Evidence Dante Was Quoted By Shakespeare

“An edition of the Divine Comedy from 1564 recently discovered at the British Library in London including notes and comments that were found to have been written by linguist and poet John Florio (1552-1625) proves the Italian-speaker contributed to William Shakespeare’s body of work including several quotes and ideas from the Florentine author, according to Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti.
“The two researchers, whose trilogy Shakespeare’s Dante was published in Italy by Solferino in 2021 and 2024 and is about to be published in English, claim the newly found copy of the Comedy shows ‘key evidence that Shakespeare was aided by someone who knew Italian and who included several of Dante’s quotes and ideas in his plays’.
“Monaldi and Sorti’s research using Dante’s work to investigate Shakespeare’s identity has raised the interest of the academic community, prompting the president of the Shakesperean Authorship Trust, William Leahy, to urge them to publish their findings and to further investigate the idea of Dante being a source of inspiration for Shakespeare’s work on the research data centre Zenodo.
“Florio, a Londoner like his mother with a Florentine father, was a refined linguist and translator of, among others, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Montaigne’s Essays.
“Several terms he has illustrated can be repeatedly found in Shakespeare’s plays, leading a number of scholars to claim he penned some of the author’s work.
“Now the two Italian scholars claim the copy of the Divine Comedy first discovered by University of Insubria researcher Marianna Iannaccone could be a ‘turning point’ in their research.
” ‘There are literally dozens of Dante’s passages accurately highlighted and commented on by John Florio his Divine Comedy which can be found in plays attributed to the Stratford genius’, they said.
“Vowing they will investigate further, Monaldi and Sorti said that in their future research to determine who contributed to Shakespeare’s work ‘we will now have a new criterion and that criterion is called Dante’.”  —Ansa, March 24, 2025