The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

"One of the great satisfactions of life is to embark upon a long leisurely journey--especially an absorbing intellectual adventure filled with mystery and promise."

So begins "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy"...a new and decidedly adventurous book by the late Richard Paul Roe.

Thirty years ago, the consensus among what may be termed 'Professional Shakespeare Academics' (let's call them PSAs) regarding the bard's knowledge of Italy was: "...he knew little of Italian geography and customs...making glaring errors..." and "...the Italy he wrote about was mostly invented inside his head...with little regard for historical fact."

'Learned English Professors' (LEPs), the local foot soldiers for the infinitely more glamorous PSAs, followed suit, clucking softly to themselves and parroting the notion that Shakespeare's "glaring errors" on Italy were a by-product of his London based research and writing.

The passing years have not always been kind, however, to these views. Several members of the traditionally-minded academic community have already broken ranks over the past two decades as, one by one, the "glaring errors" purportedly made by Shakespeare have been shown to have NOT been errors at all, but rather, to be evidence of detailed knowledge of Italian geography and travel practices as they existed in the late 16th century.

The most obvious example of this detailed knowledge is evidenced by archeological discoveries in Northern Italy which have revealed the extensive system inland waterways that existed in the region during Shakespeare's era and beyond. These include the canals which made possible a journey by boat between Verona and the inland city of Milan...just as Shakespeare himself described in The Two Gentleman of Verona...the journey ridiculed by the PSAs and the LEPs.

Now comes this book by Mr. Roe which seeks to validate not only the MAJOR points of Italian geography and the travel customs of the era as described by Shakespeare, but in addition, to analyze all of Shakespeare's "Italian Plays" in great detail...with an eye toward proving that Shakespeare made virtually no errors in points large OR small regarding Italy.

This project was especially ambitious, as the late Mr. Roe was not a PSA, or even a lowly LEP. Mr. Roe was a practicing attorney with undergraduate degrees in the fields of History and English Literature. In other words, in the eyes of the PSAs and the LEPs, he was a `rank amateur'...lower in the academic food chain than even the most junior grad student.

So what did Mr. Roe, this 'rank amateur', actually unearth ? In my opinion, he has revealed that the great author knew his Italy quite well. One might even go so far as to say: "As Schliemann `discovered' Troy, so has Richard Paul Roe 'discovered' Shakespeare's Italy...not with pick and shovel mind you, but rather with his probing intellect".

Mr. Roe, like Schliemann, has shown that the 'self-proclaimed experts' have been wrong...wrong as to their 'facts'...wrong as to their basic assumptions...wrong about the need to even CONSIDER the possibility that Shakespeare had gained his knowledge of Italy first-hand...wrong about nearly EVERYTHING as concerns Shakespeare and Italy.

Mr. Roe has, to put it bluntly, made 'the professionals' look quite bad. For this sin alone, I suspect he will likely endure a period of ridicule by the 'self-proclaimed experts'. I further suspect that later will come 'reluctant acceptance' and then, finally, some of those same 'experts' will probably start taking credit for Mr. Roe's discoveries. Such is often the case with regards to groundbreaking research of this ilk.

I will refrain from revealing here the extraordinary finds presented in Mr. Roe's book, as I prefer that the skeptics of 'rank amateurs' such as Mr. Roe, to be required to actually READ his book before they write reviews on it.

I will simply state that what Mr. Roe has planted, are the seeds from which decades of debate and further research will spring. Whether these sprouts will be tended by slightly humbled professionals, or by increasingly confident 'rank amateurs', only time will tell.

Buy and read this book if you love Shakespeare's Italian Plays and want to learn more about how they came to be written. Buy and read this book if you prefer to seek knowledge with an open mind. Buy and read this book, if you want to see into the future of Shakespeare scholarship. Buy and read this book if you, like me, believe that one day, from seeds such as this, true erudition may grow.

Note: This book was written by an author who questions the traditional authorship attribution for the Shakespeare canon, but the main text is not written as an argument of those views at all, rather, it merely examines the locales of the 'Italian Plays of William Shakespeare' one by one without further comment upon the authorship attribution of those plays. It is a very objective piece of scholarship.

