If the blocking figure is a conventional element of Shakespearean comic structure, Don John is given a slightly different role from that found by Shakespeare in his sources. While the tale of the slandered-but-virtuous woman is a popular trope in early modern literature (and one to which Shakespeare is repeatedly drawn in plays from The Merry Wives of Windsor to The Winter’s Tale), the plot from Shakespeare’s source, the Italian poet Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, took male jealousy as its motivation.
