A groundbreaking discovery has sparked academic debate: Marianna Iannaccone, at the British Library in London, has uncovered the long-lost Dante of John Florio! The news has caused a stir, making headlines in major national newspapers. 🗓 On April 6th at 5:00 PM (GMT Timezone), this extraordinary revelation will be presented to the public for the […]
A sixteenth-century copy of The Divine Comedy that once belonged to John Florio has been discovered by Marianna Iannaccone at the British Library in London. Recently published on the academic portal Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/15063366), the article by Marianna Iannaccone, a Phd student at the University of Insubria, includes images of a 1564 edition of The Divine […]
In his testament, John Florio bequeathed to William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke his whole library and an unbound volume of divers written collections and rhapsodies: “All my Italian, French and Spanish bookees, as well printed as unprinted, being in number about Three hundred and Fortie, namefy my new and perfect Dictionary, as also my, tenn Dialogues […]
Explore the similarities between John Florio’s proverbs and the proverbs found in Shakespeare’s plays. John Florio’s First Fruits (1578), Second Fruits (1591) and Giardino di Ricreatione (1591) contain proverbs that today are erroneously attributed to Shakespeare but were originally written by John Florio. Clara Longworth de Chambrun, Shakespeare’s scholar, in her book, Shakespeare, Actor-Poet reported the similarities between the two writers concerning proverbs: […]
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 […]
Shakespeare loves Italy and uses different Italian authors as inspiration for the storylines of his plays. Shakespeare loves Italy and uses different Italian authors as inspiration for the storylines of his plays. Most of these sources were not translated in English. They are works written in Italian, Italian vernacular, in Paduan dialect and Neapolitan dialect. […]
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 […]
