An edition of the Divine Comedy from
1564 recently discovered at the British Library in London
including notes and comments that were found to have been
written by linguist and poet John Florio (1552-1625) proves the
Italian-speaker contributed to William Shakespeare's body of
work including several quotes and ideas from the Florentine
author, according to Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti.
The two researchers, whose trilogy Shakespeare's Dante was
published in Italy by Solferino in 2021 and 2024 and is about to
be published in English, claim the newly found copy of the
Comedy shows "key evidence that Shakespeare was aided by someone
who knew Italian and who included several of Dante's quotes and
ideas in his plays".
Monaldi and Sorti's research using Dante's work to investigate
Shakespeare's identity has raised the interest of the academic
community, prompting the president of the Shakesperean
Authorship Trust, William Leahy, to urge them to publish their
findings and to further investigate the idea of Dante being a
source of inspiration for Shakespeare's work on the research
data centre Zenodo.
Florio, a Londoner like his mother with a Florentine father, was
a refined linguist and translator of, among others, Boccaccio's
Decameron and Montaigne's Essays.
Several terms he has illustrated can be repeatedly found in
Shakespeare's plays, leading a number of scholars to claim he
penned some of the author's work.
Now the two Italian scholars claim the copy of the Divine Comedy
first discovered by University of Insubria researcher Marianna
Iannaccone could be a "turning point" in their research.
"There are literally dozens of Dante's passages accurately
highlighted and commented on by John Florio his Divine Comedy
which can be found in plays attributed to the Stratford genius",
they said.
Vowing they will investigate further, Monaldi and Sorti said
that in their future research to determine who contributed to
Shakespeare's work "we will now have a new criterion and that
criterion is called Dante".
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