Did Shakespeare crib from Dante?
New evidence
Iannaccone showed pages to Sorti and his wife, Rita Monaldi, who have written extensively about Dante and Shakespeare, helped by their daughter, the historian Teodora Sorti. They noticed Florio also highlighted entire lines and scenes in the Divine Comedy that appear in Shakespeare’s plays, suggesting Florio fed ideas to the Bard.
In one highlighted section, Dante compares fleeting fame to “worldly rumour”, writing: “Worldly rumour is nothing but a gust of wind, first blowing from one quarter, then another, changing name with every new direction.”
Sorti pointed to the character called Rumour in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, who boasts: “Which of you will stop the vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind my post-horse, still unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth.”
Sorti said: “The fact that Florio marked this long passage, of which there is no trace in his dictionaries, is a clear indication that it was selected for Shakespeare’s text.”
There is another example in the Times article and more promised in a book. This was discovered in a book in the British Library. (Link below.)
This is why we need universities. Real scholarship makes these discoveries and they slowly add up to a fuller understanding of a period of a writer. Too much humanities output hasn’t been this sort of thing of course, but true literary scholarship is not something we want to lose. Nor as
and would say can it be replicated here on Substack.Link — https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/unearthed-book-shakespeare-dante-pgk232pmh
Philip Hardie has written an entire (huge) book on the trope of Fama. It’s a commonplace with similar passages found in dozens of authors. Shakespeare might have read Dante of course (though generally speaking refs to Dante are fairly infrequent in English sources of this period) but Shakespeare’s style, roooted in common placing, makes it very hard in my view to make a compelling argument about any single source. Generally the more classical and renaissance literature you’ve actually read, the less convincing any single « source » attribution looks.
Shakespeare must have read Virgil at his grammar school and maybe he just based his version of Fame on Virgil’s description of Rumour flying about (Aeniad book IV). There are similarities.