Verdi and Shakespeare.
I would have to go back to my music history sources and re-do some homework. However:

There is somebody you have to know about with regards to how a weary old composer, like Verdi -- it was near the end of his life, remember -- could rise to the bait of an Italian operatic adaptation of Shakespeare.

That person is Arrigo Boito. If you know "Otello" and "Falstaff" at all -- I know neither one very well, I admit -- you know that Verdi's music is a setting of Arrigo Boito's libretto, and it was Boito who did the work -- heck of a chore that must have been -- of making an Italian lyrical "book" out of an Elizabethan English drama.

Don't forget, more than one Shakespeare drama went into Boito/Verdi's Italian "Falstaff," because some of the Falstaff material comes from a drama besides MWW....don't ask me which drama -- one of the historical plays named after an English monarch I suppose?