We laugh, for what we have, are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let’s go off
And bear us like the time. (V.vi.131–37)
—STEPHEN GREENBLATT
1. Quoted in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957), ix–x.
2. The phrase may be close to the rhetorical device called hendiadys; that is, it may mean something like “completely alive.” But “complete” also suggests the range and diversity of the traits Montaigne is determined to record. This goal is linked to his determination to record his defects “to the life” (au vif) and to depict what he calls his “natural form.”
3. Ben Jonson, “Timber, or Discoveries upon Men and Matter,” Note 6, in Ben Jonson, eds. C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), VIII: 585–86.
“I am an Englishman in Italian”
John Florio and the Translation of Montaigne
In 1876 Friedrich Nietzsche wonderfully called Shakespeare Montaigne’s “best reader,” and the Montaigne that Shakespeare read would have been the translation of John Florio, published in London by Edward Blount in 1603. In addition to being a translator, the remarkable Florio was a language tutor to powerful nobles and to Queen Anne of Denmark, James I’s wife, whom he also served as groom of the privy chamber from 1604 until her death in 1619. His conversation and grammar books provided the English-speaking world access to the Italian language, and he was the compiler of the first lengthy Italian-English dictionaries. But his greatest achievement was “Englishing” Montaigne, whose essays had been available only in French and in bits of English translation before Florio’s monumental work appeared. Appreciation of the Florio Montaigne—Shakespeare’s Montaigne—is incomplete without at least some familiarity with its polymath translator.
Born in London in 1553, John Florio was the son of Michael Angelo Florio, an Italian religious reformer and a former Franciscan who fled Italy for London in 1550. (Florio’s mother was an Englishwoman whose identity has never been uncovered.) Doing what his son would do later, Michael Angelo was the Italian tutor to powerful nobility: Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, and Lady Jane Grey—he dedicated Italian grammar books to both. It is possible he tutored the young Queen Elizabeth, too, for he dedicated his translation of Agricola to her in 1563. Supported by William Cecil, Michael Angelo also preached at a church for Italian Protestants in London.
The first contemporary biographical reference to John Florio came in John Aubrey’s brief life: “John Florio was borne in London in the beginning of king Edward VI, his father and mother flying from the Valtolin (’tis about Piedmont or Savoy) to London for religion: Waldenses.” But the political and religious climate changed with the ascension in 1554 of Mary Tudor, who issued a royal edict calling for the removal of foreigners. In March of that year, Michael Angelo and his family fled England, first for a year in Strasbourg and then for a permanent settlement in Soglio—a town in Switzerland near the Italian border that was home to many Italian religious refugees. Since John seems to have been sent to Tübingen to study when he was about ten, it is possible that, as Frances Yates said in her seminal John Florio, Florio, “from whom several have supposed that Shakespeare learnt much of what he knew about Italy and Italian towns, may never have set foot in Italy itself at all.” By 1576, Florio was back in England, his father having died in Soglio, probably in the early 1570s.
Florio’s first publication, Firste Fruites, appeared in 1578 with a dedication to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who possibly helped get Florio situated at Oxford, where he matriculated at Magdalen College in 1581 and became a tutor in foreign languages to Emmanuel Barnes, brother of the poet Barnabe Barnes. During his time at Oxford, Florio befriended Samuel Daniel, whose sister he probably married in about 1580 and who would write prefatory poems to both the 1603 and 1613 editions of the Montaigne translation, as well the 1611 edition of the dictionary; Matthew Gwinne, who would be so helpful to Florio in tracing the classical references in the Montaigne project; and Richard Hakluyt, who paid him to translate into English Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Italian translation of Jacques Cartier’s account of his first two voyages, A Short and Brief Narration of the Two navigations and Discoveries to the North-West Parts called New France (1580).
Florio’s intellectual connections expanded when he worked at the French embassy in London’s Butcher Row from 1583 to 1585, serving the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Lord of Mauvissière, in the capacity of translator and language tutor to Castelnau’s six-year-old daughter, Katherine-Marie. Yates and the historian John Bossy, among others, have suggested that Florio was probably a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham.1 More certainly, during these years at the embassy Florio befriended the controversial philosopher Giordano Bruno.
