The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels

This Baedeker to the "Italian plays," an eccentric labor of love by an attorney who works like crazy to find hidden truths via minute analyses of texts, has at its core the long-accepted scholarly belief that Shakespeare never traveled, certainly not extensively, through Continental Europe and Italy. From here, the book veers into murkier territory. For Roe (who died last year), it is the earl of Oxford who made all the trips, accounting for details and an intimate erudition regarding the Mediterranean setting of 10 of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Thus, many of the so-called topographic blunders claimed by scholars in The Two Gentlemen of Verona are resolved through a better understanding of a long-vanished canal system; Romeo and Juliet details aspects of settings (types of trees, Juliet's window, and other facts) that come from no surviving source that a nontraveler could have accessed; Prospero's island in The Tempest is positively identified by geologic configurations as the island of Vulcano off Sicily's northeastern shore. Overall, the title is misleading: Shakespeare of Stratford turns out to be no guide at all. Considerable learning and ingenuity in working through the details of location and character are offset by an odd delusion, which, in fairness, the author shares with many serious fans, that the Bard was not Shakespeare of Stratford, though Roe only slyly implies this belief. 180 color and b&w photos; maps. (Nov. 8)