From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

This podcast is called,

Side My English Breath in Foreign Clouds.

Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language,

offered his audiences a remarkable collection of non-English characters.

Gentlemen of Verona, merchants of Venice, not to mention pun-loving young lords and ladies of France.

We know that Shakespeare's London had many foreign residents, refugees from the religious wars in France,

German traders, ambassadors from all over Europe.

But what exactly did Shakespeare and his audiences really know about the countries that these characters came from?

And what did they know about their cultures?

We're going to explore that question in this podcast, focusing on two countries Shakespeare wrote about most, France and Italy.

We've brought together two scholars who've looked into this question. Deanne Williams is a professor at York University in Toronto, who specializes in medieval and Renaissance literature and is the author of books including

the French fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Graham Holderness is the author of 40 books,

including 2013's Shakespeare and Venice. He's a professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire.

They are interviewed by Rebecca Shear.

Today we live in this era of mass communications and global travel, but I think we imagine

people in the Renaissance had less exposure to all things foreign. I mean, after all, back then,

it could take you, I don't know, like a week to get across England and families tended

to stay in their own regions or their own villages for generations and generations.

So it seems like a good way to start our conversation is to talk about just how familiar

English people really were with foreign countries in Shakespeare's time.

...