From today's Montreal Gazette.
Aritcle by Richard Owen of the London Times.
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ROME-The mystery of how and why William Shakespeare knew so much about
Italy and gave so many of his plays an Italian setting has been "solved" by a retired Sicillian academic. It was because he was not English at all, but Italian.
Biographies of the Bard admit that there are gaps in his life. But they all attest without question that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in April 1564, the son of
John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, and was bried there in April 1616.
But Professor Martino Iuvara, 71, a retired teacher of literature, claims Shakespeare was Sicillian. He was bron in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza, Iuvara asserts, and fled to London because of the Inquisition, changing his name to its English equivalent. Crollalanza or Crollalancia literally translates as Shakespeare.
In an interview with the magazine Oggi yesterday, Iuvara said that the key to the mystery was 1564, the year John Calvin died in Geneva. It was the year that Michelangelo was born in Messina of a doctor, Giovannni Florio, and a noblewoman named Guglielma Crollalanza, both of whom had Calvinist sympathies.
Young Michelangelo was educated by Franciscan monks, taking a diploma in Latin,
Greek and History "at a precocious age" and displaying "formidable intelligence and
powers of memory."
The Inquisition was on the trail of Florio because of his heretical ideas, and the family fled to Treviso, near Venice, bying Casa Otello, built by a retired Venentia mercenary call Otello (Othello) who, according to local lengend, killed his wife out of misplaced jealousy.
Michelangelo studied in Venice, Padua and Mantua, and traveled in Denmark, Greece, Spain and Austria. He was befriended by the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was to be burned at the stake for heresy in 1600. Bruno, Iuvara says, had strong links with William Herbert, the earl of Pembroke, and the earl of Southampton.
In 1508, age 24, Michelangelo went to England under their patronage. His mother, Signora Crollalanza had an English cousin at Straford, who took the boy in. The Straford branch had already translated their name as Shakespeare, and had a son called William, who died prematurely. Michelangelo, the professor says, simple took over the name for himself, becoming William Shakespeare.
Iuvara, who is writing a book on his thesis, denied that his claim was a late April fool, or a Sicillian rival to other outre theories, such as the notion the Shakspeare was really Christopher Marlowe.
Fifteen of the Bard's 37 plays have an Italian background.
:-) The Yeti