Fynes Moryson Travels in Italy

Morison arriving at Evian

In the long and frustrating debate about whether the playwright must have visited Italy, we tried many tactics, including personal visits of our own to sites identified by Roe and other Oxfordians as proof that only a traveller with first hand experience could have written about them. Here’s an contemporary account, given the LaTeX treatment and a rudimentary index that reveals whether the impossible journeys proposed by Oxfordians were actually real. Moryson did the Brenta Canal from Padua to Venice, horse drawn, used the carro, no tranects while getting drunk aboard with a load of well-dressed Italians.

He also used the Adige to travel down river, falling in with an Italian who told him about Petrarch’s House. They both decided to to visit but the boat had gone miles past so they got off and walked back as that was quicker than travelling upriver by boat. On a hot day too. In general, he got about on post horses, foot and occasionally carriages.

Download An itinerary vvritten by Fynes Moryson Gent.

Above Milazzo on Sicily. In their quest for an exact match for Propero’s Island, which Oxford may have visited but Shakespeare did not, Oxfordian Tempest experts Stritmatter and Kositsky claimed to have isolated the matching conditions on Isola Vulcano to match the details in the play, revealing, of course that the poet must have visited the island, remembered the unusual volcanic features and used it as his setting. As you can see from our, the island (the one with the vulcano on it, nearest the camera), is so close that anyone out for a casual stroll could watch Prospero planting his carrots and Miranda could watch the goings on in a brave new world just across the water and sell lemonade to the visiting tourists from England.