In England to lecture on Copernicanism and his theory of multiple worlds at Oxford, Bruno—or “the Nolan,” as he called himself after his hometown of Nola, near Naples—stayed at the French embassy at about the same time that Florio did. In one of his books published in England during this period—The Ash Wednesday Supper (Cena de le ceneri, 1584)—Bruno describes through a thinly veiled fiction the negative reception his ideas received in England. Of interest for the study of Florio, in the second dialogue Bruno tells the story of being escorted by “Messrs. Florio and Gwinne” to dine at Sir Fulke Greville’s house (probably in Whitehall). Along the way the men get lost, muddy, and grumpy, but the journey is partly lightened by Florio’s singing. As Theophil, the primary narrator, tells us, “Mister Florio (as if reminiscing of his loves) sang Dove senza me dolce mia vita [Where, without me, my sweet life]. The Nolan chimed in with Il Saracen dolente, oh femenil ingegno [Wherever the grieving Saracen went...oh feminine valor].” When they finally get to the dinner—where Sir Philip Sidney as well as Greville is believed to have been present—Florio tries to be deferential but ends up, initially, taking the seat of highest honor. Eventually things get properly sorted out: “Mister Florio sat across from the cavalier, who sat at the head of the table [usually thought to have been Sidney]; Sir Fulke to the right of Mister Florio; I and the Nolan to the left of Mister Florio....”
Florio was publicly connected to Bruno in The Ash Wednesday Supper (and arguably in Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity [De la causa, principio, et uno, 1584], where he may be the character Elitropio). And in his own writings Florio did nothing to distance himself from the heterodox Bruno. Bruno (Nolano) is named as one of the participants of the first dialogue in Second Frutes, and his ideas are everywhere in this book’s twelfth and final dialogue. Finally, Florio celebrated Bruno’s remarks on translation in “To the Courteous Reader” of his Montaigne’s Essayes: “Yea, but my old fellow Nolano told me and taught publicly that from translation all science had its offspring” (sig. A5).
Before getting to that translation, however, we need to examine briefly Florio’s earlier forays into translating, into bridging the gap between English and the Continental languages: his conversation manuals (Firste Fruites and Second Frutes) and his Italian-English dictionaries. Michael Wyatt, in his important The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation, has claimed that Florio was ideally suited to make these translations, “situated as he is in and between both linguistic cultures.” The language books were grammar and conversation books, but they were also, as Warren Boucher has pointed out in turn, “guides to the art of the humanist courtier.”
Scholars have detected more crankiness, anti-Englishness, and moralism in Firste Fruites—especially Florio’s attack on the English language—and, indeed, in Second Frutes Florio seems more at home in England. But in this later work he still notes that “critics” are “crickets; no goodly bird of a man mark them,” and he recognizes a fundamental xenophobia in his adopted country: He is “an Englishman in Italian” but knows that
“they have a knife at command to cut my throat,” immediately afterward quoting Roger Ascham’s demonizing words from his The scholemaster (1570), “Un Inglese Italianato, é un Diavolo incarnato.”
Towards the end of his address “To the Reader” in Second Frutes, Florio promises that he “will shortly send into the world an exquisite Italian and English Dictionary,” and he did so in 1598 with A Worlde of Wordes, which he expanded in 1611 into Queen Anna’s New World of Words. The first had about 46,000 definitions, the latter about 74,000. These dictionaries attempt to make the world richer, more polyvocal, more linguistically ambidextrous: “Lame are we in Plato’s censure, if we be not ambidexters, using both hands alike. Right-hand, or left-hand as peers with mutual parity, without disparagement may it please you Honors to join hand in hand.”
