230 THE PATTERNS
was first produced on the stage. The internal evidence is derived from a perusal of the play itself, which bears strong marks of two hands in the authorship of it: an older and an inferior style of composition is observable in the commencement of the play; and it is upon the three last acts that we suppose Shakespeare to have been principally engaged. How much of the play, as written by some anterior author, -was allowed by our great dramatist to remain, it is impossible with any accuracy to determine. Shakespeare was not the first to give it the title of " Pericles," for it seems to have borne that name when Alleyn acted in it, perhaps some years before the commencement of the seventeenth century.
The hero, at the oldest date at which we hear of him in English, was called "Kynge Appolyn of Thyre f in 1510, under this title, Wynkyn de Worde printed the romance, as it had been translated from the French by Robert Copland. This was its first appearance in our printed literature. Who was the author of the French version used by Copland we are without information; but it is more than probable that the foundation of it was .the narrative in the " Gesta Romanorum" (printed late in the i5th century), to which Belief or est was also to a certain extent indebted in his "Histories," "Tragiques," the publication of which was commenced in 1564. Belleforest, however, claims to have gone to a distinct source, a .manuscript having fallen in his way, which purported to be tirk du Grec: in fact, it seems to have had its origin in that language, from which it was translated into Latin, and subsequently into French, Spanish, Italian and English. These different versions are enumerated by Mr Douce in the work we have already referred to, but the Anglo-Saxon translation (printed under the learned care of Mr Thorpe) does not seem to have fallen in his way. Latin MSS. of it, as early as the tenth century, appear to be in existence.