The World of the Canon

The Shakespeare canon spans the known world of the sixteenth century: Italy, France, Greece, Denmark, Egypt, Austria, Bohemia, Illyria, the eastern Mediterranean. Of the 38 plays in the table below, fewer than a third are set entirely within England or Britain. The rest require the author to know, with varying degrees of precision, the geography, court politics, language, and local culture of countries most Elizabethans never visited.

This is not incidental local colour gathered from travel books. In several countries, scholars working from primary materials have shown that the plays contain knowledge that goes beyond anything available in English print in the 1590s: field-verified topography, untranslated literary sources, unpublished diplomatic exchanges, and court-level familiarity with foreign rulers and their affairs.

The table is sorted by the earliest possible date of composition according to Kevin Gilvary (ed.), Dating Shakespeare’s Plays: A Critical Review of the Evidence (De Vere Society, 2010), the lower bound of his primary-source date range for each play. Gilvary reviewed every play against the evidence used by mainstream editors and concluded that no play can be definitively dated as written after 1604 on primary source evidence alone. For the full explanation of his methodology and its implications, see Dating the Plays. The table is filterable by country; use the buttons to isolate any region.

Italy

Fourteen plays are set wholly or partly in Italy, more than any other country outside England. The Italian settings include Rome (seven plays), Venice, Verona, Milan, Padua, Messina, Florence, and Mantua. The knowledge argument for Italy is the most fully developed of any country in the canon.

Richard Paul Roe spent twenty years verifying the Italian settings on the ground. His findings, published in The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (Harper Perennial, 2011), demonstrate that the plays contain precise topographical knowledge impossible to derive from printed sources. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, characters travel by water between Verona and Milan, a route orthodox critics called a geographical blunder, since both cities are inland. Roe showed that the canal connecting them had been completed in 1573, just two years before Edward de Vere’s Italian tour of 1575–76; no printed English source described it. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia refers to a “tranect”, an obscure Italian term for a specific ferry mechanism, at the exact location Roe identified as the Villa Foscari on the Brenta Canal. These are not details available in the travel literature of the period.

De Vere travelled to northern Italy in 1575–76, visiting Padua, Verona, Venice, Mantua, Milan and other cities. His route matches the Italian settings of the plays with a precision that has no equivalent in any other candidate’s biography.

France

Six plays are set wholly or partly in France, and France is the country most frequently referenced in the entire canon: the word “France” appears 385 times across the works, “French” 166 times. French is also the foreign language Shakespeare uses most fluently, deployed for genuine puns and wordplay that require the ear of a native or near-native speaker, not phrase-book knowledge.

Margrethe Jolly’s Shakespeare’s French Connection (McFarland, 2024) documents the depth of the French engagement across the history plays and comedies, demonstrating that the author drew on French chroniclers and historical sources in their original language. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the four lords correspond precisely to identifiable figures at the court of Henri of Navarre in the late 1570s and early 1580s: Berowne maps onto the Maréchal de Biron, Longaville onto the Duc de Longueville. This is not general knowledge; it is insider familiarity with a specific French court in a specific period.

De Vere spent time at the French royal court as a young man and was documented as speaking fluent French with the royal family. The de Vere name itself derives from Ver, near Bayeux, a Norman family origin that would have given him both linguistic fluency and a particular engagement with France’s history and culture.

Greece

Seven plays are set in Greece or the Greek world, Athens appears in four of them. The knowledge argument for Greece is distinct from Italy and France: it is not primarily about geography but about literary sources. The plays demonstrate familiarity with Greek dramatic texts (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) that were not available in English translation in the Elizabethan period.

Earl Showerman has documented this systematically across a decade of research, published in Brief Chronicles, the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship journal, and culminating in Shakespeare’s Greater Greek (2025). His analysis of Hamlet, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows structural and textual debts to specific Greek plays not yet translated into English, knowledge that required either Greek literacy or direct access to Greek scholarship.

