3 réponses à “Réponse à M. Suhamy”

1. 

   Daniel Bougnoux

   13 juin 2014

   Je reçois à l’instant la réponse de – dois-je dire notre adversaire ? M. Suhamy est coriace et il répond au quart de tour ! Je ne peux mieux faire que de poster ici sa nouvelle mise au point :

   Cher Monsieur, merci pour votre message. Je n’ai pas le temps de répondre en détail à vos objections, je reprendrai contact à mon retour de vacances. Sachez simplement ceci:
   1/ Je connais la question du stratfordisme et de l’antistratfordisme bien plus profondément que vous croyez, même si je n’en ai jamais parlé dans mes cours, et si je n’y ai consacré que quelques lignes dans mes livres. Je sais aussi que les arguments en faveur de l’homme de Stratford sont beaucoup plus solides que le prétendent les anti, mais ce qui m’a le plus convaincu, c’est l’effarante ignorance des partisans de Bacon, Oxford, Stanley et tutti quanti.
   2/ Tassinari n’a pas découvert Florio, la candidature de ce dernier a été présentée par plusieurs autres publicistes avant lui et elle a été démolie par un spécialiste du nom de Scott McCrea.
   3/ Les arguments du Tassinari sont très nombreux (je les ai vus sur Internet), mais une accumulation d’erreurs et de contre-vérités ne constitue pas la vérité. Il a je crois (je ne l’ai pas sous les yeux mais peu importe), une liste de 15 raisons qui justifient sa théorie en faveur de Florio. Aucune de ces 15 raisons ne tient debout. Aucune n’a le moindre fondement. Mais à quoi bon ratiociner? Quand il dit par exemple que l’auteur de Roméo et Juliette s’est inspiré directement du texte italien de Bandello, il ment, ou il se trompe. Les parallélismes et les emprunts qui lient le texte de Shakespeare à la traduction d’Arthur Brooke sont archi-connus, et figurent dans toutes les bonnes éditions. Pourquoi le Florio se serait-il inspiré de cette traduction, alors qu’il connaissait l’italien mieux que personne? L’italianité du Florio se retourne contre l’argument tassinarien. Je connais bien la question parce que je suis en train d’écrire un livre sur la légende de Roméo et Juliette à travers les âges. Ce n’est pas moi qui en ai pris l’initiative, c’est un de mes éditeurs (je ne travaille que sur commande) mais peu importe. J’ai chez moi le texte de Bandello, en italien, et celui de Brooke, ainsi que celui de William Painter, autre source en anglais.
   4/ La question de savoir d’où vient un texte littéraire, en postulant que c’est la biographie qui peut le mieux nous renseigner, intéresse plus souvent les psychologues, les psychanalystes, les historiens ou les philosophes que les gens qui aiment réellement la littérature et les arts en général. Cela dit, la biographie, pourquoi pas. J’ai moi-même publié une biographie de Walter Scott qui a obtenu deux prix littéraires. Mais je n’ai pas attribué à Scott la Chanson de Roland ni les aventures des Pieds Nickelés. Pour déceler les liens profonds qui peuvent exister entre l’auteur et son oeuvre, la première nécessité est de bien connaître les deux, ce qui exclut automatiquement la confrérie des antistrates. Ce n’est tout de même pas un hasard si parmi les gens qui ont passé leur vie à lire réellement Shakespeare, il n’existe pas un seul antistrate. La raison n’est pas que l’oeuvre de Shakespeare sent le Warwickshire à plein nez (personne parmi les gens catalogués comme stratfordiens ne sortirait ce genre d’idiotie), mais dès qu’on lit un livre écrit par un négationniste on se rend compte que ces gens-là parlent de ce qu’ils ne connaissent pas.
   Bonnes vacances!

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   1. 

