John Florio, also Known as Shakespeare

Michel Vaïs*

Abstract

Lamberto Tassinari’s groundbreaking research has brought the question of Shakespeare’s authorship back into the headlines. The intuition of this Montrealer, Italian by birth, fascinated by the transcultural, has led him to question an age-old myth. His knowledge of Italian language and literature revealed something that few ‘experts’ before him had dared to assert, preferring to beat around the bush to explain the inexplicable: the man from Stratford, actor, show producer and usurer, did not have the resources to write the most extraordinary theatrical work of the West. At the time, only one person did: John Florio.

Keywords: Authorship, Shakespeare, Florio, transcultural, Stratford, Italy

As a theatre-goer, I must have seen a few hundred Shakespearean productions over the last half-century. And since I went to a Montreal high school, I know many of the monologues by heart in English. So I’ve studied, taught, seen and critiqued him to my heart’s content.

That’s why, like everyone else, I’ve never attached any importance to the Bard’s identity, contenting myself with his masterly, inexhaustible works. I too accepted what we had always thought: the Bard was a genius who could not be questioned. I had, of course, heard of the efforts to find a substitute for the man from Stratford: Bacon, Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere, Ben Jonson and tutti quanti, and I didn’t even think it possible that anyone serious would dare upset the age-old balance of certainties in favour of William Shakespeare.

So when Lamberto Tassinari phoned me in June 2010 at the office of the theatre journal Jeu, of which I was editor-in-chief, I listened with a certain distance. He wanted to know if we would talk in our journal about his book John Florio, the Man Who Was Shakespeare, which was published in English in Montreal in 2009 (and translated from its original Italian version, also published in Montreal in 2008). I told him that, despite my knowledge of the plays, I didn’t consider myself an expert when it came to the identity of the author, that it was far too complicated, and that the work was more than enough for me. I also thought that an Italian trying to prove that Shakespeare was Italian was a bit of a stretch!

Lamberto Tassinari. Photo: Courtesy of Stéphane Dubois

But when Tassinari offered to discuss this with me over an espresso, I couldn’t resist! I knew of his intellectual’s reputation and I was intrigued by what he had to say. Founder and director of the transcultural journal ViceVersa, and professor of Italian language and literature at the Université de Montréal, he had always been interested in the passage from one culture to another, and above all in the enrichment of one culture by the other. Having immigrated to America from a Mediterranean country like him and wanting to enrich my adopted country like all immigrants or sons of immigrants, I began to appreciate his approach. So I read his book in English, and that’s when all my certainties were shattered! So much so that six years later, we succeeded in publishing an updated and expanded French version of his book in France.

Discovering the Florios

As I plunged into Tassinari’s book, I was quickly drawn into the extraordinary career of this high-flying intellectual, born in London to a Jewish father (Michel Angelo), whose parents converted to Catholicism and who became a Franciscan friar, then reconverted and became a Protestant pastor. While the father was in the bedroom of King Edward VI when he died in 1553 (the year John was born), the son, a lexicographer, translator of Montaigne’s Essays and the Decameron, author of dictionaries and tutor, was private secretary to Queen Anne for 16 years, until her death. So he was not an obscure civil servant, as is often claimed. Between the father’s and son’s rise to the London court, there was an exile in 1555, because Protestants were no longer welcome under Bloody Mary’s reign. This is how John was brought up from the age of two to around eighteen in Soglio, near present-day Italy, attending the University of Tübingen where he studied theology among other subjects, before returning to London around1571.

John Florio by William Hole, engraving, published 1611. Photo: Web/Wikimedia/Pubic domain

In following the exciting life of the Florios, I found a number of ideas that had been part of my upbringing for ages called into question, turned upside down like pancakes, by means of patient, painstaking and, to my mind, unassailable research.

Several aspects of the book caught my attention: the criticism of the man from Stratford, an actor and producer of shows whose intellectual and material resources made it impossible to write such a monumental work; the international dispute over the Bard’s authorship of the work attributed to him, evidenced by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition’s Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare (doubtaboutwill. org); the central and little-known role of John Florio, and before him his father, in the Elizabethan England of their time; the Italianness present in plays signed Shakespeare; the true “invention” of a British genius after the death of the man from Stratford, who was given the name William Shakespeare; the long occultation of this deception, and so on.