In his epistle “To the Reader” of the 1598 edition, Florio celebrates English—which he had earlier denigrated in Firste Fruites—as a language providing “pleasure to them [English-gentlemen], to see so great a tongue [Italian] out-vied by their mother-speech, as by the many-fold Englishes of many words in this is manifest” (sig. b1r-v). Florio himself should get a great deal of credit for manifesting the potency of English: He was “a source for some 3,843 English words in the second edition of the OED. Of these Florio is responsible for the earliest appearances of 1,149 words, 173 are unique citations (hapax legomena or h.l.) so far found nowhere else....”2 Florio both cataloged and added to the richness of English in the age of Shakespeare.
The man who had his mind filled with a “world of words” was clearly the right person to translate Montaigne’s essays into English. He was not the first to attempt to do so, however, as he tells us in the epistle “To the Courteous Reader”: “Seven or eight of great wit and worth have assayed but found these Essayes no attempt for French apprentices or Littletonians.”3 Florio’s own translation was entered in the Stationers’ Register on June 4, 1600.
Florio accounts for the origins of this translation in the “Epistle Dedicatorie,” telling Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and her mother, Lady Anne Harrington,
For (that I may discharge me of all this, and charge you with your own; pardon Madame my plainness) when I with one chapter found myself over-charged, whereto the charge or choice of an Honorable person, and by me not-to-be-denied Benefactor (Noble and virtuous Sir Edward Wotton) had engaged me, (which I finished in your own house) your Honor having deigned to read it, without pity of my failing, my fainting, my labouring, my languishing, my gasping for some breath (O could so Honorable, be so pitiless? Madame, now do I flatter you?) Yet commanded me on: (and let me die outright, ere I do not that command.)
It was a painful birth, and Florio admits to having help in his “labouring” from Gwinne, who “so scholar-like did...undertake what Latin prose; Greek, Latin, Italian or French Poesie should cross my way,” and from Theodore Diodati, who helped him navigate the “inextricable labyrinth” of Montaigne’s difficult passages, “dissolved these knots” of text, and “in these dark-uncouth ways” provided “a clear relucent light” (sigs. A2v, A3r).
Florio’s Montaigne does not always find this clear light, but it is often beautiful and never dull. Florio uses his copious sense of English to amplify Montaigne’s French. He also takes very seriously his task of “Englishing” Montaigne. When, for example, Montaigne argued that we cannot understand animals any more than we can “les Basques et les Troglodytes,” Florio gave us “no more do we the Cornish, the Welsh, or Irish.” Florio’s Protestant sympathies also led to his altering Montaigne’s text to cleanse it of Catholic perspectives, so “des erreurs de Wiclef”—the errors of John Wycliffe, fourteenth-century English Protestant reformer—became “Wycliff’s opinions.” And unlike in his dictionary, where Florio did not shy away from ribald and sexually explicit slang, his version of Montaigne is often a much more chaste one than Montaigne’s own work. Florio could also just get it wrong, the most famous error perhaps being his translation of the French “poisson” (fish) as “poison”: “For he to whom fasting should procure health and a merry heart, or he to whom poison should be more healthy than meat.” Usually, though, one emerges from reading Florio’s Essayes in wonder at its successful translation of Montaigne into the Elizabethan-Jacobean world and, more than occasionally, overwhelmed by its beauty. Here is a passage from “An Apology of Raymond Sebond”:
And when we others do foolishly fear a kind of death, when as we have already passed and daily pass so many others. For not only (as Heraclitus said) the death of fire is a generation of air, and the death of air a generation of water; but also we may most evidently see it in ourselves. The flower of age dyeth, fadeth, and fleeteth, when age comes upon us, and youth endeth in the flower of a full-grown man’s age; childhood in youth; and the first age dyeth in infancy. And yesterday endeth in this day, and today shall die in tomorrow. And nothing remaineth or ever continueth in one state.
