![]() In North’s journal, the two descriptions appear in consecutive entries. Moreover, both comments share context: discussing specifically stables in Northern Italy both are in proximity to a description of fruitful Lombardy as a garden, and include the word kine. It would also include North’s journal if it were in the database. An EEBO search for hundred PRE/20 fat oxen PRE in PRE stall (or stable) yields no results other than Shakespeare. Six score fat oxen standing in my stalls The Taming of the Shrew (2.1.354-6) ![]() I have a hundred milch- kine to the pail, Remarkably, again in The Taming of the Shrew, just two scenes after its description of Lombardy, Gremio makes a similar claim: We saw one hundred fat oxen in a stable….Their kine be great… In the preceding entry, North described some of the cattle in the stalls of farms near Milan in Lombardy: ![]() The only reference to Lombardy in the canon appears in the opening of the The Taming of the Shrew, set in Northern Italy, in which Lucentio is “arriv’d from fruitful Lombardy, /The pleasant garden of great Italy.” For example, throughout North’s trip, in all of France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands, North singled out the Lombardy region as the most fruitful of all others, describing his trek through the fertile land as if riding “between gardens” and noting his “eyes never saw any soil comparable to it for beauty and profit” (April 18 th). But we also find the impressions that North wrote about the various Italian regions reproduced in other Shakespearean plays. As shown in Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare, the experiences that the young dramatist documented during his journey to Rome are most relevant to what would become two of North’s first plays: Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale.
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