Welcome back to Tracing Shakespearean Mysteries. In the last episode we looked at The Tempest, perhaps in the meantime you’ve been mulling over all the questions it raised: from the setting on the island of Ischia and the legend of the sorcerer’s cave, to the Colonna family who appear to have given their names to seven characters in the play and then there was the dark question mark that hangs over the monster-like figure of Caliban.

Today’s episode is the first of two in which I’ll be talking about the town of Verona. In total, there are actually five plays that either mention or have connections with the town, so the next mystery we are going to investigate is what makes Verona so special and why does it appear so frequently in the Shakespearean canon?

Let’s begin with the first play that springs to mind whenever Verona is mentioned: which is, of course, Romeo and Juliet. Written over four centuries ago, in 1595 or thereabouts, it has left an indelible mark on the city, transforming Verona into one of Italy’s most celebrated literary destinations and a universal symbol of romantic love.

But long before the modern balcony became a tourist landmark, literary pilgrims were already making their way to Verona in search of Romeo and Juliet. The fashion seems to have begun as early as 1726, with a publication, Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, by an English traveller, Captain J. Breval - who describes being shown an old building - converted into an orphanage - in which the supposed tomb of the ill-fated lovers of the Shakespearean play, Romeo Montecchi and Julietta Capello, had once been located, though by then the tomb was in pieces. His guide offered, as established fact, the full particulars of their story, which most likely derived from the work of an enthusiastic local historian, Girolamo della Corte, who had incorporated the legend into his History of Verona in 1596. From there the printed word gradually evolved into perceived reality.

On 22nd March 1817 an article appeared in the London based Literary Gazette, entitled Tomb of Juliet at Verona. This was accompanied by an engraving that helped fix the imagined story of the lovers in the public mind. By this time, Verona had become a compulsory stop on the Grand Tour, not only for its Roman amphitheatre and medieval architecture, but also for its romantic legend. Lord Byron passed through in 1816, Hans Christian Andersen visited in 1834 and Mary Shelley in 1840. Charles Dickens arrived in 1844, visiting Juliet’s tomb and remarking on its neglected and shabby condition. Mark Twain followed in 1867, treating the entire romantic enterprise with characteristic irony, while Henry James in the 1870s reflected on Verona’s ‘Shakespearean aura’. The city had become a stop on the grand tour of literary imagination — proof that the story had escaped the page and settled, quite firmly, into the streets of Verona itself. And still today, hundreds of thousands of visitors make the pilgrimage from all over the world to see for themselves the home of the 'star-crossed lovers'.

For those of you who enjoy statistics, Juliet’s house and balcony attract an average of 3000 visitors a day. During the high season, that number can climb to as many as 8000. As you may know, there is actually no balcony in the play itself, nor in the Italian versions of the story - just a first floor window. However, in response to the growing number of tourists searching for sites connected to the famous romantic legend, in 1926 the enterprising curator of Verona’s Civic Museums, discovered a beautiful medieval balcony in storage and had it attached to what had long been indicated as Juliet’s house. For the future of the town, it was nothing short of striking gold.

So, Verona may owe much of its fame to the playwright, but might the playwright himself owe something to Verona? What compelled an English writer to speak about an Italian town so often in his plays? Was it simply borrowed geography… or was there something about this city that he knew, saw, or even experienced for himself?

Let’s start by looking at the play. Given that the story is so well-known, I’ll just give you a very brief summary of the plot as a reminder of the key events:

The prologue presents Romeo and Juliet as 'star-crossed lovers,' fated to suffer under the weight of their families’ feud. Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet, meet and fall in love at a masked ball, and, with the help of a Franciscan friar, secretly marry—hoping their union might also reconcile their rival households. Their hope quickly unravels. When Romeo’s friend Mercutio is killed by Tybalt, a Capulet, Romeo kills Tybalt in a duel, an act that leads to his banishment. Soon after, as Juliet’s parents attempt to force her into marriage with Paris, the friar gives her a potion to feign death; however, his plan to inform Romeo fails. Believing Juliet dead, Romeo visits her tomb and there kills himself. When Juliet wakes and sees him, she takes her own life with his dagger, after which the grieving families are finally reconciled.

Before the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet became part of the Shakespearean canon around 1595, the story had already undergone a long literary journey, so let’s trace it back to the very beginning:

And we start in 8 A.D with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which tells of the secret lovers Pyramus and Thisbe - the couple of A Midsummer Night’s Dream fame. They lived in adjoining houses in Babylon and were forced to communicate through a crack in the wall because their families were enemies. They arrange to meet, but a series of misunderstandings leads each to believe the other is dead. Pyramus kills himself with his sword under a tree and when Thisbe finds him there, she uses the same sword to kill herself. It is here that we find the genesis of the Romeo and Juliet story.

A jump forward in time brings us to 1476 when Masuccio Salernitano wrote a new version of the story set in Siena. In his story, called Mariotto e Ganozza, the couple marries in secret, but then Mariotto kills a man and is banished, so in order to join him, Ganozza uses a potion to make her seem dead. However, the message sent to Mariotto explaining the plan never arrives. He returns to Siena, is arrested and executed, and Ganozza later dies of grief in a convent. So, we can see that Salernitano added a few more details to the basic story.

