ohn Florio was one the most outstanding

J interpreters of Italian humanistic culture

in Elizabethan England. Defining himself
an “Englishman in Italian” and “Italian tongue, English
at heart,” hinting at his duplicity and go-between
personality, Florio quickly imposed himself as one of
the most important and creative humanists of the
English Renaissance. His high reputation among his
contemporaries speaks for itself: he was patronised by
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and became Groom
of the Privy Chamber under King James I’s wife, Anna
of Denmark, and her private secretary until her death.
Sir Edward Dyer, Fulke Greville, Stephen Gosson,
Emmanuel Barnes, and John Lyly numbered among his
pupils. His works were prefaced with commendatory
poems by Samuel Daniel and Matthew Gwinne; he was
a close friend of Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Richard
Hakluyt, John Webster, Theodore Diodati, Gabriel

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Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and most importantly,
Giordano Bruno.
A maestro who conducted an orchestra of words,
accomplished and oft-heard masterpieces we still use
today, like “emotion” and “management,” but also
“fuck” and “masturbate,” compounds like “marble-
hearted,” and bounties of proverbs that we still use,
such as “all that glitters is not gold,” John Florio was a
juggler of words, a flamboyant translator, and a musical
lexicographer. He loved books ravenously: he
ransacked and borrowed plots from his colleagues and
favourite Italian and Classic authors to write his
entertaining language lesson manuals and collections of
proverbs, and to make better the work of others
through puns, expressions, metaphors and new
interjections, producing a shock of delighted surprise,
which unmistakably shows that eccentric, somewhat
amusing, distinctly marked personality of his. He
published in 1598 and 1611 the first two Italian-English
dictionaries, and in 1603 the masterpiece of
Elizabethan prose, his English translation of
Montaigne’s Essays. Florio was undoubtedly a
questionable figure, an exuberant, expansive mind,
sometimes defined as Harlequin’s personality: he chose

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“Resolute” as his notorious signature and academic
name, since resoluteness and courage were prominent
characteristics of his personality; he was vehement in
his likes and dislikes, and certainly possessed a touch of
that coxcombry and self-confidence which sometimes
led him to feuds and conflicts with his contemporaries.
But above the practical necessity of earning money and
the ambition to succeed, what prevailed in him was the
conviction that he had a mission to perform: that of
spreading the Italian and European culture, literature,
and language in his motherland, England. He was never
a simple tutor or language teacher: no matter if his
colleagues wrote basic didactic dialogues, Florio
transformed them into dramatic dialogues that owe
something to Cinquecento Italian comedy; when his
colleagues limited themselves to an academic activity in
their works, Florio transcended from the pedagogical
to the literary level. His determination drove him,
despite criticism, attacks, and death threats, and the
marginal position of a foreigner in his homeland, to
succeed in his mission. His activities were varied: he is
often mentioned as anonymous editor of a wide-
ranging genre of literary texts, from Sidney's Arcadia to
Vincenzo Saviolo's fencing manual. He preferred to
hide behind his friends and students to write and
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collaborate with them, from long-time esteemed
writers like Samuel Daniel to young translators like
John Healey and successful playwrights like Ben
Jonson, with only one motif behind it: his fondness for
books and literature, which was enthusiastically sincere
and entirely free from ulterior motives.
However, over the centuries, his personality has
been sadly distorted by different historians and critics.
Good and faithful portraits of John Florio have been
vanishingly sparse these past centuries, like a handful
of lilies in a fallow field. These rare, brightest flowers,
scholars like Arundel del Re, Michael Wyatt, and
Manfred Pfister, have sufficiently proved that Florio
wasn’t a mere petulant, quarrelsome pedant, as
suggested for years by some of Shakespeare’s scholars,
but a highly cultured and very fine humanist. There is,
however, one aspect of his career that has been not
investigated and which not only reinforces Florio’s
talent as a linguist and translator, but also shows him
from a new, unusual perspective, throwing a new light
upon both his literary activities and his personality, a
field of investigation that has been hitherto
unpublished, and which would open new doors into
unexplored areas of his personal life and career.

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 With new documents, this book aims to
demonstrate that John Florio was also a wizard in
poetry, involved in the production of sonnets. With an
analysis of both his poems and various accounts by his
contemporaries concerning this activity, I corroborate
the hypothesis that Florio’s passion for poetry was well
known in his inner circle, and an activity that he
preferred to partake in anonymously. Far from being a
mere hobby, I suggest that Florio was very well versed
in this occupation, and able to pen sonnets in both the
Italian and English language. Like an acrobat of words,
jumping from the Italian Petrarchan sonnet to the
English iambic pentameter, this book unveils a new,
extraordinary side of Florio’s multifaceted personality,
a hint that his career as tutor, linguist, and translator
was only a fragment of a much intriguing, gifted genius
the world needs to recognise.

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