Julio Romano died in 1546. Assuming that Paulina intended her audience to believe that the "statue" was created during the last years of his life, then Hermione, now in her mid-forties, would have been in her late twenties at the time of her banishment, and this would place her date of birth at around the early 1500's so that her father, the Emperor of Russia, a detail she specifically mentions (III.ii.119), would have been Ivan III, known as Ivan the Great (1462-1505). But even more immediate for, and better known to, Shakespeare and his audience would have been the exploits of Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible (1533-84). An English contemporary, Sir Jerome Horsey, related the sack of Novgorod in vivid terms:

he chargeth it with 30 thowsand Tartors and tenn thowsand gonnors of his guard, withowt any respect ravished all the weomen and maieds, ranzacked, robbed, and spoilled all that wear within it of their jeweils, plate, and treasur, murthered the people yonge and olde, burnt all their howshold stuff, merchandices, and warehowses of wax, flaex, tallow, hieds, salt, wynes, cloth, and silks, sett all one fier, with wax and tallow melted down the kennells in the streats, together with the bloud of 700 thowsande men, weomen and children, slaine and murthered; so that with the bloud that rann into the river, and of all other livinge creaturs and cattell, their dead carcacess did stoppe as it wear the stream of the river Volca, beinge cast therin. Noe historie maketh mencion of so horrable a massacre.³

For Shakespeare's audience watching the play, Hermione's father, "the Emperor of Russia," could quite easily have meant a telescoped image of the two Ivans. Queen Elizabeth had in fact established such close trade and cultural links with Ivan the Terrible that the king of Poland had written cautioning her against such a friendship:

We seemed hitherto to vanquish him onely in this, that he was rude of arts, and ignorant of policies. . . . [W]e that know best, and border vpon him, do admonish other Christian princes in time, that they do not betray their dignity, liberty and life of them and their subiects to a most barbarous and cruel enemy. . . .⁴

Accordingly, when Hermione wishes that her emperor father "were alive, and here beholding/ His daughter's trial," but "with eyes/ Of pity, not revenge" (III.ii.120-23), her lament is more than pathos: her reference to "revenge" implies the military power that the country to which she belonged possesses and could exercise to defend her against the false charge leveled against her by her husband. In Shakespeare's source, Greene's Pandosto, the Emperor of Russia is not the father of Bellaria (Hermione) but of the wife of Egistus (the wife of Polixenes, who, in Shakespeare's play, does not enter the action at all). Evidently the changes made by Shakespeare would have had immediate political meaning for his viewers.

Ivan the Great was the first Muscovite ruler to designate himself "Grand Prince of all Russia." His first wife died in 1472, and he then married Zoe Palaeologa, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor. But though of Byzantine descent, Zoe Palaeologa had been raised in Italy, a circumstance that helps to explain why Hermione (Zoe's daughter in Shakespeare's play) is the wife of Leontes, king of Sicily. Through the marriage of Zoe to Ivan, Italian influences made themselves felt in Russia. An Italian architect designed the Upenski Cathedral in the Kremlin, and a new Italianate palace was also built there. Russia, in fact, had entered the English consciousness a decade before the birth of Shakespeare when Sebastian Cabot's expedition sailed into the White Sea by the northeast route. The explorers were well received by Ivan IV and were entertained with great hospitality. In 1555 Ivan granted a monopoly of trade in the White Sea to an English company called the Muscovy Company, and in 1566 Queen Elizabeth's emissary Anthony Jenkinson wrote: "I came before the Emperours Majestie, sitting in his seate of honour, and having kissed his hand and done the Queenes Majesties commendations, and delivered her Graces letters and present, he bad me to dinner, which I accepted, and had much honour done unto me both then and all the time of my abode in Russia."⁵ In England there was great interest in Russia during this period. A Russian deputation was at the English Court in 1582-83, and this, as is well known, is reflected in the last act of Love 's Labor 's Lost.