Fortune's Wheel illustrating Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (On the Fall of Great Men)

These accounts provide the model for such works as The Mirror for Magistrates on which Shakespeare drew for many of his Engish history plays. Boccaccio includes the following figures found in Shakespeare: Theseus, King of Athens. Priam, King of Troy, and his wife Hecuba, Agamemnon, King of Mycena, Alcibiades the Athenian, Tarquinius the Great King of the Romans, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Antonius, the Triumvirate and Cleopatra. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License (Wikipedia).

Shakespeare often alludes to the Wheel of Fortune as in Henry V when Pistol and Fluellen talk of the execution of Bardolph for thievery:

PISTOL.
Bardolph, a soldier, firm and sound of heart,
And of buxom valour, hath by cruel fate
And giddy Fortune's furious fickle wheel,
That goddess blind,
That stands upon the rolling restless stone--
FLUELLEN.
By your patience, Aunchient Pistol. Fortune is painted
blind, with a muffler afore his eyes, to signify to you that
Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to
signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning,
and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot,
look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and
rolls, and rolls. In good truth, the poet makes a most excellent
description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral. (III.vi.25-38)