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Œuvres de Noemi Magri

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Partage des connaissances

Date de décès
2011-05-09
Sexe
female
Nationalité
Italy
Lieu de naissance
Mantua, Italy
Lieu du décès
Mantua, Italy
Lieux de résidence
Mantua, Italy
Études
Ca' Foscari University, Venice, (English, Ph.D.), Fulbright scholar, N.Y.U., New York,
Professions
Professor of English
Shakespeare scholar
researcher
Organisations
Anglo-Italian Society
Courte biographie
Noemi Magri was born in Mantua, Italy. Her father was a lawyer and her mother Ada, who taught French, founded the Franco-Italian Society.

Dr. Magri graduated from the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at New York University. From high school, she had been convinced William Shakespeare was not the author of the poems and plays attributed to him. From her research and detailed, first-hand knowledge of Italian geography, architecture, art, and history, she concluded that the true author was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), who had traveled extensively in Italy and visited Mantua. She was a much-loved professor of English at Mantua's Istituto Tecnico Industriale Statale (ITIS) and a founder of the Anglo-Italian Society.

Membres

Critiques

Review : Such Fruits Out of Italy: The Italian Renaissance in Shakespeare's Plays and Poems
by Noemi Magri

Gary Goldstein, Editor; 2014 - Laugwitz Verlag Buchholz Germany. 302 pp.; Illustrated (B &W); bibliography and end-notes.

Such Fruits Out of Italy constitutes the major essay-scholarship of the late Italian professor of English literature, Noemi Magri, concerning the part of Italian Renaissance art, geography and history in the poetry and dramatic writings of Shakespeare. The nine collected essays and the six brief notes and discussions of related issues cover the plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale and Othello and the part of Italian art in epic poem, Venus and Adonis and in the plays, The Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew.

Magri's essays on Shakespeare are a model of excellence in scholarship of Shakepearean English literary history. They demonstrate everything which standard orthodox Shakespeare scholarship ought to offer but only too rarely does. Her findings expose and critique major flaws, faults and failures marring orthodox academic scholarship. Those flaws spring from the numerous longstanding assumptions about the author and his purposes in his plays and poetry; these faults foster and perpetuate mistaken conceptions of the author Shakespeare's relationship to Italy's people and history of his time, leaving the uninformed reader of today to suppose that the author of Shakespeare's works had little in the way of a good knowledge of the country, its people, language and culture.

As Magri's essays show, the actual facts are quite to the contrary, standard academic scholarship having studiously—sometimes, more recently, even stubbornly, in the face of clear and incontrovertible correction—failed to do the basic scholarly work required to understand that the author of Shakespeare's work had an excellent and personal knowledge of Italian, of the culture of his time in Italy and of the geography of the places he visited. Thus, orthodox scholarship on Shakespeare is shown to be the work of people who, despite their illustrious titles at prestigious colleges and universities, do not understand Shakespeare's work, the author behind it or, in general, much of anything on which they so foolishly expound on these subjects.

The rivers and canal networks of much of northern Italy in the 16th century were a common means of transport for people and goods between inland towns and cities—city-states. Thus, when, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the author has Valentine “taking leave of … Proteus” in Verona and embarking, by boat, “'To see the wonders of the world abroad,'” the scene's action is historically accurate rather than the historical blooper which other scholars have held it up to be. Verona and Milan were separate state entities so, in travelling from one to the other at the time, one did “go abroad.” It is only sheer (and rather amazing) historical ignorance which allows a Shakespearean scholar to suppose that, in having his characters travel from Verona to Milano by boat, the author of the play was indulging in the arts of fanciful fiction, having his characters do the impossible.

In his poem, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare describes in detail a view of “a passionate Venus wooing a reluctant Adonis” as he sets out with his dogs to hunt boar. Magri sets out in careful detail the reasons scholars are mistaken to have found Shakespeare's sources in either Ovid or Virgil or in Titian's (Prado version) painting, “Venus and Adonis” rather than in a different version of Titian's work on the same subject—one which was present only in Venice, where there is no reasonable chance that anyone familiar to Shaksper of Stratford Upon Avon should ever have seen or heard of it.

