First proposed in the 1920s by Santi Paladino, who claimed Michelangelo Florio was involved in creating Shakespeare's works, the Crollalanza hypothesis has gone through several permutations and developments.
[2] Independent filmmaker Alicia Maksimova released in 2016 a documentary film Was Shakespeare English?,[3] covering this topic, which lacks scholarly support.
The theory has been dismissed by Sonia Massai, reader in Shakespeare studies at King's College London, as being proposed by "a most eccentric breed of anti-Stratfordians.
[10] In 1943 Bellotti published a pamphlet repeating these claims: L'Italianità di Shakespeare: Guglielmo Crollalanza grande genio italiano.
[12] In this work, Iuvara, a retired Sicilian journalist and teacher of languages, claimed to have traced a Calvinist called Michelangelo Florio (the same name as the Elizabethan humanist John Florio's father, and likely related to their family) who was born in the Sicilian city of Messina on April 23, 1564, the same date as is commonly given for William Shakespeare's birth in Stratford.
[13] Iuvara's theories had emerged into broader public awareness in 2000, during a round-table discussion conducted at the Turin Book Fair that year.
The son, Michelangelo, sought sanctuary in Venice, and then subsequently escaped to England, where he assumed a new name, "Shakespeare", this being an English calque on crolla/scrolla (collapse/shake) and lanza (spear).
[5] Conflict with records showing the existence of Shakespeares in the Stratford area long before the possible arrival of Michelangelo Florio "Crollalanza" is avoided by suggesting that these were a branch of his mother's family.
He argues that this required no personal experience of Italy, but was obtained in England, and primarily by reading John Florio's 1591 book about Italian culture and language Second Fruits.
The British ambassador Christopher Prentice appears briefly in the interview, and responds, with understated sardonic humour, to Pif's claims.
However, this interview was clearly a joke around the Scrollalanza theory, in which the RAI journalist, Pif (nickname for Pierfrancesco Diliberto) and Christopher Prentice enjoyed playing their respective roles.
He describes Iuvara's book as "amusing and embarrassing" and "lacking any scientific [i.e. scholarly] rigor", and says it contains theories so fanciful and reckless ("fantasiose e temerarie") that: "It is only possible to embellish/fictionalize them; and this Domenico Seminario has done, with masterful irony, in Il manoscritto di Shakespeare.