The Shakespeare Code

It was Ben Jonson who first attacked Shakespeare’s knowledge of geography. In The Winter’s Tale he gives Bohemia a coast-line.

It was fashionable, at one time, to say that Shakespeare knew nothing of Italian geography either: he has Prospero, in The Tempest, sailing from Milan to the Adriatic Sea and Valentine, in Two Gentleman of Verona, sailing to Milan from Verona.

But, as Professor Ernesto Grillo (an Italian lecturing in Literature at Glasgow University) pointed out as early as 1949 in his Shakespeare and Italy, people travelled round Italy by an extensive network of canals.

Here’s a painting of one…..

Shakespeare’s other famous ‘mistake’ was to claim that Tranio’s father (in The Taming of the Shrew) was a ‘sail maker’ from land-locked Bergamo. People had forgotten about the Italian lakes. There is a boat building industry in Bergamo to this day!

Here is one of its latest products….

So Shakespeare’s mistakes were never mistakes at all.

In fact, the third Earl of Southampton was so taken with Italian canals that in 1611 he dug a canal on his own land at Titchfield, only the second canal in England…

Titchfield Canal Lock

It clearly never flourished, so Titchfield today is almost as it was in Shakespeare’s time.

This is South Street….

South Street, Titchfield, Hampshire.

And this is Titchfield in the snow……..

 

(It’s best to read Part 7. now.)