Abstract
E. S. Bates cautions wordily but wisely that ‘no deduction can be made … as to whether Shakespeare ever left England or the reverse, because his capacity for using second-hand knowledge was so unique that it may be said of him as can be said perhaps of no other writer, that it is impossible to make a reasonable guess as to when his knowledge is firsthand and when it is not’.1 So far there has come to light no documentary evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare visited Italy. For him, it seems, Italy was an ‘undiscovered country’. However, this fact has not deterred many commentators from speculating about the possibility of an Italian sojourn.
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Notes
Quoted in Mario Praz, ‘Shakespeare’s Italy’ in Shakespeare Survey 7 (Cambridge University Press, 1954) p. 96.
Lewis Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1902 ) p. 396.
George Chapman, All Fools (Vol. 16); ed. Frank Manley ( Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1968 ).
See A. C. Partridge, ‘Shakespeare and Italy’, English Studies in Africa, 4 (1961) p. 119;
D. E. Baughan, ‘Shakespeare’s Confusion of the two Romanos’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 36 (Jan. 1937) pp. 35–9, and
Mary Augusta Scott, ‘The Book of the Courtier: a Possible Source of Benedick and Beatrice’, PMLA, 16 (1901) pp. 478, 481.
See Barbara D. G. Steer, ‘Shakespeare and Italy’, Notes and Queries, 198 (Jan. 1953) p. 23;
A. L. Rowse, The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady ( London: Jonathan Cape, 1978 ) pp. 1–37.
See Frances A. Yates, John Florio (Cambridge University Press, 1934) passim.
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© 1989 Murray J. Levith
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Levith, M.J. (1989). The Undiscovered Country. In: Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19681-4_5
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