Mr. Fisher tries to make the case that no amount of specific detail of Italy would be inaccessible to William of Stratford regardless if he never traveled to Italy. He gives no examples from the book to show that the unusual details given could have been provided by any specific sources that could be found in London's book stalls or elsewhere. The idea that books were so plentiful and easily available to the common public is in Mr. Fisher's word, "rediculous."

I have read Roe's book and found details such as location of the sycamore trees outside the west wall in Verona identified in R&J remarkable. Furthermore, they are still there! Then there is the identification of "old Freetown" referred to by Escalus in R&J that Roe identified as Villafranca di Verona and the Scaliger castle. This is just from the beginning of the first chapter. There is so much more just in R&J.

Some of the many of details pointed out by Roe that intriqued me were the detailed description of the canal system in Italy at the time of Shakespeare and how they played into the plays of Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew and even the Merchant of Venice. Roe's remarkable dicoveries continues on and on necessitating careful reading but with great reward, such as the likely discovery of Prospero's island. If you love Shakespeare and appreciate history and geography, you will find much enjoyment in reading this landmark book.

Over the past 400 years, much has been imagined about Shakespeare's life, and much less actually known. One of the few certainties about his very uncertain biography was this: Whoever William Shakespeare was, he was clearly a "native genius" who never left England's shores. How else to explain those famous mistakes of geography, such as setting a seacoast in Bohemia or, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, sailing boats between Milan and Verona?

And yet...why would the poet choose to set I0 of his 36 plays in Italy, a land in which he had never set foot? What was it that triggered Shakespeare's fascination with Italian history, customs, geography and mores so evident in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing? What did Shakespeare really know about Italy, and how did he know it? With no first-hand evidence, historians admit they can only imagine how Shakespeare himself imagined the world beyond England's shores.

In his groundbreaking book, "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy," author Richard Roe is not content to imagine Shakespeare; he hunts him down. Using the canon of Shakespeare's 10 Italian plays as his guide, he treks through Italy by car and by foot to solve specific clues in the plays' lines to prove his thesis: that whoever wrote these works must have had an intimate, first-hand familiarity with Italy itself.

For Roe, the secret to Shakespeare is written in the streets and byways, the rivers and canals and churches of Italy. With the passion and precision of a master detective, he locates the exact spots that the Bard describes in his plays, locations that in four centuries of Shakespeare scholarship have never before been examined.

In a broken grove of native sycamore trees, Roe uncovers the very spot where Shakespeare's Benvolio claims that the lovesick Romeo walked. In the narrow streets of Verona, hidden by centuries of change in its form and function, he finds the church that scholars long thought Shakespeare had simply invented. And in his study of English etymology and the maps of Renaissance Italy, he proves that a gentleman of Verona could indeed have "sailed," as Shakespeare claims, between the landlocked cities of Verona and Milan, which sit far from any sea.

Time and again, Roe disproves centuries of scholarship that claim Shakespeare never traveled to Italy, and so was obviously ignorant of its geography. The Bard is revealed here to be a writer who is worldly, well-tutored and wise to the ways of Italian navigation, geography and customs - right down to the earmarks of specific neighborhoods. We are convinced he must have walked the streets where he set his scenes.

Informed by Roe's relentless and scholarly curiosity - the culmination of 15 years of research, travel and writing - "The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" will entertain readers eager to follow, literally, in the Bard's footsteps. The book speaks universally to lovers of Shakespeare, history, Italy, foreign exploration - and to anyone who simply enjoys a good mystery yarn. Its accessible writing style and attention to detail also makes it a unique addition to the bookshelves of students, historians, geographers and academics interested in pushing the scope of Shakespearean scholarship towards fresh and unseen horizons.

"The Shakespeare Guide to Italy" will change how we imagine Shakespeare, guiding us through that great "undiscovered country" where the man who was Shakespeare surely must have set foot.