Painter, WILLIAM, author of the Palace of Pleasure, was most probably a Kentishman, and born about 1525. He seems to have been master of Sevenoaks school about 1560, but early next year became Clerk of the Ordnance in the Tower, with a stipend of eightpence a day. He kept this post all his days, married, seems to have had a somewhat easy standard of honesty, grew rich, and bought lands. He made his will in 1594, and died probably soon after. In 1566 he published the first volume of The Palace of Pleasure 'beautified, adorned, and well furnished, with Pleasant Histories and Excellent Nouells selected out of divers good and commendable authors;' the second volume, 'containing manifold store of goodly Histories, Tragical matters, and other Moral argument, very requisite for delight and profit,' followed in 1567. Of the first volume the principal source was the Heptameron; of the second, Bandello, through the medium of the French translations of Boastuan and Belleforest; but, in the definitive edition of the whole work (1575), to both parts stories were added from Boccaccio, Ser Giovanni, and Straparola. These last two at least he must have taken directly from the Italian. Painter's work became exceedingly popular, and indeed was the main source whence many dramatists drew their plots. Even in almost all Shakespeare's comedies we see the prevalence of the convention in early English comedy in favour of Italian plots, names, and places. Ascham in the Scholomaster denounces the 'bawdie stories . . . enchantments of Circes, brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in England,' and there can be little doubt that here he points directly at Painter, though he does not name his book. 'Painter's English is easy and unaffected, but lacks the dignity the reader expects of an Elizabethan. His book is the largest work in prose between the Morte Darthur and North's Plutarch, but its real importance is that it introduced into our literature many of the best novels of Boccaccio, Bandello, and Margaret of Navarre.
Joseph Haslewood edited an admirable edition in 1813 (2 vols.); a later is that by Joseph Jacobs (3 vols. 1890).