In the part of his Discorsi del poema eroico in which he discusses how to choose materia which permits admixture of poetic fiction without loss of autorita, by which he means truth or reality, Tasso recommends events occurring among faraway peoples in unknown lands, and adds precise examples. . . from the land of the Goths, from Norway and Sweden and Iceland, and from the East Indies and the newfound lands in the vast ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules must the matter be taken ..1 Tasso's theories of tragedy were closely intertwined with his discussion of epic, and his only tragedy is a story of melancholy Goths, Norwegians and Swedes, II re Torrismondo, issued by Italian presses in various cities ten times in its first year, 1587, and frequently thereafter. His Scandinavian sources were the works of the brothers Magnus: Olaus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555) for local color, weather, customs and suggestions of incidents, and Johannes' Gothorum Suenonumque historia (1554) for names, situations and historical details which Tasso arbitrarily telescoped into his argument.2 Shakespeare's tragedy of a Danish prince, coming after the turn of the century, owes we know not how much to the mysterious Ur-Hamlet, which had reached London audiences by 1589. The choice of a Scandinavian past as subject obviously would have meant something different to each of the two poets. In the Italian imagination the snowy and shadowy northern countries were Ultima Thule still, lands of romance, indeed of romanzi.3 For Shakespeare the distance to the Scandinavian north was both physically and spiritually shorter, the sense of its reality stronger, held by ethnic and historical ties, and the materia he took from the twelfth-century Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus or a version of it in Franqois de Belleforest's Histoires tragiques (1574) was more factual as well as more of a piece than were Tasso's levyings on the Magnuses. But though poles apart, Torrismondo and Hamlet ask to be scrutinized together. Close enough in time to be called contempo-