Did Shakespeare Travel in Italy?
- Dorothea Dickerman
- Mar 18
- 7 min read
“Literature is always history, but history – the events captured and pinned
to a textuality – is not always literature.”
– Cirilo Bautista
If you had asked my husband, Rich - a lawyer and an historian - whether Shakespeare’s plays were history, he would have said no. To him they were just literature - fluffy fictions disconnected from real events. He wasn’t interested in them because they weren’t documented history. To Rich, the name on the plays meant that the guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon made them up.
Are history and literature the same in Shakespeare?
But I see it differently. I believe that in Shakespeare’s case, literature and history are the same. Some of Shakespeare’s plays are historically accurate in their settings and periods; other are not. But together, they create an Elizabethan diary in literary form. They reveal untold historical secrets that document Shakespeare’s life, relationships, travels and political commentary, cleverly woven into different settings and story lines.
The politics of one age become its history in the next. I argued to Rich that Shakespeare’s works aren’t just literature; they are dramatizations of then-contemporary politics – which he witnessed in England and on the continent. Even when set in ancient Rome, Shakespeare was writing about the power struggles of his own time.
Many of his characters are based on well-known court personalities, including Queen Elizabeth herself. They speak lines that his audiences would recognize as commentary on then-current events. Setting some plays in foreign countries, cities and landscapes dressed England in geographic fig leaves as camouflage for his political discourse – a wise move since what he wrote often amounted to treason at a time when treason often amounted to beheading.
As they aged, Shakespeare’s plays and poems became eye-witness history.
But one big mystery kept surfacing:
Why did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Italy?
How many of Shakespeare’s 38 plays are set wholly or partially in Italy? Fifteen - just as many as in England. They overflow with precise details about Italian dialects, laws, customs, geographic and urban specifics, precise distances, even the interiors of actual Italian nobles’ palazzi – whose owners did not roll out the welcome mat to casual travelers.
The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Italian Plays: How Did He Know So Much?
No record suggests that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon ever left England or that he spoke Italian. So how did he know so much about Italy, Italians and Italian?
Was Shakespeare actually from a noble Italian family? Or was he a well-credentialed Englishman, fluent in Italian, who traveled the length and breadth of la bella penisola with letters of introduction that would open any door?
When I posed these questions to Rich, he said, “Prove it.”
The Journey to Prove It: Shakespeare’s Italy?
Rich might not be a Shakespeare fan, but he loves Italy. Armed with Shakespeare’s Italian plays, maps old and new, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy by Richard Roe, and my historical research (most of it in Italian), I proposed a travel adventure and a quest.
Our mission? To test my theory that Shakespeare’s works are primary historical sources - against Rich’s theory that they were pure invention – by searching for physical evidence that the Bard didn’t just invent his version of Italy from afar.
If the Bard’s Italian plays weren’t just stories, but guidebooks to Italy, they would lead us in Shakespeare’s footsteps in the very Italian streets and beaches he walked. And Rich would have to admit that I was right.
Following the Evidence: Shakespeare in Northern Italy
Rich was intrigued by my offer of an outside-of-the-box Italian adventure vacation – provided that it had some serious historical teeth. He agreed that because the fellow from Stratford-upon-Avon had never left England, if the plays proved a reliable travel guide through Italy 400 years later, then the footsteps we followed, and thus the plays, had to belong to someone else.
But he seriously doubted that the footsteps we followed would have much in common with those of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford on his journey as as a young man throughout Italy in 1575 and 1576.
To test my theory, we applied a three-part test:
(1) We compared the plays’ details against physical evidence in modern Italy and reputable historical sources about de Vere’s travels.
(2) We matched de Vere’s documented travels against the locations in the plays.
(3) We searched for 400-year-old physical evidence in modern Italy that aligned with both the plays and de Vere’s history.
The results?
Watch the Evidence Unfold:
👀See for yourself in Part I of Traveling Together Through Shakespeare’s Italy: Shakespeare in Northern Italy (watch below).
