but thought him incapable of writing a comedy. Verdi disagreed and said that he longed to write another light-hearted opera, but nobody would give him the chance. He had included moments of comedy even in his tragic operas, for example in Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino. For a comic subject Verdi considered Cervantes' Don Quixote and plays by Goldoni, Molière and Labiche, but found none of them wholly suitable. The singer Victor Maurel sent him a French libretto based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Verdi liked it, but replied that "to deal with it properly you need a Rossini or a Donizetti". Following the success of Otello in 1887 he commented, "After having relentlessly massacred so many heroes and heroines, I have at last the right to laugh a little." He confided his ambition to the librettist of Otello, Arrigo Boito. Boito said nothing at the time, but he secretly began work on a libretto based on The Merry Wives of Windsor with additional material taken from Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. Many composers had set the play to music, with little success, among them Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1796), Antonio Salieri (1799), Michael William Balfe (1835) and Adolphe Adam (1856). The first version to secure a place in the operatic repertoire was Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1849, but its success was largely confined to German opera houses. Boito was doubly pleased with The Merry Wives as a plot. Not only was it Shakespearian, it was based in part on Trecento Italian works – Il Pecorone by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, and Boccaccio's Decameron. Boito adopted a deliberately archaic form of Italian to "lead Shakespeare's farce back to its clear Tuscan source", as he put it. He trimmed the plot, halved the number of characters in the play, and gave the character of Falstaff more depth by incorporating dozens of passages from Henry IV. Verdi received the draft libretto a few weeks later, by early July 1889, at a time when his interest had been piqued by reading Shakespeare's play: "Benissimo! Benissimo! ... No one could have done better than you", he wrote back. Like Boito, Verdi loved and revered Shakespeare. The composer did not speak English, but he owned and frequently re-read Shakespeare's plays in Italian translations by Carlo Rusconi and , which he kept by his bedside. He