Sight-Seeing Shakespeare
Around a third of Shakespeare’s plays take place in Italy. Most scholars assumed that his knowledge of Italy was from writings and contact with Italian merchants. Some authorship debates arise from the suspicion that Shakespeare never went to Italy so someone else must have written the plays about Italy. But now, The Times has an article which asks us, “Hath Shakespeare been a tourist in Venice?”
Now FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER (or so it would seem by the article) some scholars are speculating that Mr. William Shakespeare DID in fact take an excursion out of the country to the land of pasta.
I’m wondering why this issue seems so new. Is it so hard to believe that Shakespeare traveled? The articles says, “There is no concrete evidence that Shakespeare ever left England,” but then again there’s almost no concrete information on 99% of Shakespeare’s life… so who are we to say that he didn’t go places?
For a man that we know very little about I’m not a fan about giving answers about what he did or didn’t do in his lifetime. Maybe he went to Italy. Maybe he went to Cambodia. Probably not, but who knows?
Posted on April 1, 2008
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Michael Apr 2
I’m a bit of an authorship controversy fan, and one interesting myth that really ought to get punctured in the idea that Shakespeare is very poorly documented. Actually, we have some 70 personal documents extant that corroborate his activities: records of tax defaulting, graindealing, moneylending, tithe-purchasing, property transactions, theatrical shareholding, etc. What is weird about them is that none of them are literary - there’s nothing from his life that documents his profession as a writer - the attribution rests on posthumous evidence. If there were, the authorship controversy would have to go away. What’s even weirder is that we have literary evidence from the lives of all the other major writers of his day - even from the ones who don’t have half the documentation. So we have to do a lot of “supposing” - hey, he could have gone to Italy, why not?
He “could have” done a lot of things. But the strange absence of a paper trail is the beginning of the weirdness. The authorship controversy is not just a geek’s obsession anymore (well, to be honest, it is still that for some, and always will be) - it’s got Ph.Ds working on it, and university symposia checking it out, etc. For further info, here’s a non-profit to explore: http://www.shakespearefellowship.org
Like the blog - have fun!
Michael