"The big thing in his favour is this extraordinary visit to Italy," said Rylance last year. "You would expect a playwright who set 14 of 37 plays in Italy to have been there, and the knowledge is exact."
In Measure for Measure - which takes place in German-speaking Vienna - Shakespeare writes a play whose principal characters have Italianate names.
In A Winter's Tale characters are shipwrecked off the coast of Bohemia - which is a landlocked region of the modern-day Czech Republic.
In Two Gentlemen of Verona characters sail from landlocked Verona to landlocked Milan.
Rylance may perform these plays, but he either hasn't read them or he failed geography.
Not to mention the ‘Italian’ servants in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ named Peter, Sampson and Gregory.