Shakespeare's Link with Virginia
D.M. Walmsley analyses the plentiful artistic and personal connections between the explorations of the Virginia company and the Bard.
Shakespeare’s name is vitally linked with the founding of Virginia three hundred and fifty years ago. Enormously painstaking research, illumined by imaginative interpretation, has revealed personal connexions between the Virginian adventurers and Shakespeare’s patrons and friends. His interest in the venture seems established beyond all reasonable doubt. It is true that the personalities concerned remain shadowy; yet even the minutest details that throw light, however faint, on the great central figure are intensely significant to all who acknowledge Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays generally attributed to him. Apart from personalities, there stands out the absorbing problem of the dramatist’s use of contemporary accounts of one particular ill-starred voyage.
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