And it was a translation that instantly mattered to and had an effect on its earliest readers. Ben Jonson, John Marston, Shakespeare, and John Webster drew on the Essayes and quoted from them almost immediately, and Robert Burton would engage with them intensively in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Sir Francis Bacon—usually thought of as the father of the English essay—greatly expanded his Essayes in between 1597 and 1612 (from ten to thirty-eight), culminating in the fifty-eight essays of 1625. Florio’s Montaigne, somewhat paradoxically, can be said to have shown Bacon just what the essay in English could be. Shakespeare’s complicated relationship to Florio will be discussed below, but Jonson seems to have been unequivocally positive about Florio. Jonson sincerely recognizes his intellectual help in a presentation copy of Volpone, which he inscribed: “To his loving Father, & worthy friend Mr. John Florio: The ayde of his muses. Ben: Jonson seales this testimony of Freindship [sic], & Love.” Jonson’s signature is also found in a copy of Florio’s translation of the Essayes in the British Museum.4
Shakespeare certainly read Montaigne, whether or not one agrees with Nietzsche that he was Montaigne’s best reader. And beyond dispute is Shakespeare’s use of Florio’s translation of “Of the Cannibals” in act two of The Tempest. And it is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare and Florio did not know each other, since Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, was a patron of both men in the early 1590s. In two recent essays in The Guardian, Saul Frampton has gone so far as to suggest that Florio had an active hand both in the editing of Shakespeare’s First Folio and in the publication of the sonnets. As F.O. Matthiessen put it in his Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), “Shakespeare and Florio were constantly talking with the same people, hearing the same theories, breathing the same air.”
This proximity has proved compelling for scholars since the late eighteenth century, when Warburton suggested that Florio was the “original” for the tutor Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. There is much to be said for the claim. Both of Florio’s language manuals contain the proverb on Venice quoted by the schoolmaster: Venetia, chi non ti vede, non ti pretia—though Holofernes leaves out the darker part of the proverb: “ma chi to vede, ben gli costa.” And like Florio, the tutor can be said to “have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.”5 It is hard not to imagine, too, that Shakespeare had Florio’s dictionary in mind or at hand—albeit before publication—when one compares Holofernes’s copious riffing with entries from Florio’s Worlde of Wordes:
Holofernes:
The deer was, as you know—sanguis—in blood, ripe as the pomewater who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.
Florio:
Cielo, heaven, the sky, the firmament or welkin....
Térra,...earth, country, province, region, land, soil....
So is Shakespeare poking gentle fun at a friend, or is there something more serious at stake?
Yates was among the first to suggest that Shakespeare and Florio were
not friendly. And Florio does seem to be attacking Shakespeare in the letter “To the Reader” of Worlde of Wordes. Whether H.S.—that “tooth-less dog that hateth where he cannot hurt, and would fain bite, when he hath no teeth”6—is Shakespeare or, as Yates argued, Hugh Sanford, it is much more likely that Shakespeare is being criticized later in the same section:
They hurt not God (sayeth Seneca) but their own souls, that overthrow his altars: Nor harm they good men, but themselves, that turn their sacrifice of praises into blasphemy. They that rave, and rage, and rail against heaven, I say not (sayeth he) they are guilty of sacrilege, but at least they lose their labour. Let Aristophanes and his comedians make plays, and scour their mouths on Socrates; those very mouths they make to vilify, shall be the means to amplify his virtue.
Both the seeming allusion to Love’s Labour’s Lost and the reference to the vilifying frivolity of Aristophanes and his players suggest an attack on the playwright.
In addition, Yates argued, a further tension could have come if Southampton considered Florio an informant to Robert Cecil—interestingly, the son of the patron of Florio’s father—one who was in the house both to monitor Southampton’s connections to the Essex circle and to make sure that the young earl was being raised as a Protestant and not a Catholic. If Southampton viewed Florio in this way, the earl might have enjoyed Shakespeare’s parody. Yates also argued for a complicated scenario pitting Shakespeare, Southampton, Essex, and the scholar John Eliot against the so-called “school of night”—a group including Sir Walter Raleigh, the “wizard” Earl of Northumberland, the traveler and scientist Thomas Hariot, and the poet and translator George Chapman—which met to discuss heterodox ideas, including Copernicanism and the theories of Bruno. The satire directed against Berowne and the young men in Love’s Labour’s Lost, then, would be a critique of this school of night.
Shakespeare's Montaigne Page 4