      Daniel Bougnoux

      13 juin 2014

      Et voici, au vu de cette lettre, la réponse très rapide elle aussi de Lamberto Tassinari (depuis Montréal le même jour au saut du lit !) :

      Cher Daniel,
      (…) Je sais que cet échange, si je le débute, est destiné à s’éterniser et à demeurer insatisfaisant pour tous. Et je n’ai pas envie. Je m’explique. Tous les arguments des stratfordiens sont résumés dans le livre « Shakespeare beyond doubt » qu’ils ont édité pour répondre à la charge des oxfordiens (en particulier au film «  »Anonymous »). Leur position semble solide, après quand même trois siècles de littérature, mais leur géant a les pieds d’argile et ne peut que tomber, style URSS…

      Sur les points soulevés par Henri Suhamy :

      1) Cette généralisation sur l’ignorance des anti-(stratfordiens) est ridicule, fausse : Diana Price (son « Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography » est un livre superbe), Michael Egan (auteur très digne), William Leahy (prof d’anglais à la Brunel University de Londres), Roger Stritmatter (prof de litt. anglaise au Coppin College USA) et je pourrais continuer, pour ne rien dire de trois grands interprètes shakespeariens comme les Britanniques sir John Gielgud, sir Derek Jacobi et Mark Rylance, tous anti-stratfordiens.

      2) Mr Suhamy se trompe : ce n’est certes pas moi qui ai découvert le grand traducteur de Montaigne ! T.S.Eliot pensait que sa traduction était un classique de la littérature anglaise. Mais il n’y a pas eu de thèse sur son identité shakespearienne. Santi Paladino à qui fait allusion H.S. soutenait dans les années 1930 que son père Michel Angelo était le grand dramaturge, pas John. L’on peut voir dans mon livre en tapant Paladino. Quant à ce Scott McCrea, c’est lui le tricheur ! Je dois renvoyer aux trois textes ci-joints : A. la critique de mon livre par McCrea, la seule académique publiée en 2010 dans « Comparative Drama » ; B. ma lettre à « Comparative Drama » ; C. mon analyse de la recension de McCrea.

      3) Les quinze raisons sont toutes fondées et je les développe, comme tu sais une a une dans les chapitres de mon livre. Pour les sources, HS se fixe sur Bandello. Avec Bandello il y a plusieurs autres « sources » chez Florio car il lisait TOUT y compris les auteurs anglais d’où il a tiré les 150 000 mots de son dictionnaire de 1611 ! Mais quoi dire de Tasso et Ariosto (voir la démonstration de Roger Prior) ? Et Giordano Bruno (un critique français, deux allemands, quelques italiens dont Tassinari ont tous démontré la profonde influence de Bruno dont les oeuvres n’étaient pas traduites en italien ? Et dans le cas de Tasso et Ariosto, même quand elles étaient traduites, l’auteur avait recours à l’original italien. La liste des auteurs italiens est très longue.

      (…) H.S. pourrait recevoir la plus « persuasive » de mes répliques sans qu’il y ait jamais de vrai débat… Je suggère, si tu as la générosité de lui répondre une toute dernière fois, de lui envoyer ces trois points, plus mon article sur « Love’s Labour’s Lost », ainsi que le texte C. (mon analyse du tricheur McCrea).
      John Florio est le plus probable, le seul shake-speare que l’Angleterre possédait à l’époque, il y en avait pas d’autres ! Le site web sur les traces des rituels juifs dans ses œuvres, en plus des milliers des citations des Écritures (voir Shaheen) apporte un indice supplémentaire. (…)

      Lamberto

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      1. 

         Daniel Bougnoux

         13 juin 2014

         Voici donc, à la demande de Lamberto, sa réponse à McCrea (dont M. Suhamy dit supra qu’il a fait justice de son extravagant livre) : le texte en noir est de McCrea, les lignes en bleu les inserts, en forme de réponse, de Tassinari. Hélas ! ce traitement de texte n’autorise ni l’italique, ni la couleur… Je mets donc entre guillemets les paragraphes de McCrea, alternant avec les réponses de Tassinari.

