A Taste of Bacon Sir? - The Secret of Shakespeare

[Steve Franklin]

I was looking at the locations of "Shakespeare's" Italian plays, the non-historical ones at least, using them as a kind of travelogue on the hypothesis that Marlowe escaped to Italy and that the plays follow his travels there. It looks like the first one was The Two Gentlemen of Verona, set in Verona and Milan, Verona being about 160 kilometers (100 miles) east of the larger Milan. This is rather interesting in that Guglielma, whom her followers believed to be an incarnation of the Holy Ghost, arrived there from Bohemia in 1260, the tarot reappeared there in a version commissioned by Bianca Maria Visconti and painted by Bonifacio Bembo between 1441 and 1450, and Leonardo went to work there for Ludovico Sforza, the son of Bianca and later duke of Milan, in 1487 after disappearing (supposedly in the East) for 4 years. Marlowe would have arrived there shortly after 1593, though Stokes places the play at 1591 based on sparse evidence. One has to wonder what exactly was percolating below the surface in Milan that drew these disparate characters there over a period of 333 years. The timeline through Leonardo is here.