Such was the sixteenth-century Tuscan view of "wickedness." I have
endeavored to reproduce it without comment.

So much of ink and paper and typography may be needed, I fear, to remind
you, in a more exhortatory civilization, that Graciosa is really, by all
the standards of her day, a well reared girl. To the prostitution of her
body, whether with or without the assistance of an ecclesiastically
acquired husband, she looks forward as unconcernedly as you must by
ordinary glance out of your front window, to face a vista so familiar
that the discovery of any change therein would be troubling. Meanwhile
she wishes this sorrow-bringing Eglamore assassinated, as the obvious,
the most convenient, and indeed the only way of getting rid of him: and
toward the end of the play, alike for her and Guido, the presence of a
corpse in her garden is merely an inconvenience without any touch of the
gruesome. Precautions have, of course, to be taken to meet the emergency
which has arisen: but in the dead body of a man _per se_, the lovers can
detect nothing more appalling, or more to be shrunk from, than would be
apparent if the lifeless object in the walkway were a dead flower. The
thing ought to be removed, if only in the interest of tidiness, but there
is no call to make a pother over it.

As for our Guido, he is best kept conformable to modern tastes, I suspect,
by nobody's prying too closely into the earlier relations between the
Duke and his handsome minion. The insistently curious may resort to
history to learn at what price the favors of Duke Alessandro were secured
and retained: it is no part of the play.

Above all, though, I must remind you that the Duke is unspurred by
malevolence. A twinge of jealousy there may be, just at first, to find his
pampered Eglamore so far advanced in the good graces of this pretty girl,