ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's geographical fallacies are well known, though over-estimated: certainly, Bohemia lacks the seacoast with which The Winter's Tale credits it, and people will never be able to insist upon any one location for Prospero's island in The Tempest. There was another set of reasons for an English dramatist like Shakespeare to explore the history of the ancient Near East. One argument for a British affinity with nations and peoples east of Rome came from the still-current notions of British origins in the East, dubious though they were. An older tradition of criticism treated diverse Mediterranean settings and stories in Shakespeare's plays as little more than exoticizing touches, or camouflage for treatments of early modern Britain. Scholarship about Shakespeare's uses of classical history, has tended to be source-centred, author-centred, and focused on direct textual interactions. In turn, this emphasis entails a concerted geographical focus on ancient Greece and Rome.