         Contested Scott : an analysis of his book-review
         Lamberto Tassinari. « John Florio, The Man Who Was Shakespeare ».
         Trans. William McCuaig. Montreal:Giano, 2009.Pp.386. $24.95

         « In the last few years, a basketful of books have come out promoting the Earl of Oxford, the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Henry Neville, Sir Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe as the true author of Shakespeare’s works. All of them are guilty of terrible scholarship, specious logic, and the worst kind of sophistry. Still, these books are not valueless; for one thing, they call attention to Elizabethan writers and history that the non specialist might find interesting and would otherwise overlook. Such is the case with Lamberto Tassinari’s John Florio. »

         McCrea’s incipit is full of air: the scholar, the high priest, the doctor of the Stratford Church, is about to utter his sentence on the “terrible scholarship” of the “non specialists”, the anti-Stratfordian plague. Such an ardor shows that the critic is determined to use whatever means to end the heresy.

         « Florio was a translator and lexicographer who wrote several books that Shakespeare used as sources for his plays. »

         He concedes though that the connection exists. While recognizing that Florio provided the material – words and cultural information – to the dramatist and poet, McCrea doesn’t specify the extent of Shakespeare’s debt.

         « Though born in England in 1553, he spent his youth in Switzerland and Germany, but he returned to London in the 1570s. He became a tutor of French and Italian at Oxford and later enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. In the reign of James I, he tutored the king’s eldest son as well as the new queen, Anne of Denmark. Florio was acquainted with many famous Elizabethans, including the poet Samuel Daniel (who married Florio’s sister). »

         Indeed the opposite is true ! This is the first flaw of McCrea’s short critique: it was Florio who married Samuel Daniel’s sister, Rose. The specialist betrays his limits.

         « Ben Jonson, and the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who taught at Oxford in the mid-1580s. »

         Bruno visited Oxford for the first time in June 1583 for three days, sustaining a debate with theologians and doctors. In the summer of the same year he started teaching briefly there but was accused of plagiarism and left the university. These experiences are reflected in several writings in which the Neapolitan philosopher mistreats Oxford’s Aristotelian doctors. In return, for centuries, English and American scholarship “forgot” about Giordano Bruno’s impact on the English Renaissance, particularly on Shakespeare.

         « He wrote his own will that attests to his « poverty, » and he died in debt in 1625. These facts are scattered throughout the book; Tassinari never provides a clear narrative of Florio’s life (though he begins one in chapter 2). For that, Frances Yates’s 1934 biography remains the standard. »

         You should read “What’s in a will”, the comparison between Florio’s and Shackspeare’s (sic) wills in my eBook p.279. Of course mine is not a biography and, yes, Yates’ “remains the standard until Florio’s Shakespearian identity is universally recognized and scholars start researching his life, beginning with the hundreds of books of his library and thousands of his letters, all lost.
         If the “specialist” McCrea had read Yates biography he would have learnt why Florio ended up in poverty: because the Crown never paid the pension due to him for the fifteen year service at court. (see Yates, pp.293-300)

         « Instead, Tassinari spends the first part of his book asserting his thesis that Florio, in collaboration with his father, the Italian writer and tutor Michel Angelo Florio, composed the plays and poems, invented the name William Shakespeare, said nothing as credit and money for the plays were taken by the unscrupulous actor, and received help in creating the fiction of « Shakespeare » from Ben Jonson and others. Florio’s purpose, his « mission, » was to « elevate the English language and culture of England above its rivals, but to do so incognito, for . . . the man responsible for that enrichment of vocabulary and style and ideas, could simply not be seen to bear a foreign name » (16). Apparently, he was so wedded to this project that he was willing to die in poverty and debt rather than claim a portion of the proceeds from the First Folio, a bestseller in 1624. »

         The actor’s money came from his moneylender and business activities. Remember that half or 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were never printed before 1623, a big loss of profit for the avid dramatist. About the credit, things are quite murky as until 1598 Shakespeare’s plays were anonymous and after, the connection between the dramatist and the Stratford’s theatrical impresario is anything but clearly established. Possibly McCrea knows the true reason of Florio’s poverty but he doesn’t hesitate to alter an historical fact in order to show what the reader perceives as my contradiction !

