"Poetry in persons": appunti su Shakespeare e la teoria letteraria di John Henry Newman

[Autom. eng. transl.] In this contribution we will see how the work of Shakespeare intersects and informs the literary theory of one of the greatest thinkers of the English nineteenth century, John Henry Newman (1801-1890). A man of the Church, first Anglican and then Catholic, Cardinal Newman was one of the minds who created and completed the Trattarian experience at Oxford (1833-1845); a fine theologian but also a prolific and elegant man of letters, Newman was the author of historical and autobiographical novels and poems. Some of his writings on literary practice will be the object of analysis, intending in this way to contribute to filling an important gap in Newman studies. The pervasiveness of the Cardinal's teaching in European culture is confirmed and systematized in various branches of studies ranging from pedagogy to the purest theology; however, despite the pervasive influence that the figure of Newman has in his historical present and in the modernist and twentieth-century experiments in the Anglo-Saxon area, his literary practice has not met the same favorable interest on the part of the critics, apart from some very valid study. With this intention, we will see here as the basis of Newman's complex thought on Shakespeare's literature and the great European tradition; particular emphasis will be given to the use of the Shakespearean macrotext and the classical tradition as the basis on which to construct and illustrate one's own idea, which rests on the general consideration that the literary fact is given as an essentially oral event.