John Florio
Dates: 1553 — 1625
Background:
• Born in London, son of a Tuscan Franciscan friar of Jewish ancestors, Giovanni Florio, known as John Florio, spent his childhood between Italy and Switzerland, his teenage years in Germany, and at eighteen years old he moved back to London, soon affirming himself as one of the most outstanding and prominent ambassadors of Italian culture in England.
• 1580-1583: Florio spent three years at Oxford as tutor of John Lyly, Emmanuel Barnes, Stephen Gosson, and as promoter of Euphuism. He also translated Cartier’s Voyages, and became a close friend of Samuel Daniel and Philip Sidney.
• 1583-1586: He spent three years at the French embassy in London as legal representative, tutor, and secretary of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, and became close friend of Giordano Bruno. He also became a spy for Queen Elizabeth during the Babington Plot, intercepting and decoding Mary Queen of Scots’s correspondence.
• Between 1586 and 1589: Florio became agent for Sir Edward Dymoke.
• Between 1591 and 1598: Florio became tutor, secretary, and close friend of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, moving to Titchfield with him and getting involved in the Danvers case.
• From 1604 to 1619: John Florio became Groom of the privy chamber and private secretary to Queen Anna of Denmark. He also worked with foreign ambassadors, and he was responsible for inviting musicians to perform at the royal court. Florio also became a close friend of Ben Jonson.
• 1625: Florio wrote his testament bequeathing his library and manuscripts to the Pembroke family that, since then, have disappeared.
Famous for:
• Linguist, poet, playwright, translator, lexicographer, royal language tutor, John Florio defined himself an “Englishman in Italian” and “Italian tongue, English at heart.” He became one of the most important and creative humanists of the Elizabethan Age.
• We need only glance at his contemporary reputation to judge in what high esteem Florio was held: he was patronised by the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, and became Groom of the Privy Chamber under Queen Anna of Denmark and her private secretary until her death. He numbered Sir Edward Dyer, Fulke Greville, Stephen Gosson, Emmanuel Barnes, and John Lyly among his pupils. His works were prefaced with commendatory poems by such men as Samuel Daniel and Matthew Gwinne; he was a close friend of Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Richard Hakluyt, John Webster, Theodore Diodati, Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and most importantly, Giordano Bruno. He was universal in his acquirements; his achievements and learning made a tremendous impression on his contemporaries; he had a physical and mental vigour that enabled him to complete Herculean labours; he was vehement in his likes and dislikes, which often lead to quarrels and disputes.
• John Florio contributed to the English language with 1,149 words, placing third after Chaucer (with 2,012 words) and Shakespeare (with 1,969 words). He was also the first translator of Montaigne into English, and the first anonymous translator of Boccaccio into English. He wrote the first two comprehensive Italian-English dictionaries, A World of Words and Queen Anna’s New World of Words. Frances Yates, author of Florio’s biography (1934), defined Florio’s dictionaries as the epitome of the era’s culture. He wrote entertaining language lesson manuals in dramatic dialogues called First Fruits and Second Fruits, and a collection of six thousand proverbs, Giardino di Ricreatione. He also published numerous anonymous pamphlets, such as “A letter lately written from Rome,” and “Perpetuall and Natural Prognostications of the Change of Weather.” He composed a madrigal published in Antwerp in 1601 titled Il Trionfo di Dori. John Florio contributed anonymously to Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia with Fulke Greville and Matthew Gwinne, and he collaborated with Ben Jonson for several plays such as Volpone, as well as with John Webster.
The Case:
• Florio’s first work, First Fruits (1578), contains dedicatory verses written by the whole company of the Leicester’s Men, by such men as Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson, Thomas Clarke, and John Bentley. They thank him for having contributed to bring the Italian novelist to the English theatre, which indicates that at twenty-five years old he was already involved in theatre.
• The works of John Florio indisputably played an essential role in Shakespeare’s works, as it is clearly pointed out in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry “Shakespeare,” that includes an ad hoc paragraph: “Shakespeare Continues his Education, His Connection with Florio.” As for the vocabulary used by Shakespeare, in his works you find many new words, proverbs, and compounds introduced by John Florio in his published works. Florio added more than one thousand new words to the English language, the same contribution attributed to William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare and John Florio display the same bombastic style: the same exaggerated use of metaphor, rhetoric, wit (quips and puns), poetic sense, and extensive use of proverbs. They even coin words in the same fashion. Thousands of words and phrases written by Florio appear later in Shakespeare’s works. Two of Florio’s phrases become titles of William Shakespeare’s comedies. Florio is a juggler of words and a polyglot: he speaks four modern languages, as well as Latin, Greek and probably Hebrew—the same languages known by Shakespeare, according to scholars.
• John Florio possessed a vast knowledge of the arts, science, literature, theology, botany, medicine, falconry, law, and seamanship, an encyclopedic knowledge which the author of the Shakespearean works clearly commanded. Few knew European literature like John Florio who, having read the material in the original languages (Italian, French, and Spanish), also taught it and translated it.
• John Florio is famous for his vehement attacks toward his enemies (Thomas Nashe, Hugh Sanford, John Elliot) in the preface of his works. These attacks coincide with the same criticism received toward Shakespeare.
• John Florio translated Montaigne’s Essays and Boccaccio’s Decameron, two exceptional works. Florio’s translations prove that he is a great writer, a poet close in spirit and style to Shakespeare. If we keep in mind that Florio was writing in prose and not in verse like Shakespeare, this closeness is undeniable. The great influence of Montaigne’s thought and vocabulary upon William Shakespeare, reluctantly recognised by Shakespearean scholars, was demonstrated by George Coffin Taylor’s Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne (1925).
• John Florio owned 340 books in Italian, French, and Spanish, as well as an unknown number in English. These are the same books which Shakespeare had to have read in the original languages as source materials for his plays. Florio’s will bequeathed his library of Italian, French, and Spanish books to his friend and protector William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
• The vast knowledge of Italian writers, some of whom had not yet been translated into English, could not have been known by the man from Stratford. One clear example is Giordano Bruno, a Neapolitan heretic philosopher burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition in 1600. Many of their works cross-reference each other. The works of Shakespeare also demonstrates an undeniable Italian sensibility; examples abound, as plays boast Italian plots. The playwright shows an excellent knowledge of Italian, as if he read the arduous Giordano Bruno, Ariosto, Aretino (another one of the Bard’s major inspirations) in the original. Naseeb Shaheen states in Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (1999) that when an English translation is available, Shakespeare’s words resemble the original Italian.
• All the “friends” of Shakespeare who appear in the colourless biography of the man from Stratford are John Florio’s historically documented friends, from Lord Southampton to William Pembroke. William Shakespeare’s presumed godfathers were John Florio’s well-known students and protectors. Ben Jonson considers Florio “his loving Father and worthy Friend Master John Florio. Ayde of his Muses.” Similar tributes are shared by many other nobles.
• John Florio has been proposed over the centuries as “collaborator,” “helper,” “tutor,” “close friend” of Shakespeare, instructing him in the Italian language, Italian culture, Italian literature, as well as in Montaigne. Recently, in a 2013 article in The Guardian, Saul Frampton proposed Florio as final editor of Shakespeare’s First Folio; Frampton ended his article by asserting, “We cannot tell for certain whether the words were written by John Florio or by William Shakespeare.”
