Abstract
The subject of this paper is Domenico Seminerio’s novel, Il manoscritto di Shakespeare, inspired by the essay, Shakespeare era italiano, by Martino Iuvara, a scholar who, starting from a series of clues based mostly on names, identifies Michele Agnolo Florio, a Sicilian nobleman, as the real Shakespeare. Seminerio turns Iuvara’s investigation into a Sicilian spy story where the names, whether true or false, real or literary, become places from which the multiple narrative threads that weave the plot of the novel depart. This paper uses the semantic approach of literary onomastics to the proper names to explain the process of interpretatio nominis, through whlch the author puts onomastic investigation at the heart of the puzzle-solving, and show how the naming process of characters and places (from talking-names to fantastic toponyms, frorn pseudonyms to nicknames) in the novel may contribute to the development of the narrative.