The first thing that amazed me about Tassinari’s book was the story of the wills. I had heard of the “Shakespeare” will (signed more like Shakspere, Shackspear, Shexpir, etc.: the actor and impresario wrote his name six different ways), which was rather drab in style, and his “second best bed,” which he left to his wife. But then I realised why we didn’t know much more about it: this will is terribly embarrassing for those who defend the Bard’s authorship. Yet it’s easy to find on the Internet. The businessman and usurer does not mention a single book, not even a Bible, nor any piece of furniture that might have contained books (chest, shelves); it only mentions material and utilitarian goods (furniture, household items), money lent at a certain interest rate, sums owed, land and buildings, jewelry. Some twenty plays had not yet been published at the time of the Stratford man’s death, which represented a considerable value to be bequeathed, and there is no mention of them in the will, nor indeed of the slightest reference to a theatrical life.

By way of comparison, I found John Florio’s sumptuously written, flowery, Shakespearean testament very enlightening. What a beautiful text! Among other things, it refers to his imposing library of hundreds of books in English and foreign languages (John spoke seven), and above all, it tells us to whom he bequeathed this treasure: to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the dedicatee and sponsor of the First Folio (the first edition of the complete works – 900 pages – by William Shakespeare, edited by Ben Jonson, the go-between). This was the first edition of a playwright’s complete works after Jonson’s own, in 1616, and it cost a fortune.

The Portrait Affair

The other thing that really amused me was the story of the portraits. We all know the ugly portrait of the man with the bulbous forehead, oversized face, no neck, hair longer on one side, crudely starched ruff and asymmetrical black pourpoint, which appears on the title page of the First Folio (1623). Well, I’ve learned that this is the only “authentic” portrait of the Bard. All the other portraits we sometimes see in theatre programmes or books have no verified connection with WS. Tassinari reveals that the author of this portrait, the 28-year-old Martin Droeshout, was commissioned, seven years after the Bard’s death, to paint the image of a “perfect genius”, or of anyone not recognizable, a caricature – Ben Jonson says in his introduction to the book to read it, not to look at the portrait. But Droeshout painted other portraits before and after the Bard’s death that look more natural. In this one, Shakespeare is said to have two right eyes and two left arms; in other words, the artist must have – obviously deliberately – reproduced his right eye on the left side of the face and his left arm on the right, without taking account of the shadows.

But what’s even more extraordinary, as if to support this theory, is that a London tailor discovered in 1911 that the right side of the pourpoint was in fact the back of the left side! The same goes for the embroidery at the top of the sleeves and the collar, which are also asymmetrical. By painstakingly reproducing the front and back of real clothes, Droeshout – and those who commissioned and then accepted this portrait – seems to be warning us: this William Shakespeare is a fake!

The same applies to the so-called WS monument: a statue in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. Originally, the man rested his hands on a sack of grain (we now know that Shakspere got rich trading grain, which he stored to drive up prices). A blank page was later added under his hands, followed by a quill, even though according to his daughter, who remained illiterate like her grandparents, William would never have held a quill in his hands!

Italianness

I remember the mocking look I got when Tassinari, an Italian who immigrated to Quebec in 1981, told me that he had discovered that Shakespeare, rather than being a native Englishman, had Italian origins.

And then, as I read the book, I realised that you had to be Italian – and well versed in Renaissance literature – to see in these plays so many precise references to the works of Tasso, Cinzio, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Machiavelli, Bandello, Aretino, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, Boccaccio, Groto, Lasca, Guarini, Berni, Bibbiena, etc. Tassinari is not the first to say that many of the sources for the Bard’s works can be found in this corpus. He is, however, one of the few to assert that many of these works were not yet available in English at the time when we find traces of them, or even entire passages in the plays. Situations, character names and plots could not have been invented by a man (the Stratford actor) who everyone agrees spoke no language other than his native English. Nor do I see how he could have gleaned from the taverns of the port of London so many precise references to literature that was certainly fashionable in his day, but unavailable in English!What’s more, according to Naseeb Shaheen, even when the sources already existed in English or French, the author did not always use them, preferring the Italian original. The Shakespearean text therefore often appears closer to the original Italian source than to the translated version.

