 main index © Jeff Matthews 2002-2012 Everything is related to Naples Number 31 in this series. Link to all items here. 1. entry Jan 2010
Essere
o non essere...mamma mia...atsa questione!
Anyway, the fringe arguments against Shakespeare can be hastily boiled down to these: he didn’t have enough education, and he couldn’t possibly have known all that stuff about Italy that whoever wrote Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice clearly knew. For the first part, how could the
poorly educated son of a glove maker have written Hamlet? I don’t
know. I also don't know how a poorly educated bastard
could have painted The
Last Supper (when he wasn’t designing
helicopters). Or how a lackadaisical student could have
come up with the Theory of Relativity. Maybe some people
are just good at things. Interestingly, at least one
other under-educated dolt, Mark Twain, was on the fringe
side in this debate (in Is Shakespeare Dead?), but no one
seems to know if the Bard of Hannibal really believed
any of that or if he was just being an ornery
contrariant (who—Mark
Twain?!). For the second part, Shakespeare had ample recourse to such things as the Palace of Pleasure by William Painter, a collection of Painter’s translations of “Pleasant Histories and excellent Novelles…out of divers good and commendable authors...” that provide the Italian settings and plots for much Elizabethan drama. The collection was cobbled together by Painter from many Italian sources including Boccaccio, Gian Francesco Straparola, and Matteo Bandello. And traditional scholarship points out the obvious: Shakespeare’s contemporaries say(!) he wrote the works we attribute to him. The most recent theory is that
Shakespeare was a Sicilian! Professor Martino Iuvara, 71,
a retired teacher of literature, claims (in Shakespeare era Italiano,
pub. Ispica. Ragusa, Sicily, 2002) that the Bard was
really Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza, born in Messina
in 1564 to a doctor, Giovanni Florio, and a noblewoman
named Guglielma Crollalanza. The parents had Calvinist
sympathies and fled with their infant son to Treviso,
near Venice, to escape the Inquisition. There they
bought Casa Otello, built by a retired Venetian
mercenary called Otello (Othello) who, according to
local legend, had killed his wife out of jealousy. The
young bard-to-be then studied in Venice, Padua, and
Mantua, and travelled in Denmark, Greece, Spain, and
Austria. He was befriended by the philosopher, Giordano
Bruno, who, says Iuvara, had ties with William Herbert,
the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Southampton. In
1588, at age 24, Michelangelo went to England under
their patronage. His mother, Guglielma Crollalanza, had
an English cousin at Stratford, who took the boy in. The
Stratford branch had already translated their name as
Shakespeare, and had a son called William, who died
prematurely. Michelangelo, says Iuvara, took the name
for himself, becoming William Shakespeare. In the spirit of the German woman who
once assured me that "sein
oder nicht sein..." (to be or not to be) was by
Goethe, I offer up a compromise solution: Crollalanza
moved to England and became the Pope 500 years earlier.
And Goethe? Not a chance. Hoping against hope, I shall
now google every German phone book I can find to look
for the name Schaukellanze or Schaukelspeer. You see, I
have this theory... 2. added March 28,
2011
Shakespeare &
Garibaldi—Etymology Unbound!
This is not the theory I refer to
(above), but it's probably just as good.
In his journal, La
Critica. Rivista di Letteratura, Storia e Filosofia
(n. 17, 1919), Neapolitan historian and philosopher, Benedetto Croce, wrote an essay
entitled "Shakespeare,
Napoli, e la Commedia Napoletana dell'Arte"
[Shakespeare, Naples, and the Neapolitan Commedia
dell'Arte]. I learned that (1) in The Tempest, the
name, Trinculo, (one of the characters) exists only in
Neapolitan dialect and (2) that the island in The Tempest may be
Lampedusa—unless it's Bermuda! Croce also has a bit of fun
with what he calls an "extravagant" piece of scholarship,
"one of the many that come to us from the distant places
and the erudite world of Shakespeariana." It has to do
with the etymology of the name Shakespeare. Croce cites a German
source: Jahrbuch der
deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft [Yearbook of
the German Shakespeare Society], vol. XX, 1885, pp.
335-336. When Croce calls something "extravagant," he is
being skeptical. (It's hard to tell if he is actually
laughing.) He adds, simply, that "Here's one that is
curious for us Italians." Croce finds curious the theory that the names Shakespeare and Garibaldi mean the same thing! Gariwald or Gerwald was the name of a Bavarian duke from the sixth century. In France, that name became the surnames, Giraud, Gerault, etc. and then passed with the Normans into England in the form of Gerald, a name that survives in compounds such as Fitzgerald. The original ducal name, Gerwald, is claimed to come from old German roots ger and wald, meaning, respectively, (1) spear and (2) wield, brandish, or shake. Thus, Garibaldi means Shakespeare. I did some checking. Indeed, there is an old English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) form, wald, meaning wield in modern English. Presumably it has an old Germanic equivalent way down yonder in Bavaria. I don't know if wield means the same as shake, but in the world of goofy etymology, anything is plausible! Ger in the meaning of spear? Well, there is an old Germanic root, gar (also ger)—cognate of the modern English gear—used to indicate general armor or warlike accoutrements—such as shield, lance or spear. Thus, Garibaldi and Shakespeare might really be the same name.
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We may add another
name to the long list of candidates who—says an
underwhelming body of fringe scholars—must have written
the works of William Shakespeare. The list so far
includes the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere;
philosopher and writer, Francis Bacon; playwright,
Christopher Marlowe; playwright, Ben Jonson; Sir Walter
Raleigh; and Queen Elizabeth I. My personal favorite is
Marlowe because he would have had to fake his death in a
tavern brawl in 1593 and then to have written under a
pseudonym for reasons that we are not at liberty to
reveal, but "thereby hangs a tale!" I don’t really have
a dog in this fight. I’m just glad that someone wrote
the works of Shakespeare, the same way I’m glad that
someone wrote Mozart’s