For, from the poem, only this work, and not the details from either Ovid's or Virgil's accounts nor any of the other existing Venus and Adonis paintings of the period correspond to the details in Shakespeare's poem.

Orthodox scholars have tried without success to locate an actual place corresponding to what is called “Belmont” in The Merchant of Venice. Though there were numerous places called by that name in 16th and 17th century Italy, none of them correspond to the other details of the play's action and timing. Magri, however, locates a Villa, the Villa Foscari, on the river Brenta, corresponding in all its details to the constraints described in the play's action and settings. The correspondences are too close to be accounted for by mere coincidence. It seems beyond sound doubt that the play's author had Villa Foscari specifically in mind when he described the setting and place called Belmont. And yet, it is hardly conceivable that he'd have had such a familiarity unless he had been there and seen the place for himself—as Magri's exposition shows us he most assuredly did in all probability according the historical facts she relates.

Again and again, Magri's expertise in her knowledge of Italian, of Latin and of the fine details of the history and geography of Italy of the 1500s make it clear that standard scholarship on Shakespeare has failed again and again to get and to transmit a clear and accurate picture of the author and his work and intentions and meanings. Instead, the general reader's trust in orthodox scholarship on Shakespeare has been grossly abused—sometimes, it is extremely difficult to avoid the impression that the abuse has been selfish, cynical and malicious.



“Owing to a lack of correspondence between the life of Shakesper of Stratford and the Works {ascribed to "William Shakespeare}, orthodox criticism has always been inclined to disregard the personal experience of the author, to the extent that the criterion of the 'impersonality' of Shakespeare's art seemed to establish a conclusive solution: Shakespeare's art is impersonal, that is, it does not involve the author's life and social environment, nor do his works reflect his feelings or thoughts. Of all the writers of the western world, Shakespeare is the only one whose works have been denied an autobiographical basis.

–Noemi Magri, Such Fruits Out of Italy: The Italian Renaissance in
Shakespeare's Plays and Poems
, p. 151



Thus, professor Noemi Magri states the key and characteristic problem with all orthodox Shakespeare scholarship. The genius and the personally-experienced worldly-knowledge so evident in the works cannot be reasonably made to “fit” the personality which orthodox scholars are obliged to present as the author of the work. The incongruities between these two are so glaring that facts must be ignored, denied, distorted and replaced with wildly implausible conjecture—offered as fact. It makes no difference how intellectually gifted the orthodox scholar, no difference how much time and attention he or she has devoted to the texts: if one starts from a preposterously erroneous premise about the identity of the author, one is obliged to force the prescribed narrative into a fact-set which refuses to accomodate it.

Instead of a picture that coheres, that “makes sense,” orthodox scholarship's narrative of the life of the author calls forth again and again puzzling questions and, for answers, has desperately contrived accounts which strain common-sense belief.

Shakespeare's writings are not the work of someone who was driven to write by material necessity. His writing springs from a vocation, one he practically invented himself and one which he professed and expressed from the most immediate and personally-felt need. Thus, his poems and plays find their sources and their settings in the things he experienced in his extraordinary life and in the places he experienced them.

If he chose to devote nine thousand and seven hundred words of poetry to a tragical account of the goddess Venus, bereft at the loss of her adored Adonis, we should expect and understand that there was something in his experience which so moved him that he felt the topic deserved that attention and effort. As Magri so astutely explains, the motivations are not to be found in texts which the author of Venus and Adonis knew well—neither Ovid's Metamorphosis nor any other ancient Greek or Latin text.

These essays are brilliant and indispensable for any right understanding of Shakespeare's work and the true facts about the author behind that work. Magri's collected work is one of only a handful of writings about which one may say that with confidence.

