Shakespeare Movie Coming Soon! Mystery Disclosed.
Posted: Monday, October 24, 2011
by Christofer French
Rain Dancer Associates, LLC
Surname recorded from 1248, and means "a spearman." This was a common type of English surname, e.g. Shakelance (1275), Shakeshaft (1332). Shake in the sense of "to brandish or flourish (a weapon)" is attested from late O.E.
Heo scæken on heore honden speren swiðe stronge.
"Never a name in English nomenclature so simple or so certain in origin. It is exactly what it looks -- Shakespear". Nevertheless, speculation flourishes. NO KIDDING.
Yet his vocabulary was massive for a man of his background. A total of 15,000 different words were used in his plays and a further 7000 were used in his poems and sonnets. This gave him a vocabulary of 21,000 words when the average vocabulary of the day in Stratford, England, was less than 500.
No wonder we need an online Shakespearean Dictionary ! Even by today's standards, the most celebrated authors do not exceed an average of 7500 words (The poet, John Milton was an exception and his totalled about 8000) and the average English speaking person only has about 2,000 words in their vocabulary. For a person with a University degree this range in vocabulary would rise to about 3000 to 4000. (Gregory Lewis would most likely exceed these norms).
It is therefore no wonder that he is referred to as an Elizabethan Literary Genius and why there is an online Elizabethan / Shakespearean Dictionary featuring the vocabulary coined by the Bard on this section of the site.
Christofer’s Mom, Shakespeare’s Fan and Tennessee William’s Aquaintance
My mother was a classically trained actor from the University of Iowa. She knew Tennessee Williams and played in scores of plays in the early 40’s.
There were arguments about Shakespeare. It used to be a big point of consternation. Yes. Young people at parties, thespians and otherwise, who would throw volleys back and forth about who their favorite candidates were for the real Shakespeare. Into the drunken and smoke-filled nights they would argue. No winners. No conclusions, just young people during World War II feeling the need to reach back and speculate. Since England was getting bombed and Spitfires were in the air over London defending, perhaps those arguments made them feel closer to the place. My Mother’s first fiancé, before my father, was from the University of Iowa and was a Bomber Pilot shot down over Schwein Furt, Germany. This took her out of the theatre for a time, and then her Father got her first professional job in 1945.
My Mother had her own strong opinions, but then she would say: “I don’t care who it was, if it was one, or several, but somebody wrote them and damn he was a genius!” It was the constant rehearsels of the argument over the decades that aroused my interest anew, with the making of this new film.
How Do The Arguments Go and Who are the Suspects?
· For sheer longevity, no conspiracy theory can match the notion that William Shakespeare did not write the plays that have been attributed to him.
· The plays contain too much accurate detail about distant places of affairs at court to have been written by someone of as low social standing as Shakespeare, goes one argument.
· The plays display too wide a range of style, goes another.
· Shakespeare was not educated enough and Stratford-on-Avon was too backward a place to have produced a playwright of such caliber, goes a third.
· And so, almost every prominent Elizabethan has been suggested at one time or another as the author of one or more of Shakespeare's plays:
Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and of course, Francis Bacon.
He was Low-Classed and therefore we don’t know who he was? Hardly.
The argument that writing plays was considered a low-class occupation beneath the dignity of the aristocracy, or that the author needed to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, but surely if Shakespeare's plays were on target enough to make such measures necessary, then there would be a general “hulabaloo” and efforts to find his name and declare it. Elizabethans would have been alive with talk as to who was the "real" author.
Italian?
Shakespeare – Italian? Over the centuries scholars have been puzzled by Shakespeare's profound knowledge of Italian. Shakespeare had an impressive familiarity with stories by Italian authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Matteo Bandello, and Masuccio Salernitano. In an attempt to solve the mystery of Shakespeare's Italian aptitude, one former teacher of literature has unleashed a new hypothesis on a world eager to hear anything fresh about the Bard.
Retired Sicilian professor Martino Iuvara claims that Shakespeare was, in fact, not English at all, but Italian. His conclusion is drawn from research carried out from 1925 to 1950 by two professors at Palermo University. Iuvara posits that Shakespeare was born not in Stratford in April 1564, as is commonly believed, but actually was born in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza.
His parents were not John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, but were Giovanni Florio, a doctor, and Guglielma Crollalanza, a Sicilian noblewoman. The family supposedly fled Italy during the Holy Inquisition and moved to London. It was in London that Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza decided to change his name to its English equivalent.
Romeo and Juliet; Caesar, et al.
Crollalanza apparently translates literally as 'Shakespeare'. Iuvara goes on to claim that Shakespeare studied abroad and was educated by Franciscan monks who taught him Latin, Greek, and history. He also claims that while Shakespeare (or young Crollalanza) was traveling through Europe he fell in love with a 16-year-old girl named Giulietta. But sadly, family members opposed the union, and Giulietta committed suicide.
“Anonymous” is the Name
Rhys Ifans is to play Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford in the dream project "Anonymous." An Elizabethan drama full of intrigue in both Elizabeth I's royal court and London's theaters, it explores the theory that de Vere was the true author of William Shakespeare's plays and that Shakespeare merely stole the credit.
Ifans knew which role he wanted but doubted his chances. "I'm a Welshman," the lanky actor explains, sitting down for a chat the afternoon after the film's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
It was at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama that Ifans became a fan of the Bard. Patsy Rodenburg, a coach and director worked with him on "Richard III's" opening monologue, the speech that begins with "Now is the winter of our discontent."
The experience was a revelation for the budding actor.
Extraordinary Moment
"It was one of those extraordinary moments. It just all made sense and before that moment, Shakespeare made me feel stupid," he recalls. "I spoke those words and worked with her on it and I wept. I thought, 'Oh my God!'
"Shakespeare is kind of a bastion for an actor," he adds. "Until you get Shakespeare, especially in England, you're not a real actor. It was like a coming of age for me in a way. It really freed me up and it made me brave, particularly that speech."
To play the man who might have written all those plays, Ifans read every biography he could of de Vere, but stayed away from reading about any of the competing theories over who - besides William Shakespeare - might have written the plays.
Ifans says. "I found it extraordinary that one man could've produced such an immense body of work. Just the weight of that and all of his kind of virility and optimism and how the Elizabethan court and society gradually quashed that. And really the pain."
As I look over the struggle, I think of my Mother who was in the most elemental sense only to be described as a fan. Though, don’t get me wrong, she could go on for pages! I still think of her words in the last few weeks of her life: “Genius, there, just pure genius.”
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Thanks for the info on the Italian possibility. There is a lot to learn here from other writers.Until I started writing about the upcoming film, I did not even know about the Italian info. Fascinating indeed.
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