1 | 2    Whetstone’s sources         Whetstone took many elements from Boccaccio for the structure of his book, and for the novellas. He adapted two novellas from Boccaccio’s Decameron in the fourth day’s exercise of his work. Whetstone and other Elizabethan writers translated and imitated Boccaccio especially for his religious arguments. Boccaccio was a Catholic writer, but he always spoke about priests, nuns and monks without hypocrisy.        The Elizabethan writers took from Boccaccio this religious material to show the sins and the corruption of the Catholic clergy. In fact, it was a way of exalting Protestantism and the raising Puritanism. They considered the Catholic Church blasphemous and idolatrous; they thought Catholics were ignorant because they hadn’t the Bible translated in the vulgar language, so the Priests could tell them anything they wanted from Pulpit and the people would believe them. In choosing the tales to translate there were many limitations so they chose the tales that hadn’t lascivious scenes and could be considered moralizing.        Elizabethan writers were very critical of the Catholic Clergy and of the contrasts between the different orders of catholic monks (Agostinian, Franciscan, etc). The most famous novellas by Bandello in the Elizabethan times were The Duchess of Malfi and The Countesse of Celant; the adapted novella of Rinaldo and Gilletta in The Rock of Regarde (1576) and Romeo and Juliet, recalled by a character in the fifth daies pleasures in Aurelia (1593). The most famous novella by Giraldi Cinthio was Il Moro di Venezia, which Shakespeare took for the plot of his Othello. Whetstone adopted the story of Promos and Cassandra that Giraldi Cinthio had used in his Ecatommiti, (Deca VIII, Nov. 5).        Whetstone wrote a play The Rare Historie of Promos and Cassandra (1578) that was never performed on the stage. The novella is the prose version of the play and it is the most famous work by Whetstone because it was the main source of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.         1 | 2