The baton is then taken up again sixty years later, in 1530, when Luigi da Porto gives the lovers the names Romeo and Juliet or rather Romeo e Giulietta. He sets the story in Verona, drawing on the well-known rivalry between two prominent families who actually lived there in the thirteenth century, the Montecchi and the Cappelletti. Da Porto places the story during the rule of Bartolomeo della Scala, the lord of Verona from 1301 to 1304. For 125 years Verona was governed by the Della Scala family, whose name means 'of the ladder'. In the English versions of the story the Lord’s name is translated as Escalus.

Fourteen years later, in 1544, Matteo Bandello took up his quill and penned a similar version of the Romeo and Giulietta story, his Novella number IX , which in English is now known as The unfortunate death of two most unhappy lovers. Bandello did not change the events in the story, but his narrative is more dramatic, exploring the moral and psychological aspects of the tragedy. As in Da Porto’s story, Giulietta wakes up just as Romeo is dying. Minutes after his death, she dies of heartbreak.

I think it would be useful to open a quick parenthesis here to give you a few details about Matteo Bandello, as more than one of his stories made their way into the Shakespearean canon. He was born near Milan in about 1480, educated there, became a Dominican friar, and established himself as a writer and poet closely connected to the powerful Sforza court. Bandello was also, as I mentioned in the previous episode, a big fan of Prospero Colonna, a military commander in the Italian Wars, which at that time made life unstable for court intellectuals like Bandello, who was repeatedly forced to move between Milan, Mantua, Pavia, Verona, and Venice, before eventually settling in France. This constant movement - and exposure to different courts and social worlds - directly influenced his literary output. He wrote more than 200 Novelle, many based on real events and notable for their tragic themes.... and here I’ll close the parenthesis.

Back to Bandello’s version of the Romeo and Juliet story, which made its way to France, first in a version translated by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559, followed by another in 1565 by Francois de Belleforest. The former was likely the inspiration for Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet published in 1562. Five years later, William Painter seems to have drawn from both French retellings when he published Rhomeo and Juliet in his collection of stories entitled The Palace of Pleasure.

The Shakespearean play appears to draw chiefly on the poem of Arthur Brooke, whose extended, emotionally charged speeches of despair and inner conflict are echoed in the playwright's rendering of the story—though he notably discards much of Brooke’s moralising. It is also probable that our author consulted The Palace of Pleasure, a source for several of his other plays, which offers a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story in prose.

The most striking divergence between the Italian and English versions of the story occurs in the death scene. In the original narratives, Juliet wakes up while Romeo is still alive for a brief moment, a poignant detail that intensifies the emotional impact of the scene - an effect that is absent from the later English adaptations. However, the English versions offer a more probable conclusion, as Juliet no longer dies of sudden heartache, but uses Romeo’s dagger to kill herself.

So, as we can see, this love story has made a long, long journey through time, two thousand years, in fact. Now that we have heard its history, let’s compare the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet story with the other versions.

First let’s turn our attention to the setting and the places mentioned in the play. Luigi da Porto specifically set his story in Verona, and many of the locations he mentioned can still be identified in the town today. As the story travelled across Europe, some of these details were lost, while others are still to be found in the play. In a very interesting book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy - Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels, Richard Paul Roe tracks down the exact locations featured in all the so-called ‘Italian plays’ of Shakespeare. He not only identifies the places described in Romeo and Juliet, but also, and very intriguingly, he identifies two new locations unique to the play.

The first, in the opening scene, is the sycamore grove near the west gate, where Romeo has gone to grieve after being rejected by Rosaline. His friend Benvolio tells Lady Montague, Romeo’s mother:

“Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun
Peer'd forth the golden window of the east,
A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad;
Where, underneath the grove of sycamore
That westward rooteth from the city's side,
So early walking did I see your son:”

Today, in the area around the west gate of the town, known as Porta San Zeno, many sycamore trees - or more precisely, plane trees - still grow. In the Mediterranean area, the terms ‘plane tree’ and ‘sycamore’ are frequently used interchangeably to describe the Oriental plane tree (Platanus orientalis), which is recognisable by its bark that peels away in large patches to reveal a smooth, pale trunk. This tall, leafy tree was widely planted in medieval and Renaissance Italy to provide summer shade in public places.

The second location not in the earlier versions of the story, so unique to the play, is St. Peter’s Church, where Juliet’s father wishes her to marry Count Paris. At the time, Verona actually had two St. Peter’s churches. The first, San Pietro Incarnario, is favoured by Roe in his book because of its connection to St. Francis, which could tie in with the Franciscan monastery and Friar Laurence. In reality, however, this St. Peter’s was a convent of Franciscan nuns, with no public or pastoral authority, and therefore not a place for a marriage ceremony. The other St. Peter’s church was formally known in the medieval and early modern period as the church of St. Peter of Verona in St. Anastasia, meaning that it was built on the site of the older church of St. Anastasia. Some people called it St. Peter’s, others preferred St. Anastasia, which is the name by which the church is known today. It was a monumental, public church with significant civic influence, making it the most suitable setting for the wedding between Count Paris and Juliet.

