John Florio, The Man who was Shakespeare
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“ Shakespeare es -digámoslo así- el menos inglés de los escritores ingleses.
Lo típico de Inglaterra es el understatement, es el decir un poco menos de las cosas.
En cambio, Shakespeare tendía a la hypérbole en la metáfora, y no nos sorprendería nada que Shakespeare hubiera sido italiano o judío, por ejemplo.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Borges oral, 1979.



“Shakespeare is - let us put it this way -
the least English of English writers.
The typical quality of the English is understatement, saying a little less than what you see.
In contrast, Shakespeare tended toward the hyperbolic metaphor, and it would come to us as no surprise to learn that Shakespeare had been Italian, or Jewish, for instance.”


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The Man who was Shakespeare


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L'Homme qui était Shakespeare


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John Florio, The Man who was Shakespeare
Published by Giano Books in 2009.

You have entered the first and only web site dedicated to John Florio, a great Elizabethan unknown to Shakespeare’s readers, forgotten or ignored by scholars. Finally, John Florio steps into the limelight. The gifted translator, linguist and propagator of Italian, French and Spanish languages and cultures in the England of the Tudors and Stuarts assumes his true identity as the author of the plays and poems attributed to the William Shakespeare of Stratford.

From the book the site offers:
the Introduction, excerpts from Chapter 7, Chapter 8 and Chapter 17, as well as excerpts from and links to John Florio’s major works and his will, which  must be compared with the meager one of the man from Stratford.
Read the Introduction






Caravaggio, St Matthew Fifteen Reasons
for John Florio,
The Man Who Was
Shakespeare

John Florio added more than a thousand new words to the English language, similar to William Shakespeare’s contribution. Furthermore, Florio compiled the first Italian/English dictionary, its 1611 edition contained 74,000 Italian words and 150,000 English words, one third more Italian words than the prestigious Accademi a della Crusca’s dictionary published in 1612 in Florence. Frances Yates, author of Florio’s biography (1934), defines Florio’s dictionary as the epitome of the era’s culture. (…)

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