Note 251c — XV—THE LATEST PLAYS

In Winter’s Tale (IV. iv. 760 et seq.) Autolycus threatens that the clown’s son ‘shall be flayed alive; then ‘nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp’s nest,’ &c. In Boccaccio’s story the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare’s Iachimo), after ‘being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,’ was ‘to his exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps and gadflies wherewith that country abounded’ (cf. Decameron, translated by John Payne, 1893, i. 164).