The Emperor Manelay has set forth to the Holy Land, leaving his
empress and kingdom in his brother's care. No sooner has he gone than
the regent commences to make love to his brother's wife. She rejects
him scornfully. Angered by her indignation, he leads her into a forest
and hangs her by the hair upon a tree, leaving her there to starve.
As good-fortune will have it, on the third day a noble earl comes by,
and, finding her in that condition, releases her, takes her home with
him, and makes her governess to his only daughter. A feeling of shame
causes her to conceal her noble rank, and so it comes about that the
earl's steward aspires to her affection. Her steadfast refusal of all
his advances turns his love to hatred, so that he plans to bring about
her downfall. Then comes the passage which Shakespeare seized upon
as vital: "It befell upon a night that the earl's chamber door was
forgotten and left unshut, which the steward had anon perceived; and
when they were all asleep he went and espied the light of the lamp
where the empress and the young maid lay together, and with that he
drew out his knife and cut the throat of the earl's daughter and put
the knife into the empress's hand, she being asleep, and nothing
knowing thereof, to the intent that when the earl awakened he should
think that she had cut his daughter's throat, and so would she be put
to a shameful death for his mischievous deed."

The laws of immediateness and concentration, which govern the
short-story, are common also to the drama; by reason of their brevity
both demand a directness of approach which leads up, without break of
sequence or any waste of words, through a dependent series of actions
to a climax which is final. It will usually be found in studying the
borrowings which the masters have made from such sources as the _Gesta
Romanorum_ that the portions which they have discriminated as worth
taking from any one tale have been the only artistically essential