A third location in the Shakespearean play, a nearby town that appears in all versions of the story, contains a factual detail not found anywhere else. The town is Villafranca, which lies about 15 km southwest of Verona.

The Italian and French versions of the story place Romeo’s family estates in Villafranca. Arthur Brooke anglicises the name, saying that Romeo comes from Freetown, a usage followed by Painter. However, in the play, Freetown is no longer mentioned as the home of Romeo’s family, but as a place of judgement.  In the opening scene of the play, after the boys’ street fight, the lord of Verona summons the two fathers to appear before him, calling Capulet to his palace in the town, whereas to Montague he says:

And Monatague, come you this afternoon,

To know our further pleasure in this case,

To old Free-town, our common judgement-place. (1.1.102-105)

In no other version of the story is Free-town mentioned as a place of judgement. So why is it in the play?

As we have already heard, the lord of Verona at the time of the story was Bartolomeo della Scala. The castle at Villafranca - whose name means “town free of taxes,” hence Freetown - was built in the 14th century by the della Scala lords marking their territorial border with Lombardy, and situated along the old Roman road, the Via Postumia, an important north-south trade route of the whole Italian peninsula. To encourage settlements and the cultivation of the surrounding land, the Della Scala lords granted tax-free privileges to all residents and feudal obligations were removed. As the town grew around the castle, it evolved into an administrative centre, particularly for the dispensation of justice. The lord, or his appointed magistrates, held court in the castle and presided over local disputes and criminal trials. By the 16th century, although the town had come under the authority of the Republic of Venice and the castle functioned primarily as a military stronghold, judicial proceedings continued to be conducted there, in old Free-town, as the play states. So, how our author came by this unique piece of information is indeed a mystery.

Let’s now look at the details we are given about Juliet in the various versions of the tale. In the Italian stories she is almost 18, although in some editions of Bandello’s work she is almost 14. In the French retellings she is almost 14, too, while in the English works of Brooke and Painter she is almost 16. However, in the Shakespearean play, Juliet returns to being almost 14 again, perhaps suggesting that Brooke and Painter were not the only sources for the play.

Then there is Juliet’s birthday. In all versions prior to the play, Juliet’s birthday falls on St Euphemia’s Day, the 16th of September, but the Shakespearean version removes the Catholic feast day and replaces it with a different summer festival, Lammas Eve on 31st July. Lammas Day itself marked the early harvest in medieval times and was still a well-known date in sixteenth century England.

The events surrounding Juliet’s birthday are narrated in Act 1, scene 3, when her Nurse recalls Lammas Eve as being the day she weaned Juliet. She remembers  they were sitting in the sun by the wall of the dove-house. She had rubbed some bitter wormwood on her breast in an attempt to discourage the two-year-old from breast-feeding. As soon as Juliet started protesting noisily, the earth began to shake, forcing them both to move quickly away from the dove-house wall. The Nurse twice specifies that this earthquake happened exactly eleven years earlier, giving particular emphasis to the event, which does not appear in any other version of the story.  

Given that there is so much in the play which corresponds to true facts about the  town, let’s go down the earthquake path for a moment. Estimates suggest that Romeo and Juliet was written around 1595, so eleven years earlier would have been 1584. There does exist fragmentary historical evidence of an earthquake in Verona that year, but it was more than likely linked to a major quake - corresponding to about 5.9 on today’s Mercalli scale - which occurred on the 10th of September 1584,  about 150 kilometres south of the town, along the Tuscan-Emilian stretch of the Apennine Mountains, which border the Po Valley. Sediments in this region can amplify long-period seismic waves, so residents of Verona, on the opposite side of the broad valley plain, might well have felt swaying, vibrations or rumblings, even though the epicenter was relatively far away. In fact, the nurse complains of the dove-house wall shaking.

The playwright brings Juliet’s birthday forward by about 6 weeks - from Saint Euphemia’s day on 16th September to Lammas Eve on 31st July - perhaps to combine it with the story of the summer earthquake, which occurred on 10th September. It is an intriguing possibility. We need to determine whether the earthquake anecdote functions merely as a vivid and comic interlude in the Nurse’s speech, or whether the fact that an earthquake actually occurred eleven years before the play was written indicates that the playwright’s knowledge of the event is part of the wider mystery. In other words, how did he know about it?

In summary, in the text of the play Romeo and Juliet, we have identified several unique and interesting details connected to Verona: the sycamore grove, St. Peter’s church and the judiciary nature of the Villafranca castle, as well as Juliet’s birthday connected to the earthquake. The big mystery is how did the author know about these very specific locations, and the earthquake event? Do you have any thoughts on this? Could it be that a friend had visited the town and had described it to the author? Or maybe the author himself had visited the town? It is certainly a fact that calls for explanation.

Maybe the next episode will provide us with some further clues for our investigation, as I will be continuing with the role of Verona in the Shakespearean canon, so I hope you will join me for that.