Richard Paul Roe, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels, Introduction by D. Wright, New York, Harper Perennial, 2011, pp. 310, maps by F. Sheehan with photos (some by the Author) and illustrations.(published with the title: Everyone Has a Right to an Opinion, in “Journal of Drama Studies”, vol. 6, n. 2, 2012, pp. 110-115)
The book contains twelve chapters that deal with “the secret Italy hidden in the plays of Shakespeare” (p. 1) and Richard Paul Roe’s travels, that span a lifetime, as a lover of Italy, seen through the eyes of the English Bard: Romeo and Juliet (chapter 1), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (chapters 2 and3), The Taming of the Shrew (chapter 4), The Merchant of Venice (chapters 5 and 6), Othello (chapter 7), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (chapter 8), All’s Well that Ends Well (chapter 9), Much Ado about Nothing (chapter 10), The Winter’s Tale (chapter 11), The Tempest (chapter 12).
In Verona, the main setting of Romeo and Juliet, the A. wanders around the city, very much like Dickens in Pictures from Italy (1846), with a copy of the play in one hand and a tourist guide in the other, picking out sights and curiosities that are mentioned in the play. He has just started touring the city, that immediately he is pleasantly surprised to find remnants of a grove of sycamore trees “that westward rooteth from the city side” exactly- as he says - where Benvoliodescribes them in Act I, 1, vv. 119-120, while he was looking for Romeo.
Sycamore trees, that in Europe actually belong to the maple family, acerpseudoplatanus, and can be distinguished from the native American variety called platanus occidentalis, are also present in Love’s Labour’s Lost (V,2, vv. 89-94) and Othello (IV,3), mentioned for their restful shade and for their association with “love-sickness” (sickamour) (cf. Romeo and Juliet, ed. by B. Gibbons, Arden Shakespeare, p. 88, note 119). The sycamore trees, photographed by the A. presumably a few years ago, outside Porta Palio, are actually maples, so it seems very difficult to conclude that Shakespeare stayed in Verona and recorded his remembrance of its particular trees “into the pool of his great drama” (p. 10), revealing an overlooked truth through apparently irrelevant facts.
Likewise in chapter 8, during a visit to Mantua to admire the astonishing pictorial and architectural masterpieces of that “rare Italian master Julio Romano” (The Winter’s Tale, V, ii, 96), Roe takes some time for a pleasure trip to Sabbioneta, “la piccola Atene dei Gonzaga”. Entering through Porta Vittoria with a guide he is left practically breathless and has to steady himself against a wall upon hearing that the gate was also called “the Duke’s Oak”. Could it possibly be that the Duke’s Oak in Sabbioneta corresponds to “the Duke’s oak” in A Midsummer Night’s Dreamin ActI,ii,102, where Bottom and Quince meet to rehearse their play? Considering that Sabbioneta is called “the little Athens”, built by the enlightened Duke Vespasiano Gonzaga (1511-91) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in Athens, ruled by the justDuke Theseus, Roe decides that Shakespeare had, without doubt, toured the Renaissance ideal town of the Gonzaga (p. 183) and, afterwards,chose it as his model for the setting of his fairy play. No documentary evidence is given for this conclusion except that Sabbioneta could conform to Theseus’ ideal court and that a local guide pointed out that the Porta Vittoria, the entrance gate to the small town set on a wooded plain, was also locally and popularly called the Duke’s Oak.But no mention of this particular oak at the site of the Vittoria Gate can be traced in the authoritative Italian Touring Club guide to Lombardy (cf. Lombardia, Milano, Touring Club Italiano, 2005, p. 812).
But let us return to Romeo and Juliet, after the first revelation of the sycamore trees, the A. proceeds to identify the topography of the whole play. “Freetown”, which translates the Italian “Villafranca”, exists as a real place, just a few miles outside of Verona, where Roe “discovers” that the whole Veronese tradition of the tragedyisbased both on historical and literary sources.The same is true for the houses of the Capulets and the Montagues, traditionally identified with Medieval buildings, respectively in via Cappello and in via Arche Scaligere 2-4, where once the Cagnolo Nogarola family used to live.Even though it’s mainly through oral transmission that even scholars have come to believe that Juliet lived in the Medieval house in via Cappello, where the symbol of the hat can be seen on the arch above the entrance, little is known about Romeo’s house, except that, at least up to the 19th century, according to hearsay, his house was located in vicolo Pigna (cf.A.Pomello, Giulietta e Romeo. Storia o leggenda?, ed. by M. Bonato,Verona, Della Scala, 2002, p. 30).