De Vere lived as a ward in the household of Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577), Elizabeth’s principal secretary of state and one of the foremost Greek scholars in Elizabethan England. Smith taught Greek at Cambridge and maintained a personal library of Greek texts. The connection is direct: de Vere had access, from his formative years, to the one man in England best positioned to transmit advanced Greek learning.

Denmark

Hamlet is set at Elsinore, Kronborg Castle at Helsingør, the fortress guarding the strait between Denmark and Sweden. The play’s Scandinavian atmosphere and Danish court detail are precise enough to have prompted the Danish royal family to stage productions at Kronborg itself.

The Oxfordian connection here runs through de Vere’s brother-in-law, Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, who was posted on diplomatic missions to the Danish court and visited Kronborg. Willoughby was de Vere’s direct family connection to the court that Hamlet depicts, a living intelligence source for the play’s setting in a way unavailable to anyone outside the Elizabethan diplomatic network.

Russia: reference, not setting

Russia does not appear as a setting in any play, but the canon contains six significant references to Russia and its court: the Masque of Muscovites in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “The Emperor of Russia was my father” in The Winter’s Tale, the extended Russian night reference in Measure for Measure, the “rugged Russian bear” in Macbeth, “the mouth of a Russian bear” in Henry V, and the Russian sable furs referenced in Hamlet.

Rima Greenhill’s research (Shakespeare, Elizabeth and Ivan, McFarland, 2023; first published The Oxfordian, 2006) demonstrates that Love’s Labour’s Lost encodes detailed knowledge of Ivan the Terrible’s court drawn from Russian primary sources not previously translated into English, and from the private diplomatic correspondence between Ivan IV and Elizabeth I regarding Ivan’s marriage proposals, material that was never in public circulation. Greenhill dates the play’s composition to the late 1570s on textual and source grounds: too early for Shakspere of Stratford on any conventional reckoning. Note that Gilvary’s independent dating of Love’s Labour’s Lost gives a lower bound of 1578, consistent with Greenhill’s textual analysis.

De Vere’s access to this material ran through Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s principal secretary of state, who handled the Anglo-Russian diplomatic correspondence directly.

Egypt

Antony and Cleopatra is the primary Egyptian play, though Egypt figures in the background of Pericles and the eastern Mediterranean world of several others. The Egyptian settings draw chiefly on Plutarch’s Lives in Thomas North’s 1579 translation, the one major classical source available in English, but the play’s texture goes beyond Plutarch in its sense of Ptolemaic court atmosphere and the interplay of Roman and Egyptian cultures.

Austria

Measure for Measure is set in Vienna. The play’s depiction of ducal governance, legal process, and the specific political tensions of an absolutist court shows familiarity with Viennese institutional arrangements that a writer working only from English printed sources would not naturally produce. Daryl Palmer’s Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (Routledge, 2004) includes analysis of how the play’s Russian references work alongside its Viennese setting as part of a broader meditation on sovereignty, subjection, and the edges of the known world.

Elsewhere in the canon

Twelfth Night is set in Illyria (the Adriatic coast, modern Croatia and Albania) though the setting is lightly specified. The Winter’s Tale gives Bohemia a sea-coast, which has been cited by orthodox critics as evidence of the author’s geographical ignorance. This argument fails on two counts. First, Bohemia did have a seacoast: Přemysl Ottokar II, King of Bohemia 1253–1278, expanded his kingdom southward through Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola to the Adriatic, Bohemia genuinely controlled sea access until Ottokar’s defeat and death at the Battle on the Marchfeld (1278). Second, Shakespeare did not invent the detail: his source, Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), already has ships sailing to “the coast of Bohemia.” The supposed blunder was in the source material Shakespeare dramatised, not something he introduced. Pericles ranges across the entire eastern Mediterranean from Antioch to Tyre, Tarsus, and Mytilene, tracking real ancient geography with reasonable accuracy.