-------------------------------------

Contents:

Introduction: by Gary Goldstein, Editor.
----------------

Part I: Italian Renaissance Art in Shakespeare

Titian's Barberini Painting: The Pictorial Source of Venus and Adonis

Giulio Romano and The Winter's Tale

Identifying the Three Wanton Paintings in The Taming of the Shrew

Part II : Italian Geography in Shakespeare

No Errors in Shakespeare: Historical Truth and The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Historical Location of Belmont in The Merchant of Venice

Geographical Precision in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well

Shakespeare's Illyria and Bohemia: The importance of personal experience in writing Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale

Shakespeare's Knowledge of Illyrian History in Twelfth Night

Othello's House on the Sagittary: Shakespeare's Knowledge of Venice

“A Veronessa” : Shakespeare and the Ships of the Venetian Republic in Othello

Part III : (Edward, the 17th Earl of) Oxford in Italy

The Venetian Inquisition Inquiry Regarding Orazio Cuoco (1577)

Did the Earl of Oxford Build Himself a House in Venice?

Part IV : Notes and Queries

Deciphering the Latin Mottoes on the Title Page of H. Peacham's Minerva Britanna

Names in Shakespeare: the Origins of Ophelia and Othello

Italianisimos in Shakespeare: the Bard's working knowledge of contemporary Italian

The Three Systers of Mantua: a Known History and an Unknown Play

How Well Did Shakespeare Use The Italian Legal System in The Merchant of Venice?

Hamlet's The Murder of Gonzago in Contemporary Italian Documents

Bibliography
Index of Shakespeare's Works

------------------------------
Notes on Noemi Magri drawn from Gary Goldstein's introduction: Dr. Noemi Magri was born in Mantua, studied at Ca' Foscari University in Venice and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Philip Sydney's Astrophel and Stella. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University and she taught English at the Instituto Tecnico Industriale Statale (ITIS) Enrico Fermi in Mantua. She died May 9th, 2011 in Manuta.

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One day, we don't know yet the precise details of just how, when and by whose hand it shall finally happen, but, one day, the immense, gargantuan preposterous fable that Shaksper of Stratford, the product of a provincial grammar school education who never--even according to his most ardent believers--ever ventured outside of the British Isles, wrote the works attributed to "Shakespeare"--that myth--shall collapse leaving its once-illustrious proponents with the reputations as fools that they so richly deserve.

When that day comes, people shall marvel at the fact that a respected scholar could have written:



..."Malone's* phrase, 'foreign admixture,' a gibe at French Revolutionary innovation, also has its resonances in later authorship controversies. As will be shown in chapter six,the eighteenth-century elevation of Shakespeare to the rank of supreme genius had a lot to do with nationalism and Francophobia. One of the most frequently reiterated Anti-Stratfordian claims is that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays because he had never been to Italy, of which the plays supposedly reveal intimate knowledge. Let us set aside the fact that in the first scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the impression is given that it is possible to travel by sea from Verona to Milan, which makes one suspect that the plays could not have been written by anyone who had ever actually been to Italy (Milan is a seaport once again in The Tempest). The interesting thing about this claim is not its falsity but the conclusion which tends to be drawn from it: the plays must have been written by an English aristocrat who visited Italy. The alternative possibility, that the plays must have been written by an Italian, has never found favour ...."

p. 93, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997) Picador, Macmillan Publishers Ltd. by Jonathan Bate, 'King Alfred professor of English Literature' at Liverpool University and author of the above cited excerpt.

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* Notes : * Edmond Malone (Wikipedia ®) : "... (4 October 1741 – 25 May 1812) was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare. ..."


" The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries were a cause célèbre in 1790s London, when author and engraver Samuel Ireland announced the discovery of a treasure-trove of Shakespearean manuscripts by his son William Henry Ireland. Among them were the manuscripts of four plays, two of them previously unknown.

Upon the release of the manuscripts, such respected literary figures as James Boswell (biographer of Samuel Johnson) and poet-laureate Henry James Pye pronounced them genuine, as did various antiquarian experts. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the leading theatre manager of his day, agreed to present one of the newly discovered plays with John Philip Kemble in the starring rôle. Excitement over the biographical and literary significance of the find turned to acrimony, however, when it was charged that the documents were forgeries. Edmond Malone, widely regarded as the greatest Shakespeare scholar of his time, conclusively showed that the language, orthography, and handwriting were not those of the times and persons to which they were credited. William Henry Ireland, the supposed discoverer, then confessed to the fraud." ... (Wikipedia ®)


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Signalé
proximity1 | Feb 27, 2017 |

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