         « To account for Ben Jonson’s famous description of Shakespeare’s « small Latin and less Greek, » Tassinari is forced to argue that this line refers to the actor’s front man, but the praise in the rest of the poem, lauding Shakespeare as the « Soul of the Age, » is secretly meant for Florio. In one poem, in other words, Jonson refers to two different Shakespeares. « Jonson deliberately creates a cloud of confusion » (245), explains the author, without a scrap of evidence. »

         Evidence? A mass of evidence is missing in the Shakespearian narrative. See the infinite series of “perhaps”, “may be”, “might have”, “could have been”, etc. in biographies like Greenblatt’s, Shapiro’s and others. Jonson’s heavy and bizarre contradictions logically point to another Shakespeare.

         « One assumes Tassinari would say the same thing about Jonson’s telling William Drummond that « Shakespeare wanted art, » and then, in the same conversation, criticizing Shakespeare for making mistakes of geography in his plays. The first Shakespeare must be the front man—since by any definition, Florio never lacked « art »—and the mistake-prone Shakespeare must refer to Florio.
         There are no geography mistakes in the works of Shakespeare.
         In the second section of his book, Tassinari asserts Florio’s influence on Shakespeare’s works, which is undoubted. »

         ‘Undoubted’ yes but overlooked, not seriously studied in centuries by the main stream scholarship.

         « For example, as the author says, « Iago’s diatribe against women in Othello appears to be modelled on this Florian dialogue :
         Women are the purgatory of men’s purses;
The paradise of men’s bodies; the hell of men’s souls.
Women are in churches saints; abroad angels; at home devils;
At windows sirens; at doors pies [i.e., magpies]; and in gardens goats.
         (Florio’s Second Frutes)
         You are pictures out of doors,
Bells in your parlours; wildcats in your kitchens;
Saints in your injuries; devils being offended;
Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.
         (Othello, 2.1.109) » (166)
         Modeled, certainly. But the poet has transformed his source, with his superior imagination, into inimitable poetry. Nowhere in his writing under his own name does Florio show the creativity to envision wildcats in kitchens, offended devils or injured, uncomplaining saints. Yet Tassinari claims that Shakespeare “thinks and writes in the same way as Florio” (165). He has obviously convinced himself, but it’s doubtful he will convert many readers to his opinion.
         Here is a 1606 poem by Florio in praise of Jonson’s new play Volpone, or The Fox:

         Forgive thy friends: they would, but cannot praise
         Enough the wit, art, language of thy plays.
         Forgive thy foes; they will not praise thee. Why?
         Thy fate hath thought it best, they should envy.
         Faith, for thy Fox’s sake, forgive, then, those
         Who are nor worthy to be friends nor foes;
         Or, for their own brave sake, let them be still
         Fools at thy mercy, and like what they will.

         Compare this to any of the Bard’s sonnets. In the same year this was published, Shakespeare was writing King Lear and Macbeth. »

         This is the infamous bad poem falsely attributed to Florio by McCrea which I denounced and commented in my previous email: a serious and unforgivable sin for a scholar.

         « Unlike Marlovians and Oxfordians, who can claim that the extant writings of their candidate predate those written as Shakespeare, Tassinari doesn’t have that luxury. »

         What’s that?? Florio’s « First Fruits » was published in 1578 and his « Second Fruits » in 1591 !

         « Reading Shakespeare alongside Florio makes one painfully aware of how beautiful and poetic even the two dedications to Southampton are, and how prosaic and fundamentally different is Florio’s mind. »

         Just read Florio’s prefaces to his works and judge by yourself the quality, the level of Florio’s English prose. Professor Hermann Haller in his critical edition of Florio’s 1598 Dictionary finds that the “genuine polyglot and passionate philologist” was also a “creative writer” who “inspired Shakespeare”. My opinion that Shakespeare “thinks and writes in the same way as Florio” is not as odd as Florio’s style and mind are presented in a similar fashion in the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica:
         Florio and Shakespeare were both, moreover, intimate personal friends of the young earl of Southampton, who, in harmony with his generous character and strong literary tastes, was the munificent patron of each. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, dedicated his « Venus and Adonis » and his « Lucrece » to this young nobleman; and three years later, in 1598, Florio dedicated the first edition of his Italian dictionary to the earl in terms that almost recall Shakespeare’s words. Shakespeare had said in addressing the earl, « What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours. »
         And Florio’s words
         ‘…to your bounteous Lordship, most noble, most vertuous, and most Honorable Earle of Southampton, in whose paie and patronage I have lived some yeeres to whom I owe and vowe the yeeres that I have to live.’

