Tom Klington, “Unearthed Book Proves Shakespeare ‘Cribbed from Dante” (2025)

“A series of scribbled notes in the margin of a book found in the British Library is the latest proof that Shakespeare copied lines from Italy’s greatest poet, Dante, a group of literary sleuths have claimed.

“The handwriting in the ancient copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which has sat on a shelf at the library for centuries, ‘is the first material confirmation that Shakespeare took words, themes and even characters from the Divine Comedy’, said the Italian author Francesco Sorti.

“Dante’s 14th-century description in three parts of imagined journeys to heaven, purgatory and hell is Italy’s best known literary work but was not translated into English until 1782, more than two centuries after Shakespeare was born.

“Contemporaries of the Bard knew the work but it had never been seen as a big influence on his plays.

“What is known is that Shakespeare is likely to have read two Italian-English dictionaries, including words coined by Dante, written by John Florio, an Anglo-Italian writer and translator who moved in the same 16th-century literary circles as Shakespeare.

“Dante’s word inciela, meaning ‘place in heaven”’ is translated as ensky in one dictionary and used by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure.

“Florio’s copy of the Divine Comedy was lost — along with his entire library — but has now been discovered by Marianna Iannaccone, a researcher at the University of Insubria in Italy who has been hunting the library for ten years.”    —Tom Klington, “Unearthed book proves Shakespeare ‘cribbed from Dante,'” The Times (May 23, 2025)