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Updated: June 19, 2025
Florio's way of translating the Latin classic writers into indifferent English rhymes is also repeatedly ridiculed. The heavens' promoter that doth peep and prey Into the acts of mortal tennis balls.
This was not Florio's Case; he found that three hundred a Year was but a poor Estate for Leontine and himself to live upon, so that he Studied without Intermission till he gained a very good Insight into the Constitution and Laws of his Country.
One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to have possessed was Florio's Montaigne, and he might well have transferred the Frenchman's motto, Que scais je? to the front of his tragedy; nor can I help fancying something more than accident in the fact that Hamlet has been a student at Wittenberg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whose results in unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying them for promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye-witness, but which he must actually have experienced in himself.
Yet it is obviously not its source but rather an imitation or variant indirectly drawn from a similar foundation story. Gonzalo's speech, too, follows pretty closely a passage in Florio's Montaigue. The first scene shows the storm in progress. Is there any clew given to the reader that it is a magic tempest?
The elves were always on guard against moles and injurious worms, the fairies sprinkled the seeds and protected the young buds, and basking in the sunshine outside the cottage door was always to be found Florio's pet, the red fox, whom Florella for a time had chosen to be his guardian. Franz and Rosa also induced their family to leave the Alpine snows for the beautiful land of flowers.
We learn, from this remark, of what great importance the Essais must have been considered in literary circles, and it is not improbable that a few attempts 'of the seven or eight of great wit and worth' may have appeared in print long before Florio's translation.
Again, in act iv. sc. 2, Furor Poeticus, Ingenioso, and Phantasma indulge in expressions which can only apply to the Dedications and the Sonnets of Florio's translation. Phantasma, for instance, addresses an Ode of Horace to himself: 'Maecenas, atavis edite regibus, O et praesidium et dulce decus meum Dii faciant votis vela secunda tuis. The latter line ought to run:
Either Will or Bacon, either in fun or ignorance, makes Nathaniel turn a common Italian proverb on Venice into gibberish. It was familiar in Florio's Second Frutes , and First Frutes , with the English translation. The books were as accessible to Shakspere as to Bacon. Either author might also draw from James Sandford's Garden of Pleasure, done out of the Italian in 1573-6.
Cornwallis, speaking in high praise of Florio's translation of Montaigne, observes, "It is done by a fellow less beholding to Nature for his fortune than to wit; yet lesser for his face than his fortune. The truth is, he looks more like a good fellow than a wise man; and yet he is wise beyond either his fortune or education."
'The bond, he says and here we quote Florio's translation, only slightly changed into modern orthography 'which should bind our judgment, tie our will, enforce and join our souls to our Creator, should be a bond taking his doublings and forces, not from our considerations, reasons, and passions, but from a divine and supernatural compulsion, having but one form; one countenance, and one grace; which is the authority and grace of God. The latter, be it well understood, are to Montaigne identical with the Church of Rome, to which he thinks it best blindly to submit.
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