Shakespeare's Italian connection
In Venice the sun is shining, the swallows are nesting, the Tiepolos are back inside the newly reopened church of Sant'Alvise, the covers have come off the Valier monu- ment in San Zanipolo to reveal its tumid grand opera of contrasted marbles (some- how the more compelling because Ruskin hated it so) and the restaurants are serving bigoli in salsa and malfatti alla panna at low-season prices. Over lunch at Montin a friend newly arrived from London pro- duces a cutting from a newspaper she thinks I might have missed. In it we read that a retired Italian professor, Martino Iuvara, has claimed, under the somewhat implausible circumstances of an interview with the popular Hello-style magazine Oggi, that the man we always knew as William Shakespeare of Stratford was in fact a Sicil- Ran, born Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza of Messina, who only reached England in 1588, when he was 24. For a moment the words 'April' and 'fool' come happily together, or as the Italians say, 'April fish'. But then, after a few more mouthfuls of soft-shelled crab and polenta, I think 'why on earth not?' Professor Iuvara, supposing the British journalist has not invented him, may be barking up the wrong tree, but this particular part of the Shakespearean forest happens, as far as I'm concerned, to be the right one.
The occupational hazard of being a great writer is that after your death (and not infrequently while you're still alive) the general reader assumes ownership, not just of your works but of the career and person- ality which shaped them. Auden's memo- rable encapsulation of Edward Lear, 'he became a land', carries a note of melan- choly warning beneath the intended praise. Thus thousands of us believe we under- stand Shakespeare on a level whose exclu- sivity recalls the accolade given to the Edwardian Gaety Girl Gertie Millar: 'When she sang you felt she was doing it just for you and nobody else.'
Shakespeare becomes what each of us wants him to be. No part of his life (far bet- ter documented than popular wisdom would have us believe) is more open to such territorial claim-staking than the so- called lost years between 1586, when he was last heard of in England, and 1592, which sees him making his name as a dramatist and member of a theatrical troupe. The conflicting scenarios for 'this great gap of time' include everything from an abortive stint as a lawyer, a year or two at sea and a spell in the wilderness of schoolmastering, to the latest relaunch of a once popular theory that the playwright learned his craft as the protégé of a Lan- cashire recusant family who referred to him as `Shakeshaft'. Duff Cooper devoted an entire book, Sergeant Shakespeare, well sup- ported by reference to the plays, to trying to convince a sceptical Lady Diana that the author of Henry V had spent a ticklish moment or two as a soldier in the Low Countries.
My own private Shakespeare may have been all these things (as a schoolmaster I like to think of him gracing that lowliest and most despised among English profes- sions), but at some stage he gave up what- ever he was doing and set off, how or why will doubtless never be known, for Italy. Only of course, say critics and scholars, he couldn't have done, could he? Whole vol- umes have been devoted to sneering at the mixture of fantasy and ignorance apparent- ly underlying his dozen-odd plays with Ital- ian or Italianate settings. He got it all from books or hints from travellers or conversa- tions with John Florio, compiler of the first Italian-English dictionary. What exactly have these panjandrums been reading? Each other, presumably, for they have cer- tainly not examined the plays in question.
The map of Shakespeare's Italy is plain for all to see, that of a comparatively small area extending eastwards from Milan to Venice, and including the cities of Padua, Mantua and Verona. Interestingly Much Ado About Nothing, the one Italian play set outside this northern orbit, is completely empty of localising detail, as the others sig- nificantly aren't. Yet what fun the critics have with Shakespeare's topographical ham-fistedness. Tee-hee, the Swan of Avon thought it was possible to get from Verona to Milan by water, ho-ho, sweet Master Shakespeare, not for an age but for all time, believed Padua was on the sea, and no, honestly, this'll kill you, one of his char- acters says of another 'His father was a sail- maker in Bergamo' (about 200 kilometres inland).
As it happens, Shakespeare was correct on each of these points. Until the late 18th century a standard mode of travel between Milan and Verona was via the network of canals linking the larger waterways of Loin- bardy. Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew has 'come ashore' at Padua from one of the innumerable barges plying along its river Brenta. As for Bergamo-super-Mare, Shakespeare never thought that. He just knew, as anybody did who actually went there, that this mountain city, looking down on fields where hemp was grown to make canvas, was the major supplier of sails for the great galleys of the Venetian Republic.
It is vulgar to mock the qualified expert. The late A. L. Rowse, for all his imagina- tive forthrightness as an amateur Shake- spearean, made himself embarrassing and ridiculous through doing just this sort of thing. Yet what are we to suppose if these very same authorities refuse to accept that Shakespeare knows better than they do as to the realities of late 16th-century Italy? Very well, the fact-checking department betrays him now and then. It is unlikely that the Doge of Venice, administratively a eunuch, would have sat in judgment on the case of Shylock v. Antonio, or that the real- life Capulets and Montagues had servants called Samson and Abraham.
In the end it is the pervasive atmosphere of these plays, a general sense of what F. R. Leavis used to refer to as 'felt life', which persuades us more strongly even than such authenticating details as Portia's Titian hair or Old Gobbo's 'dish of doves', a customary Venetian gift, that Shake- speare's Italy was vibrant in the memory rather than something fished out of a library. Italians themselves have always loved Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew for the way these mirror a society agelessly famil- iar to them, with its feuding clans, its bella figura-obsessed bourgeoisie, its rhetoric of violence, jealousy and sex, its reverence for money and status.
No doubt I am talking as much moon- shine as Professor Iuvara, though I have to admit to a perverse delight in the possibili- ty that Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza (the name means 'shake spear') might be The One. Until such time as the Prof advances his proofs, however, I prefer to think of the young Stratfordian footloose in the Veneto, on a boat from Milan maybe, among the Bergamasc sailmakers, or hear- ing the swifts scream while he tucks into a plate of bigoli in salsa.
Jonathan Keates
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