John Florio, the man who was Shakespeare



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“As for me, for it is I, and I am an Englishman in Italiane”

John Florio, Second Frutes, To the Reader.

>> Fifteen Reasons
for John Florio,
The Man Who Invented Shakespeare

>> Quindici Ragioni
per John Florio,
L’uomo che ha
inventato Shakespeare

>> Florio As Seen By Scholars : 1921-2007

>> Author matters

>> In pursuit of meaning

>> A world of words

>> Florio’s words, Shakespeare’s words

>> Chapter 7: (excerpt)
The Translation of Montaigne’s Essais

>> Chapter 8: (excerpt)
Language, Style,
And Euphuism

>> Chapter 17: (excerpt)
The Spirit and The Land
of Italy

>> L’Italia e Florio

>> John Florio
and His Entourage

>> The Testament
of John Florio

>> Florio’s works

Florio - Shakespeare
Chapter 17: (excerpt)
The Spirit and The Land of Italy

In a book published in 1928, Scapigliatura italiana a Londra. Sotto Elisabetta e Giacomo, G. S. Gargàno tells the stories of various prominent Italians residing in London at the time when Shakespeare, according to orthodox scholarship, was “conquering” the theatre. Using Italian and English archives and a number of letter collections as research material, Gargàno’s aim, as he stated in his preface,

was to find out if any of the many Italians who were in London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries might have left us a notice, even a fleeting one, regarding William Shakespeare. It was and is worth expending time and trouble to acquire any information that might shed light on a life and career that are still so mysterious. Gargàno’s search went unrewarded, of course, and he had to content himself with recounting the lives and vicissitudes of Italian ambassadors, merchants, and bankers, which, however interesting, even fascinating in themselves, added nothing to the stock of our knowledge of Shakespeare, in particular his relationship with the Italian community in London, and with Italy.
Yet Italy is a clear, self-evident, literal reality for Shakespeare. Many of the plays are set in the peninsula, whether in ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance. To the list of what has come to be called Shakespeare’s “Italian canon,” which any reader may compile, should be added Measure for Measure, as Taylor has demonstrated, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, regarded by some as “an Italian-style comedy in English dress.” Let us pause for a moment to consider these two recent additions to Shakespeare’s “Italian canon.”
Measure for Measure is set, very unusually, in Vienna. If that idea originated with Shakespeare himself, it would be an utter novelty, in the sense that it would make Shakespeare the only English playwright to choose this city as a background for a theatrical plot before 1660. We learn from G. Taylor that the London public would have been able to “imagine” little or nothing about Vienna, since at that time “it meant almost nothing.” The first production took place at court in December 1604 before James I, staged by the King’s Men (the so-called “Shakespeare’s Company”) of which James I had recently become the patron), and was entered in the documents of the Revels this way: “Mesur for Mesur” by “Shaxberd.” That is how the name of the great dramatist could be written, at a time when almost all his works had been staged or published. Taylor cites the view of one critic that “Measure was specifically designed as a ‘royal entertainment’.” This hypothesis accords perfectly with the historical facts: Florio wrote it to accompany and reinforce the gesture of Basilikon Doron, the Italian translation he had signed “Giovanni Florio.” As we have seen, he would follow the same course a year later, writing Macbeth under the usual nom de plume Shakespeare, which must certainly have been a disguise through which some at court could see...
There remains the question of Vienna. To sum up Taylor’s elaborate and rigorous research, historical and textual, he maintains that in this comedy, never printed or put on in theatres before the publication of the First Folio in 1623, the name of the Austrian capital was introduced at a late stage to replace that of an Italian city, Ferrara. And indeed, everything in the plot and the atmosphere is Italian, even the names of the characters, while Austria is never mentioned in the text. Moreover the comedy underwent repeated revisions according to Taylor, in 1606, 1608, 1617 and 1621.
The hand responsible for making substantial changes to Measure for Measure in 1621 was that of Thomas Middleton, according to Taylor (and others). It is believed that it was he who substituted Vienna for Ferrara. The change is thought to have been connected with the current political and diplomatic situation, with the allusion to Hungary at a time when Vienna was again the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, under an emperor, Ferdinand II, hostile to the Protestant world. So if the setting was an Italian city in the original text of 1604, how was that determined?
G. Taylor answers that question with a string of fascinating and convincing arguments, grounded in history and logic, demonstrating that Shakespeare had Italy in mind when he wrote. And for that matter, an impressive number of productions at all periods, from that of Davenant in 1662, down to the musical adaptation by Wagner and the BBC production in 1979, have all situated the action in Italy. The principal sources for the comedy are two of the novellas in Cinzio’s Ecatommiti. In one of these, number 56, the protagonist is a Duke of Ferrara, the city that was the residence of the ducal family, the Este, and the great poets and writers whom they fostered, like Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini. Cinzio himself was living in Ferrara when he wrote his very popular book. For a list of reasons that need not be spelled out, including the description of the cityscape, the presence of a duke, and various others, Taylor arrives at the totally convincing conclusion that the city in Measure is Ferrara. Among the arguments presented is this:

Ferrara is the first Italian city mentioned in John Florio’s Second Frutes... Elizabethans... could read, in Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays, of Montaigne’s own visit to Ferrara, and his encounter there with the mad and imprisoned poet Tasso. One observes how, whenever the topic is Shakespeare and Shakespearian problems, the name of Florio constantly and inevitably appears. What matters in the present context is that Measure for Measure is an “Italian play,” and that the strangeness, ambiguity, and hybridity of the comedy do not depend exclusively on the clash between the changes made by the Calvinist Middleton to material drafted by a Shakespeare whom Taylor sees as “Catholicizing.” While I find totally convincing the thesis that Middleton made adaptations in 1621, with the shift to Vienna and all the rest, it seems to me that the confluence of different elements and styles in Measure for Measure is, at least in part, original. By that I mean: pertaining to Florio personally, specifically tied to his origins, his varied experience of life, and his situation, bracketed between Catholicism and the Reformation, with Judaism in the background.
John, by the way, was never a stubborn anti-Catholic like his father. For example, the knowledge displayed about the rules of the order of Santa Chiara (the “Poor Clares”), a female order of the Franciscan observance, is not a clue to the Catholic heritage and feelings of the man from Stratford, but evidence of the Franciscan heritage of Michel Angelo Florio, which he passed on to his son. Georges Lambin has demonstrated, with 10 irrefutable parallels, that for the dialogues between Isabella and mother Francisca, Shakespeare was following the Regula, or rule of the order of the Poor Clares. Here are three of the shorter ones:

Shakespeare was not improvising, he simply possessed the whole life experience and baggage of knowledge accumulated by the Florios.
As for Merry Wives, derived like The Merchant of Venice from one of the novellas in Il Pecorone by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino available exclusively in Italian, Giorgio Melchiori sees it as lying squarely in the tradition of Italian commedia erudita, a genre influenced by Aretino, Cardinal Bibbiena, Ariosto, the Accademia degli Intronati of Siena, and Machiavelli: authors whose books were owned and read by Florio. (...)

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