Even the little church of Saint Peter, mentioned in Romeo and Juliet, III, v, 114, where Juliet was to become the bride of Count Paris, locatedin Stradone San Fermo, is described by Roe as the Capulet’s parish church (p. 17 & pp.31-33), but, traditionally, the Capulets (Cappelletti) were considered parishioners of San Fermo Maggiore, the outstanding, Gothic church, near the banks of the Adige, where the Franciscans arrived in 1260. The little church of san Pietro Incarnario,so called probably because it was founded on the ground of the ancient Roman cemetery (carnarium) in 955, and the convent of Saint Francis, which is supposed to be the burial ground of the two lovers, are mentioned, along with the other locations in the play, by Matteo Bandello (c. 1480 – 1562) - also the source of the English poem by Arthur Brooke, dated 1562 - and the translators of his novella, Boisteau in French and Painter in English.
Although the A. is aware of dealing with historical events he never even consults or pretend to rely on historical sources, of which he seems to ignore the existence . Yet, besides Medieval references to the two feuding families,it’s quite possible, even today, to consult the only Renaissance account of the story of the “star-crossed” lovers of Verona in the chronicle of Shakespeare’s contemporary,Girolamo Dalla Corte, Historia di Verona, (Verona, Stamperia di Girolamo Discepolo, 1596, libro I, pp. 589-593, but, it seems that the first ed. of the first volume is dated 1592). The book is rarely linked to the Shakespearean play, yet it’s interestingto note that the chroniclernarrates the story of Romeo and Juliet by referringindirectly to the poem, L’infelice amore dei due fedelissimi amanti Giulia e Romeo (Giolito, 1553), written by his uncle, Gherardo Boldieri (1497-1571) under the pseudonym of “Clizia”.Boldieri had been inspired by Luigi Da Porto’s novella, but alsoby Matteo Bandello, whom he had met (as recorded in the novellas XII and XVI, in the second part of the collection composed by the Dominican monk). Boldieri and Dalla Corte both depend on Da Porto but they claim to havemapped out and visited all the places mentioned in his novella and identified them as traditionally corresponding to the historical sites.
In Chapters 2, 4, and 9 the A., analyzesThe Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of theShrew,and All’s Well that Ends Well, in order to prove, in the first two plays, that Milan could be easily reached from Verona by navigating along rivers and canals and, similarly that Lucentio could make good use of the intricate waterways from Pisa to “come ashore” in Padua (p. 91) just as, in the third play,set in Florence, he demonstrates thattrade (in wool) was plied by exploiting navigation on the Arno river, not far from “the Saint Francis here beside the port” (III, v, 36), which, as the A. assumes, corresponds to the real Oratory of the Franciscans near Porta Prato.For these “discoveries” and other Shakespearean references and allusions, Roe heavily depends and re-adapts research conducted by Georges Lambin in the early 1950s and later published in Voyages de Shakespeare en France et en Italie (Paris, Droz, 1962), a book that appears in the bibliography, but is never actually quoted within the text, where the few notes are mostly explanatory and rarely bibliographical.
In his lengthy tour of Venice in chapters 5, 6, and 7, the A. surmises and illustrates elements of fact and fiction which have been assembled by consulting such sources, as Thomas Coryat (Crudities, 1698), Horatio Brown, (Studies in the History of Venice, 2 vols, 1907), G. Giraldi Cinthio (Gli Hecatommithi, 1565) and articles by Violet M. Jeffrey, Shakespeare’s Venice (in “The Modern Language Review”, vol. 27, no. 1 (1932), pp. 24-35, and Noemi Magri, Places in Shakespeare: Belmont and Thereabouts” (in “The de Vere Society Newsletter”, June 2003). The former describes various streets of 16th century Venice and specifies that the “tranect”, or horse-drawn ferry,could be boarded at Fusina both by Portia and Balthazar; the latter tries to demonstrate that Belmont really existed and from her calculations and suppositions, it should be associated with the Palladian Villa Foscari, where Henry III and, perhaps, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford might have sojourned, the latter, while he was staying in Padua in 1575.
