The primary source for All’s Well That Ends Well was The Decameron (ninth novel, third day), written by Giovanni Boccaccio in 1353. Shakespeare could have read the text in its original Italian, but it is most likely that he worked from the translation by William Painter, retold in The Palace of Pleasures, in 1575. Painter, an English clerk, gathered his collection of ‘Pleasant Histories and excellent Novelles’ from authors like Bandello, Livy, and Marguerite of Navarre, in addition to Boccaccio. The following is Painter’s synopsis of Boccaccio’s story (original spelling):
Giletta a phisician’s doughter of Narbon, healed the Frenche Kyng of a fistula, for reward whereof she demaunded Beltramo Counte of Rossiglione to husbande. The Counte beying maried againste his will, for despite fled to Florence and loved an other. Giletta his wife, by pollicie founde meanes to lye with her husbande, in place of his lover, and was begotten with child of two sonnes: which knowen to her husbande, he received her againe, and afterwardes he lived in great honour and felicite.