In “the first act, the very first scene” of the play that so many believe to have been Shakespeare’s first, Romeo’s mother, Lady Montague, asks Benvolio if he knows her son’s whereabouts. Roe begins his book where Shakespeare began his play, in “fair” Verona, “the first Italian city a sensible traveler from England would reach, having successfully crossed the Alps and come down through the Brenner Pass” (5).
Through the generosity of his daughter, Hillary Roe Metternich, I can share with you here enlarged versions of a few of the photographs he took during his travels, from the Verona of Romeo and Proteus to the Padua of Petrucio, the Venice of Shylock and Othello, the Sicily of Leontus and Prospero, and a little-known town just outside Mantua where he envisioned the events and characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Click on thumbnails to enlarge.) Much as they enhance his book, they’re fairly small in size. Most of the photos here were taken by Roe himself on his journeys. If he was so specific about Italy, he can be trusted in other areas, as readers steeped in ancient literature, horticulture, Renaissance Law, medicine, and astronomy, have attested over and over through the years. This changes our view of how Shakespeare functioned. Today, these have fed with facts, names, places and photographs his brilliant feat of literary forensics: the evidence that Shakespeare knew these places personally, that he always knew what he was talking about and––greatly important to authorship scholars––that he was there himself. As Richard Roe travelled through Italy, tracking down the real locations where events occur in Shakespeare, he carried with him dog-eared copies of the plays with the place names underlined that were clues to the locations he was seeking, an accumulation of well-worn maps and travel guides, and his camera.
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