On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Stratford Shared a Beer in Southwark.

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• Shakespeare Authorship, March the 17th and Social Media.
• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Stratford Shared a Beer in Southwark.

Just why Shakespeare chose to locate so many plays in Italy and how he came across so much information about the country have long been the subject of scholarly debate. For traditional Stratfordian scholars, the questions presented an interesting specialty within the field. But, once the Shakespeare Authorship Debate became a thing, that curious little sideline became a battle-line.

Candidates that had not traveled in Italy during their lives — specifically, the Stratford man — found their flank exposed. Many of the alternative candidates descended upon it with Italian banners streaming behind them.

The Stratfordians, for their part, reinforced that flank with generalizations some even valid. Who could prove that they were not true, after all? Shakespeare could, indeed, have picked up facts about Italy from merchant sailors by hanging out at London dockyard taverns. Already, inexplicable language capabilities had been explained away by Ben Jonson translating key classical language texts for him, John Florio doing the same for Italian, etc. Problematical knowledge of content from foreign books of various languages are also theorized to have come from English translations surely many hundreds of which have left behind no trace.

Humble Stratfordian, though he was, his genius, we are assured, could have recommended him to the company of the noble and wealthy who had traveled to the country. Readers are informed that young Englishmen of wealthy families had begun doing “The Grand Tour” of Europe since early in the 16^th century. There were plenty of raconteurs eager to tell the stories of their travels in Italy freighted with curious detail.

But the tour actually only began to be a thing some hundred years later. Those who traveled to Europe in the 16^th and the first half of the 17^th centuries tended, as the rule, to travel with business and/or diplomatic delegations that offered them life experience in exchange for secretarial and other duties. The tour, on the other hand, was a private affair accompanied by best friend and tutor/chaperone.

Those 16^th century travelers for business likely disembarked at the great port of Antwerp. Those for diplomacy, at Calais where they proceeded to Paris and Lyon. Those very few who were so hardy as to travel for pleasure would also make their way to Paris. Those planning to continue to Italy, as did Edward de Vere, the young 17^th Earl of Oxford, in 1575, might schedule their trip in order to cross into Germany by coach — a convenience not yet available in England — in time to spend at least a few days at the great Frankfort Fair where they would marvel at the thousands of books for sale surrounded by every kind of merchandise, food and entertainment.

Those, like the young Earl, who were sufficiently wealthy, would also visit the stables where some of the finer horses on the continent would be gathered for sale. A newly purchased mount would carry them in sufficient style and comfort to Augsburg from where man and horse would begin the journey south, through the Brenner Pass, across the Swiss Alps, into northern Italy. Perhaps in the company of German Jews headed back from their business at the fair to the Venetian Ghetto.

Shylock. Why there, there, there, there, a diamond gone

cost me two thousand ducats in Franckford,...¹

It seems that Shakespeare knew something of these matters, as well.

In the Italy in which Romeo and Juliet is set, wealthy gentiles' homes featured impressive balconies overlooking gardens. In the home of the wealthy Jew, in the claustrophobic Venetian Ghetto, his daughter must stick her head out a casement window into a common street for her view of Carnival revelers.

Shylock. Clamber not you up to the casements then,

Nor thrust your head into the publique streete

To gaze on Christian fooles with varnisht faces²

Such small touches suggest direct personal experience. When her gentile lover arrives, she must lower her father's riches from a window because the houses have no doors to the outside of the ghetto. It will soon be full night and no Jews allowed outside of the Ghetto so she must dress as a gentile and hurry out the ghetto gate.

On the other hand, Oxfordians might struggle to explain the trial between Antonio and Shylock being heard before the Doge, with the Council of Ten seated behind him, as in a great matter of state, not as an error, but as a conscious dramatic fiction. It could not have been the case in Venice but surely must be the case on a stage.

Shakespeare wrote plays not travelogues or cultural anthropology. Furthermore, the stages upon which plays were then performed did not yet feature scenery or much in the way of props to suggest a foreign place. Italy must be evoked largely by speeches describing merchant ships laden with exotic cargoes, off-hand reference to exotic place names, like “Rialto,” and currency names like “ducats”.

All parties — whoever their candidate as author — struggle, as the rule, with Portia's instructions to her friend Balthazar, if they notice the reference to “the Tranect”.

Now Balthaser, as I have ever found thee honest true,

So let me finde thee still: take this same letter,

And use thou all the indeavour of a man

In speed to Mantua³, see thou render this

Into my cosins hand, Doctor Belario,

And looke what notes and garments he doth give thee,

Bring them I pray thee with imagin'd speed

Unto the Tranect, to the common Ferrie

Which trades to Venice; waste no time in words

But get thee gone, I shall be there before thee.⁴

The term “Tranect” probably comes from the Latin trans-necto, “to connect across”. It is only known to exist, in print, in Shakespeare's play. The reference to the “common ferry” only tends to confuse the matter.

The ferry referred to is the ferry at the terminus of the Brenta canal, at Fusina, in southern Venice. The final change in altitude across the Tranect of the canal, at Marghera, to the beginning of the canal-section toward Fusina, is too steep to achieve via a lock system.⁵ This obstacle was overcome by the use of ingeniously designed canal boats (“cars”) with detachable wheels, that were rolled onto a wooden platform and lowered by winches, from the top of a dam, at the end of the main section of the Brenta canal, to descend to the mouth of the section toward Fusina.

The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, (who called the stop “Chaffousine” rather than Marghera) some five years later.

Chaffousine, which is naught but an inn, and here we took boat for Venice. Here they bring ashore all the boats with machinery and pulleys worked by two horses after the fashion of an oil mill. They move their boats by means of wheels placed underneath, which run along planks and thereby convey them over to the canal which runs into the sea on which Venice is situated. We took dinner at Chaffousine, and, having embarked in a gondola, arrived at Venice in time for supper after travelling five miles.⁶

Montaigne did not own the horses his party was riding: they were rented “post horses”. Therefore, they rode them from Padua (the beginning of the canal), rather than taking a canal boat, and turned them in at the inn at the Tranect, without needing to arrange to dispense with them.

All indications are that Oxford timed his trip to buy a horse at the fair as young noblemen often did. Padua made excellent business being the last market at which to sell these temporary trans-Alpine horses before continuing toward Venice where horses were not permitted. From there he would have taken a canal boat to the Tranect where he would surely have found the manner of lowering the “cars” at the very least curious. Perhaps he mentioned it to Shakspere of Stratford some evening as the two shared a beer at a tavern in London's Southwark theater district.

1Merchant of Venice, III.i.79-80.

2MoV, II.v.33-5.

3It is repeated elsewhere in the play that Dr. Bellario resides not in Mantua but in Padua (were Italy's most prodigious law school was located at the time).

4MoV, III.iv.48-57.

5Those who have read my monograph Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WC94FGW/) will already be aware of the vestigial reference to the canal cars at Marghera in the earliest versions of Hamlet.

6The Journal of Montaigne's Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany (1903) transl. Waters, W.G. II.13-4.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

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