Florian theory of Shakespeare authorship
[6] Paladino subsequently expanded on his original article by issuing a small volume, Il grande tragico Shakespeare sarebbe italiano (transl.
[10] By 1929 Paladino had established an Accademia Shakespeariana in Reggio Calabria which, according to a correspondent for the London Times, engaged in polemics with both the national and foreign press over the issue.
[18] Several years later he wrote up the results of his spiritualistic encounters with the real, Italian author in a pamphlet published in Venice in 1943, entitled L’italianità di Shakespeare.
[27][g] Ernesto Grillo (1877–1946), Stevenson Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Glasgow University from 1925 to 1940, made passing reference to Paladino's idea in a posthumous and updated edition of his 1925 study of Shakespeare's relationship with Italy.
[34][35] In 1954 some marginal support, again from Germany, came when a Friderico Georgi, identified by Wadsworth as a certain Franz (Maximilian,[36]) Saalbach,[22] in a self-published brochure under the name Erich Gerwien[37][38] also advocated a Florio theory.[who?
][36] This Georgi also claimed that a Florio wrote not only all of Shakespeare, but also, among others, Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry and John Lyly's Euphues.
[47] Andrea Camilleri, author of the Montalbano detective stories, mocked the thesis by translating Shakespeare's actual play back into Sicilian dialect, using the same title invented by Iuvara.
A veritable boom in speculations about a Florio connection broke out, mainly consisting of self-published materials full of sham biographical reconstructions without any evidential basis.
The resurgence of fantasies culminated in a fake news report on an online clone of Sky TG24 that Shakespeare's real birth certificate had been discovered in the archives of Stratford-on-Avon, and testified that he was indeed Michelangelo Florio born on 23 April 1564 in Messina.
[56] He found an antecedent to this in Shakespeare, whose The Merchant of Venice, rather than reflecting anti-Semitic attitudes in the manner Shylock was depicted, evinced to the contrary a thorough grasp of Jewish culture.
[n] At a conference on Jacques Derrida, an acquaintance of Goldschmit, the French actor and theatrical director Daniel Mesguich, alerted him to the existence of Tassinari's Florio theory, and, for Goldschmit, the bits of mystery of Shakespeare's intimacy with Jewish scriptures all fell into place: qua John Florio, son of a man whose ancestors had been converts from Judaism, Shakespeare must indeed have been a crypto-Jew and fluent in Hebrew.
[59] Goldschmit himself claimed support for the theory by citing Jorge Luis Borges, imagining from a remark of the Argentinian writer that he too was not only an anti-Stratfordian, but had intuited that Shakespeare must have been either Jewish or Italian, since his style was marked by hyperbole rather than typically English understatement.
Pseudo-revelations of this sensationalist type aspire to stir up polemical reactions from practitioners of orthodox scholarship in order to secure their otherwise hackneyed ideas a certain visibility.
The more informed academics defend Shakespeare, he added, the greater the inadvertent impression is that the 'nasty' establishment of Shakespearean authorities is engaged in a conspiracy to muffle up what a self-styled iconoclastic smasher of their omertà claims he is exposing.