Using Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Tempest, Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Merchant of Venice as our travel guide, we traced a route through northern Italy from Milan, Mantua, Verona and Padua to Venice and tried matching it to de Vere’s recorded travels.
Beyond the natural beauty and charm of Italy, there were surprises: clues in Shakespeare’s text that linked history, place and plays in ways we never could have predicted. For example:
Did You Know About Travel in Renaissance Italy by Canals?
Renaissance northern Italy was crisscrossed by a vast network of navigable rivers and canals making travel by boat faster and safer than by road. Some modern Shakespeare scholars claim Shakespeare made a mistake when his characters sailed through “landlocked” cities because they assumed that, since he never left England, he did not understand Italian geography.
But he knew exactly how to cross the breadth of northern Italy by boat! Not only that – it is still possible today in some places, including Milan!
Shakespeare in Sicily: The Trail Continues
One trip wasn’t enough. We had only followed the Bard’s footsteps in northern Italy. Was Shakespeare in both northern and southern Italy?
For our second trip, I needed to create a Shakespearean travel guide to southern Italy, using yet more historical research, Roe and Shakespeare’s plays set on the Adriatic and Sicilian coasts: Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest and Twelfth Night.
Again, our three-part test delivered intriguing results. Not only did we find firsthand evidence that Shakespeare knew these locations incredibly well – down to details that could only be known by someone who had been there - but we also uncovered something unexpected. The settings of the plays mirrored exactly the route de Vere must have followed when he disappeared for five months in 1575 during a massive plague outbreak in Italy.
The unsolved mystery of where de Vere had gone and why unfolded as we overlaid Italian history, Elizabethan letters, reports from Burghley’s spies and even the ancient hero Aeneas’ journey around the Italian peninsula on top of the southern Italian plays.
Did Vergil Influence Shakespeare’s Travels in Italy?
Shakespeare knew Vergil’s The Aeneid well. He used it often in his plays, especially The Tempest. De Vere was marooned in Italy because the Alpine passes were blocked due to the plague (exactly like the messenger in Romeo and Juliet who returns with Romeo’s undelivered letter to Juliet). Could it be that de Vere used The Aeneid as his travel guide as he tried to outrun the plague that summer, just like we were using Shakespeare’s plays?
👉Follow us and decide for yourself as we trace Aeneas, Shakespeare and de Vere on a Sicilian adventure in Part II of Traveling Together Through Shakespeare’s Italy: Shakespeare in Sicily (watch below)
Discover the Real-World Locations of Shakespeare’s Plays
From Verona’s ancient walls to the coastlines of “Bohemia” and “Illyria” (modern-day Croatia), Shakespeare’s famous Italian plays breath authenticity. If you have ever wondered whether Shakespeare was in Venice, stand in the very room in “Belmont” where Portia drops hints about which casket wins her hand in The Merchant of Venice. If you have ever puzzled over where Prospero’s island in The Tempest is, go inside his cave, listen to the waves wash the shore outside, and inhale the nearby “pools” that Shakespeare’s Trinculo claimed smell like “horse-piss”.
As you experience the pieces of the historical puzzle shifting in unforeseen combinations, the answer to whether literature is history becomes clearer, and Shakespeare’s Italian plays start to unlock an even deeper and more beautiful historical secret!
🗝️Unlock the Evidence Yourself: Watch the Traveling Together Through Shakespeare’s Italy Series
🏔️Unlock Part I: Shakespeare in Northern Italy
⚓️Set Sail for Part II: Shakespeare in Sicily
More Secrets to Come
Have Rich and I made further trips following Shakespeare’s trail based on other plays? Well, of course! I am researching a new trip right now!
📜You can join us on our next journey by subscribing here.
⛲️And check out some of the Italian photos and matching Shakespeare quotes on my Instagram, SeekingShakespeare here: https://www.instagram.com/ddickerman01
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