WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE ACTUALLY?

For hundreds of years, many scholars have questioned whether the actor William Shakespeare really wrote the plays that bear his name, but John Hudson is the first to suggest that the true author was a Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier.

Amelia was member of an Italian/Jewish family and lived in England as a Marrano and has heretofore been known only as the first woman to publish a book of poetry ("Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" in 1611).

The hypothesis  Shakespeare was not even a man at all, but a woman isn’t new. Some  scholars, as Sam Sloan, for example, believe that the true author of Shakespeare was a woman and a good place to start would be Elizabeth Vere. It so happens that she was the daughter of Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford), who is considered to be a possible author of Shakespeare, and she was also the wife of William Stanley (Sixth Earl of Derby), who is another leading candidate for being the author of Shakespeare.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 –1834) wrote: “…In Shakespeare all the elements of womanhood are holy….drawn, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude…” and James S. Shapiro (born 1955) goes so far as to claim that Shakespeare was 'the noblest feminist of them all'. Other authors, as Liz Lewis or  Kate McLuskie (Director of The Shakespeare Institute),on the contrary, think it is historically incorrect to regard him as a feminist.

There had been many other attempts to identify the playwright as Francis Bacon (or his brother) or as the Earl of Southampton or as Sir Walter Raleigh or Rutland or Derby or Oxford.

According on an Italian researcher, Martino Juvara (from Ragusa) the Bard was Michelangelo Florio the child of the Sicilian physician Giovanni Florio and of Guglielma Crollalanza (in Italian, "Shake" means "scrolla","speare" equals "lancia") The thesis that Shakespeare was Italian had been advanced already in letters by Santi Paladino in 1925, who in a volume by a Calvinist, Michelangelo Florio, discovered the proverbs that are found in Hamlet: now Juvara has set together wedges of various studies offering a suggestive mosaic.

Giovanni Florio left Palermo for religious reasons and took refuge with a family in Venice, in the palace built for the commander Otello, who, according to legend, killed his wife Desdemona for jealousy. The young Michelangelo graduated in grammar and philosophy in Padova. His love for one Juliet, daughter of a Milanese count, was opposed for religious reasons. He killed her and took refuge in England along with a maternal cousin who had already changed the name from Crollalanza to Shakespeare.

In official literature Shakespeare’s Italian inspiration is explained with his contacts "with Italian humanist adventurers like John Florio", the same name as his father in the Juvara version.

John (Giovanni) Florio was a linguist a lexicographer and a royal language tutor at the Court of James I . He also translated Montaigne and wrote Florio’s 1611 Italian/English Dictionary.

Michelangelo Florio was an Italian tutor to Lady Jane Grey and to Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth I.

A woman from New England named Delia Bacon went to England in 1853 to try to dig Shakespeare’s corpse up to prove that there was no body in his grave, just a bag of rocks, but the British authorities stopped her. One reason why she felt so strongly that there were no bones in the grave was that the tombstone of Shakespeare specifically states that it mustn’t be dug up. His tombstone reads: "Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare, To digg the dust enclosed heare. Blese be ye man that spares the stones, And curst be he that moves my bones."

Well, Shakespeare’s identity is still the greatest literary mystery of all time.

 

Per approfondire clicca i seguenti links:

 

http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/shakespeare_women.html

 

http://www.jstor.org/pss/372745

 

http://www.endex.com/gf/shkspr/shlt040800.htm

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Florio