the play's paradoxical incorporation of how "all things change them to the contrary" (4.5.90).

Perhaps some tentative conjectures about Shakespeare's literary imagination are worthwhile here. These examples of Shakespeare's borrowing from Nashe not only are helpful for establishing the direction of authorial influence and the date of composition of Romeo but also appear to be illustrative of how Shakespeare's imagination works in transforming his literary sources into his poetic drama. The common bond that unifies these examples is Shakespeare's power of fusing or unifying into a more complex whole that he finds separate or disjoined. In this respect, he is very much an artist of Renaissance temperament. In his pervasive use of sources, Shakespeare upholds the Renaissance rhetorical ideal of imitatio whereby the combination of old material with new is expressed uniquely, and he does not seem to favor imaginative creation "ex nihilo." Like one contemporary theory of creativity, namely God's creation of the universe out of the raw materials of the four contraries combined into the four elements, so also Shakespeare's creative art often evolves out of his combination of various elements in the raw materials of his literary sources.

Moreover, Shakespeare seems to adhere to Renaissance critical theory regarding the operation of the poetic imagination, theory that has been elucidated by William Rossky.³³ Although Renaissance psychology views the imagination as necessary but dangerous because of its irrational power, Renaissance apologies for poetry exalt this faculty for its transforming or "feigning" power when imagination is guided by reason to create art.³⁴ Rossky shows this cooperation between reason and imagination for art's sake is revealed in sixteenth-century descriptions of poetic feigning of images as a process of severing and joining things real to form things imagined). Shakespeare's use of his literary sources to feign his own images may be seen as some-what analogous to this poetic theory, especially in his joining together of what he often finds severed, or at best loosely associated, in his sources, or in our parlance, perhaps a literary version of fission and fusion. Impressive indeed is how Shakespeare's extraordinarily retentive memory generates his free association of images and ideas to form new combinations. On the basis of the few examples considered here, one aspect of Shakespeare's imaginative genius in his practice of imitatio seems to be his ability to forge connections where others, like Nashe, do not, or to see things "whole," resulting in a texture of images with greater verbal and ideational complexity.