Percy and Mary Shelley visited Napoli (Naples), in Campania, Italy, the home of Shakespeare's character Ferdinand, from The Tempest. In the play, Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, and his father, King Alonso, are shipwrecked in different parts of Prospero's Island. They do not learn of each other's survival until the end of the play. At that point, Ferdinand is able to return to Italy with his new bride, Miranda. 

Percy and Mary Shelley visited Napoli (Naples), in Campania, Italy, the home of Shakespeare's character Ferdinand, from The Tempest. In the play, Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, and his father, King Alonso, are shipwrecked in different parts of Prospero's Island. They do not learn of each other's survival until the end of the play. At that point, Ferdinand is able to return to Italy with his new bride, Miranda. 

Since the guitar that Percy Shelley gave to Jane Williams, described in the poem "With a Guitar--to Jane" has not been played at any point during the era of sound recording and is too fragile to be played now, we can only guess what it would have sounded like--or we can try to build a replica (copy) of it and play that. Following this plan, UWGB engineering instructor Prof. Wesley Schroeder is building a replica in his luthiering workshop in northeast Wisconsin. Prof.

Among English people of Shelley's generation, war in Spain made the guitar (well, the "Spanish guitar," to be distinguished from an archaic instrument called the "English guitar," or "gittern") more visible in London, and the talk of the town.

In 1821, Shelley gave a guitar to Jane Williams with a handwritten poem, "To a Guitar, to Jane." On July 8, 1822, the week before his thirtieth birthday, he, Williams's partner Edward Ellerker Williams, and young neighbor Charles Vivian, age seventeen, all drowned in the Bay of Spezzia, off of Lerici, when Shelley and WIlliams's boat capsized in a storm. Shelley and Williams had named the boat the Ariel, after the transoceanic-flying fairy sprite in Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

Classic British rock-n’-roll required three elements: a guitar, preferably electric; a player, typically a self-fashioned vagabond, outcast, or rebel; and at least a lingering lick of British Romanticism.

When Jane Williams met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Pisa in 1821, she delighted them with her musical ability. She played piano (a relatively new and very "modern" instrument!), harp, and guitar. She also had quite a "Romantic" personal history. In 1814, at age seventeen, she had married Captain John Edward Johnson. When he proved an abusive husband, she flouted convention by leaving him. After some time, she met Captain Edward Ellerker Williams, an aspiring writer and artist retired from military service in his mid-twenties.

One of the United Kingdom's five national research libraries, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, is the permanent home of Jane's guitar. In 1897, an extreme fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley, retired merchant seaman Captain Edward Silsbee of Salem, Massachusetts, purchased the guitar from Jane Williams's grandson and immediately donated it to the Bodleian. This library, founded by the sixteenth-century scholar Sir Thomas Bodley, is one of the oldest and most useful research libraries in England. It is architecturally distinctive.