         « This is why Florio’s father, and not Florio himself, was proposed as an authorship candidate in 1921. A writer with an imaginative and florid style in Italian, Michel Angelo left no paper trial in English that could be compared to Shakespeare’s works. »

         Did McCrea read Michel Angelo Florio’s books or is he simply repeating what I wrote about this brilliant Renaissance man?

         « Tassinari asserts that Shakespeare’s royalist sympathies, as well as his knowledge of the Bible, literature, and music, point to Florio, ignoring that censorship made any non royalist position unacceptable, that other writers put aristocrats and kings at the center of their plays, that Elizabethans heard the Bible read in church weekly, that most actors also needed to be musicians. »

         Shakespeare’s royalism is very peculiar. As for the Bible, Shakespeare’s knowledge was vast and profound as Naseeb Shaheen has proved in a thousand page research.

         « As for literature, what books Shakespeare read beyond obvious sources is impossible to determine. Lost plays that he acted in could always have been his actual inspirations. Still, one can’t argue with Tassinari’s call for more research into Aretino’s and Giordano Bruno’s influence on Shakespeare and his times. »

         Indeed, this is another big omission of Shakespearian studies.

         « As the author admits, “Italian expressions are sometimes used in an inaccurate or parodic fashion in Shakespeare’s plays.” According to Tassinari, this “proves that the author pretends not to know Italian (299). Proves? Let’s pretend it’s true. If Florio is indeed concealing his identity by mangling his Italian, this seems to contradict his mission of improving English culture. His works signed John Florio are designed to teach Italian to Englishmen. His life was spent teaching Italian and French. Perhaps it is to conceal his identity that the author of Henry V lifts half of the French in that play from John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), something a linguist like Florio, the translator of Montaigne’s Essays, wouldn’t need to do. Or perhaps Florio didn’t write the play. »

         As the author Shakespeare has to be a pure blood Englishman, Florio’s burlesque and occasional mangling of the Italian language was necessary in order to speak Italian in an English fashion and be understood by the public.. This episodic use of bad Italian doesn’t compromise though his broader didactic mission. The borrowing is not a problem for Florio/Shakespeare as he was “an accomplished plagiarist” stealing interesting words, phrases and ideas wherever he found them (as Florio did with Thomas Thomas’ dictionary, etc.)

         « In fact, it was John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary and his teach-yourself- Italian books that allowed Shakespeare and his contemporaries to decipher Italian novellas. Robert Armin, who played Shakespeare’s fools, became a translator of Italian. John Marston includes eighteen lines of Italian in his play Antonio and Mellida. It was the Renaissance. English culture had been enamored with Italy since the 1570s. »

         Florio, I repeat, published his First Fruits in 1578.

         « Tassinari writes, “Stratfordians are faith-based scholars, they eschew reason: possessing the truth in advance, they must perforce resolve all the incongruences and contradictions over which they stumble through rigid adherence to the myth” (206). This is a pretty good description of Tassinari’s book. The conspiracy theory it espouses cannot be disproved so it is not really a theory at all; it is faith. »

         Not really a conspiracy. Certainly I’m not applying the so called “conspiracy theory” ! As stated in my book, p.24
         ‘Adopting anonymity and concealment as necessities at first, the Florios later had to resign themselves to the misapprehension when the beneficiary, the man from Stratford, appropriated it, and the general opinion confirmed it. This minor misidentification, this little piece of semantic slippage, has had far-reaching historical consequences over the course of time. Someone, I no longer remember who, put it this way in describing an event analogous to the prevalence of the Stratfordian myth: “it is a sort of Niagara Falls of history, there is no conspiracy but everything conspires in the sense that everything respires in the same direction.’

         « For those willing to overlook the book’s inconsistencies and ridiculous logic, it offers the comfort of a Shakespeare whose erudition is documented. For the rest of us, it calls attention to an eminent Elizabethan to whom the English language owes a debt but who did not write the plays of Shakespeare. »

         Scott McCrea
         Purchase College, State University of New York

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