Another of Samela's lovers, despairing of success, "became sick for
anger, and spent whole ecologues in anguish."

Greene's story of "Pandosto," of "Dorastus and Fawnia," which attained
a great popularity, and went through at least fourteen editions, is
well known as the foundation of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale."
Shakespeare has followed Greene in the material points of the story,
even so far as to make Bohemia a maritime country. But the genius of
the dramatist is manifest in the miraculous and happy ending which he
substitutes for the unlawful love and inconsistent suicide of Pandosto
in the work of Greene. Shakespeare borrowed from the text, as well as
from the plot of the novelist. The lines,

The gods themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them: Jupiter
Became a bull, and bellowed: the green Neptune
A ram, and bleated; and the fire robed god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now,

are evidently a reproduction of the soliloquy of Dorastus:

And yet Dorastus, shame not at thy shepheard's weede: The heavenly
Godes have sometime earthly thoughts: Neptune became a ram, Jupiter
a bull, Apollo a shepheard; they Gods, and yet in love; and thou a
man appointed to love.[63]

The story of "Philomela," "penned to approve women's chastity," is the
best of Greene's tales, and approaches more closely the modern novel