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Shakespeare es - digámoslo así - el menos inglés de los escritores ingleses. Lo típico de Inglaterra es el understatement, es el decir un poco menos de las cosas. En cambio, Shakespeare tendía a la hypérbole en la metáfora, y no nos sorprendería nada que Shakespeare hubiera sido italiano o judío, por ejemplo.
Shakespeare is-let us put it this way-the least English of English writers. The English typically resort to understatement, saying a little less about things than they might. Shakespeare, in contrast, tended toward hyperbole in the use of metaphor, and it would come to us as no surprise to learn that Shakespeare had been Italian, or Jewish, for instance.
-Jorge Luis Borges, Borges oral, 1979
The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn up.
-Charles Dickens, 1847
The fears of Charles Dickens have come true: something has finally turned up, something that, had I not left Italy twenty-eight years ago, I would never have succeeded in seeing and recognizing. By that I mean that I would never have been able to read Shakespeare in a way that would have led me to John Florio. I was sensitized in the first place to the idea of an "ethnic" Shakespeare through leaving myself: leaving behind the country of my birth, crossing cultural boundaries, speaking other tongues. At the end of the twentieth century, even without persecution, expatriation is always a wrench. Leaving is a good and an ill at the same time, just as Prospero says to Miranda: "Both, both, my girl: By foul play, as thou say'st, were we heave'd thence, but blessedly holp hither."
Metamorphosis
Marvelous metamorphosis: John Florio emerges from the heart of Europe and becomes Shake-speare on the banks of the Thames. Everything comes from abroad, certainly everything that counts. As the Gulf current warms the shores of Albion, so a current from the Mediterranean flowed north and touched the culture of the Tudor age at the right time, impregnating and transforming it. In a superb image of John Florio (Shakespeare, that is), the Greeks received "their baptizing water from the conduit-pipes of the Egyptians," who had received it in turn "from the well-springs of the Hebrews or Chaldees." Those same waters...