Mary scholars agree that Shakespeare incorporated Commedia dell’Arte in his plays, an Italian form of comedy that was often improvised, into many of his plays, using plots and characters from Italian sources. For example, the first appearance of the word “pantaloon”, a famous character from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, appeared in the English language in The Taming of […]
Italian settings and culture in Shakespeare’s plays No fewer than twelve Shakespeare’s plays have Italian locations as main or secondary setting: from Venice (The merchant of Venice and Othello) and Sicily (Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale) to Padua (The Taming of the Shrew), Verona (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet) and Messina (Much ado about […]
The Shakespeare authorship question began with the publication of Groatsworth in 1592, written by Robert Greene, a very famous writer in 1590 and a friend of Thomas Nashe. In the Groatsworth we find the same criticism of a plagiarist that is reported in the Menaphon, written by Greene and published in 1589, whose introduction was written precisely by Nashe, and it is […]
John Florio’s dramatic dialogues John Florio, like Shakespeare, in First Fruits and Second Fruits wrote dramatic dialogues about love, women, theatre and philosophy; arguments that cannot be found in another language lesson manuals of the Elizabethan period. These dialogues are more recreational than didactic: many Florio’s scholars have pointed out that Florio’s works contain dramatic […]
In 1578 John Florio published his first work, First Fruits, which contains four dedicatory poems written by the whole company of the Leicester’s Men. They are Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson, Thomas Clarke, and John Bentley. They thank John Florio for having contributed to bring the Italian novelists to the English theatre. The dedications prove that Florio was in contact […]
In 1620 the English translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron was published anonymously in London by John Florio. The handsome folio was printed in two volumes, adorned with woodcut illustrations of French origin. The printer was Isaac Jaggard, and the dedicatee Sir Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, to whom is also addressed an ‘epistle dedicatory’, supposedly by […]
Florio’s magnum opus as lexicographer was his augmented dictionary Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues (London 1611), embracing nearly 74,000 definitions. Not only was the volume almost twice larger than its predecessor, containing about 75.000 definitions, but in the preparing of it he had consulted 249 books […]
Montaigne’s Essays by John Florio is highly regarded as a work of art as well as one of the most popular and influential Elizabethan translations. The Publication June 4th, 1600 is the day that saw the publication of one of the most popular and influential Elizabethan translations. John Florio’s rendering of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays […]
While he was engaged in the service of Henry Wriothesley, Florio produced a work which remains a landmark in the history of Italian scholarship in England. A Worlde of Wordes, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues (London, 1598) is an Italian-English Dictionary, and, as such, only the second of its kind in England and much […]
Second Fruits is John Florio’s second work. Entitled Second Frutes to be gathered of twelve trees, of diverse but delightful tastes to the tongues of Italian and English (1591), it appeared thirteen years after the publication of the First Fruits, and is a product of perhaps the most interesting period of his life. Second Fruits: a new literary […]
If you’d like to chat about working on a project together, or learn more about working with me, get in touch!
