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

One of the crucial linkages for my theorem, a load-bearing structure of incontrovertible proof, is the relation between the vocabulary of Florio’s Montaigne and that of the theatre of Shakespeare. To help us grasp the importance of this work by Florio, let us briefly review the impact of his Montaigne on English cultural life. Frances Yates believes that work on the translation began at least a year before the publication of the dictionary in 1598; it was registered for printing in June 1600, and published in 1603. As for its value, Yates states:

Seventy years and more have passed, and one is obliged to note that Florio’s translation no longer holds this solid niche among the English classics. Not only has it been forgotten by literary criticism and the universities, it no longer even seems to interest students of translation. I have been able to locate no more than a few brief studies, and not a single monograph, dealing with it since 1934.
One has to return to the 1920s and 1930s if one wants to attend to a really thorough discussion of Florio the translator. Felix Otto Matthiessen studied the translators of the Elizabethan era in his 1931 book Translation: An Elizabethan Art, in which he not only offers highly interesting remarks on Florio, but assesses in detail the position of Montaigne in Elizabethan culture. Rumours of a translation began to circulate within a few years of the death of the great French philosopher in 1592, but as Matthiessen informs us, Montaigne already had a readership in England.
A sign of his influence is the appearance of a book by Francis Bacon in 1597 that uses Montaigne’s title, the Essays. Once again Florio (who had already begun his translation), almost certainly played some part in inspiring Bacon, although this is not stated anywhere. England was ready, writes Matthiessen, for Montaigne: “Every phase of his broad philosophy struck some responsive note in England. The sane penetration of his skepticism was what her thinkers wanted, since it cleared their fevered minds and lifted from them the oppression of medieval authority.”
The publication of the Essays of Sir William Cornwallis in 1600, in the wake of those of Bacon, lets us gauge the influence of Montaigne’s book. At this time the manuscript of Florio’s translation was certainly circulating in the London intellectual milieu, given that it had been presented at the Stationers’ Register for publication in June 1600, five months before Cornwallis’s book came out. It would seem that Florio was encouraged to undertake the Montaigne translation by two of the many aristocrats who maintained and protected him throughout his life, in particular his great friend Sir Edward Wotton, whose half-brother Sir Henry was the political secretary of the Earl of Essex. When Florio’s own patron, the Earl of Southampton, was involved in the conspiracy of his cousin the Earl of Essex and arrested, John was taken under the protection of Lady Anne Harington, cousin of the translator of Ariosto, Sir John Harington, and Yates suspects that Florio had a hand in the Harington translation of Orlando Furioso. The translation of the Essais was dedicated to Lady Anne, her daughter the Countess of Bedford, and four other female members of the English aristocracy. Cornwallis, an interested contemporary who had not read Montaigne in the original and who, according to Matthiessen, might well have read the Florio translation in manuscript, has this to say about the translator, whom he does not name:

... translated into a stile, admitting as few idle words as our language will endure. It is well fitted in this new garment, and Montaigne speaks now good English....It is done by a fellow less beholding to nature for his fortune then witte, yet lesser for his face then fortune; the truth is, he lookes more like a good-fellow then a wise man, and yet hee is wise beyond either his fortune or education. What struck Yates, and strikes any reader, is the translator’s ability to transpose the French language and culture of Montaigne into English: “It has often been noticed how clever Florio is at finding English equivalents for allusions which would not be familiar to English readers... the astonishing skill with which he ’anglicizes’ Montaigne’s detail.” This capacity to produce an organic translation, one charged with meaning, was already on display in First Fruites, with which Florio intended to supply not just language instruction but a lively cross-section of English culture, for the purpose of aligning the English and the Italians more closely in cultural terms. (...)

	John Florio The Man Who Was Shakespeare by Lamberto Tassinari Giano Books 388 pages $ 20.00
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