Completely unconvincing are the last three chapters that deal with Sicily. While examining the setting of Messina in Much Ado About Nothing, because “nearly all the places alluded to… no longer exist” (p. 220), the A. fabricates a historical theory which aims at unraveling or decoding the true identityof the main characters in the play, who are made to correspond to contemporary powerful figures, like don John of Austria. The A.supports his reasoning by interpreting the clues that he finds disseminated in the play and that conveniently correspond to the chronology he has assigned to it. At one point, when he realizes that scholars have dated Much Ado around 1598, he declares in amazement: “I see something wrong here”, and decrees that it “was written nearer to 1576, perhaps 1578” (p. 226 and p. 241), because the “Shakespeare” that wrote all those marvelous poems and plays, could only be Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who certainly travelled to Italy in 1575, although thefew lyrical poemsand the verse “dialogue between the poet and Desire”,that comprise his literary heritage,compare well only with the output of other contemporary courtiers.
In The Winter’s Tale,where the only real Italian is the acclaimed artist Giulio Romano, the A. shifts his focus to the classical background that involves Cleomenes and Dionwho, during their return voyage from Delphi, following a very tortuous route, mapped out by the author, eventually land at Trapani and from there, following the via Valeria, come to the temple of Segesta (pp. 257-260).
But the greatest surprise awaits the reader at the very end of the book where Prospero’s island receives a long and detailed description. Few scholars have ventured in attributing a real geographical name to the island of The Tempest. Since the text mentions it, Bermuda or “Bermoothes”, was traditionally accepted by some critics, but Roe proves that the name corresponds to “a wretched haunt in London… where dilapidated buildings encouraged prostitution, gambling and the illegal manufacture of alcohol in the many hidden distilleries – “stills” (p. 291). Perhaps there’s some truth in the statement, but nothing prepares us for his conclusion. Roe is truly convinced that all the action in the play takes place in one of the wildest Aeolian islands, Vulcano. Shakespeare by name, but actually, the Earl of Oxford, who composed the play before his death in 1604, roamed the island, learned its language, Catalan (p.287), studied its peculiar animals and floraand reveled in its “constant music – cracking, groaning, sighing and drumming” (p.284).
Notwithstanding his rather naïve approach, Richard Paul Roe has written an enthusiastic story about Shakespeare’s travels throughout Italy, from Lombardy to Sicily, that reads sometimes like a fantasy, sometimes like an adventure story, sometimes like a mystery.
For a scholar in the field of Anglo/Italian relations, it is impossible to accept, at face value, this particular account of Shakespeare’s travels, that rarely quotes directly from the plays, includesa heterogeneous bibliography, which is rather dated, and rarely mentions works of Italian scholarship and, when it does, the titles are often misspelt, as are the many Italian expressions in the book, which is sorely in need of a good bilingual editor. Two major omissions, for instance, is the still valuable essay by Mario Praz, Shakespeare e l’Italia (Lectura Scaligera Shakespeareana, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1963, available also in English), who condensed in a nutshell the slight proof we have about the Bard’s travels, and the indispensable Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeareby Geoffrey Bulluogh, which is the starting point for all comparative studies of the playwright and the only collection of sources so far that establishesthe playwright’s first hand knowledge of many Italian literary works.
Of course everyone has a right to an opinion.Even at St. Trinian’s school incredible discoveries about Shakespeare were made and certainly in the authorship question that has been troubling literary critics in the last two centuries, nothing could be more astonishing than the revelation that the Bard was really a woman[1]. But then if Shakespeare is the Earl of Oxford and Roe is really retelling that gentleman’s Italian voyage, there was no need for him to use such a misleading title and to be so mysterious about the authorship of the plays up to the very end of the book.When the deceit becomes clear the reader can only experience disappointment and also perhaps a little envy for the author who has been gallivanting around some of the most exclusive places in the garden of the world, following the footsteps of the one outstanding Bard.
(Rita Severi)
1
[1] Cf. Inthe hilarious film “St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold”, 2009, directed by Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson, starring Rupert Everett , cross-dressing as the totally understated British head-mistress, Camilla Fritton, the students of the all-female academy discover that Shakespeare was really a woman.