Well, somebody's been talking about Richard Roe's Shakespeare Guide to Italy (Harper Perennial, Nov. 8, 2011) because last night (Dec. 12, 2011) on Charlie Rose , Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd inadvertently revealed that Roe's book was on his mind. Boyd appeared as a guest in Rose's "Why Shakespeare?" series where he happily held forth on the nature of all things Shakespearean. During a discussion of how he chose which Shakespeare plays to direct, Rose asked Boyd if he had to be older to tackle directing King Lear and Boyd responded in the negative. "Young people can imagine," Boyd said. "Just as an Englishman could imagine Italy in the English Renaissance." That was it -- no other discussion of imagination or Englishmen or Italy or the Renaissance, not to mention Italian references in Shakespeare or any bedamned books about any such thing. I cannot imagine that Boyd had read Roe's book; if he had, ...
a Michigan group dedicated to the study of the works of William Shakespeare with particular interest in the authorship question