John Florio’s Italian-English Dictionary, New World of Words (1611). Photo: Web

But Tassinari goes further, and this too struck me. He was astonished to discover, in reading The Tempest (it was this reading that tipped him off and sparked off his research), turns of phrase, witticisms, children’s rhymes, proverbs, jokes that were readily sexual, not funny at all in English, but that hit the nail on the head in Italian. This explains the Bard’s writing, which is considered atypical and unique: it is translated Italian, or more precisely, transcultural writing. This work is in fact the result of a harmonious meeting of languages and ideas from a cultural universe in which all the traditions come together, those of Europe and the East, in particular the Italian tradition of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the French, the Spanish, the German and, no doubt, the English too! Florio alias Shakespeare read everything in English, either to get to know his new homeland in depth, or simply for his work as a linguist and lexicographer, which led him to collect the 175,000 English words he used to translate the 74,000 Italian words in his dictionary published in 1611, The New World of Words.

Another aspect of the work’s Italianness is its references to Italy. There are more than 800 in all the plays, 17 of which (and 106 scenes) are set in Italy (it should be noted in passing that Stratford-upon-Avon is never mentioned in the Bard’s work). However, many exegetes have claimed that Shakespeare’s Italy was an imaginary country, with many errors, particularly geographical. Nothing could be further from the truth! Tassinari quotes extensively from Richard Paul Roe’s work, without ignoring the fact that he had predecessors to whom he should have referred, such as Lambin, Sullivan, Grillo and Magri. In Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, we find that all the allusions to Italy in Shakespeare’s works are accurate: the names of places, gates, streets, squares, rivers, ports, boats, statues, woodlands, religious monuments, and so on, down to the last detail. So when we read in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that the action takes place in Athens, we’re not talking about an imaginary Greece, but the Piccola Atene, Little Athens, in Sabbioneta near Mantua. It was a city that still exists today, built on the model of ancient Athens at the behest of the architecture-loving Duke Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna. In fact, Quince, Bottom and their friends meet near the city gates at the “Duke’s Oak”, where there was a statue of the reigning Duke.

Much has also been made of the fact that two characters travelled by boat from Verona to Milan in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and that Prospero in The Tempest arrived on the island by boat from Milan. However, it has now been proven that in the 16th century there were navigable canals leading from these cities to the sea. That said, Tassinari believes that in The Tempest, even though Milan is named, it refers to the city of Florence, which also had a river, the Arno, leading to the sea. These many observations on Italian topographical details alone disqualify the other candidates for authorship of WS’s work, who may have visited Italy as tourists, even if they would have stopped off in all the cities where Shakespeare’s plays are set.

The Bible and Judaism

The references to the Bible and Judaism that Tassinari explores in WS’s work are as astonishing as those concerning Italy and Italianness. As far as Judaism is concerned, we all remember The Merchant of Venice, but according to the latest discoveries, specific references to Jewish rites can be found in no fewer than fifteen plays attributed to WS. Clear allusions to the Midrash (a series of rabbinical glosses) in As You Like it, lines like “eater of broken meats” in King Lear, which is a direct reference to non-kosher meat (and which Jean-Michel Déprats translates heavily, in the Pléiade edition, as “bâfreur de rogatons”), allusions to the koshering of meat in Othello (“stay the meat”, says Iago), references to the yellow ribbons worn by Jews on their clothes in the Venetian ghetto in Twelfth Night, Caliban’s quotation of a passage from the Hebrew Bible (when he speaks of the great light and the little light, which burn by day and by night), etc. We know that the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, only to return at the end of the 17th century. One wonders how a provincial from Stratford could have had access to this knowledge, when Florio’s father was of Jewish origin, a great intellectual and a keen theologian.

In fact, Tassinari has found studies of varying length on the Jewish connection in Shakespeare’s works by no fewer than eleven authors, who seem to ignore each other. In any case, each seems to be reinventing the wheel. He classifies them into three categories: the perplexed “classic Anglo-Saxons” who do no more than ask questions (Thomas Carter, Richmond Noble, Naseeb Shaheen, Steven Marx), the “neurotic Jews” (James Shapiro, Neil Hirschson, David Basch), and finally, the Francophones who analyse the Scriptures (Gérard Huber, Haudry Perenchio, Yona Dureau, Marc Goldschmidt). However, most of these discoveries have not yet been cited in the French version of Tassinari’s work, but they are to be included in the latest version of his research about to be published in Germany.

Vaïs and Tassinari interviewed on Radio-Canada. Photo: Courtesy of Michel Vaïs

Many bona fide researchers are wondering where does Shakespeare get all this knowledge of the Hebrew tradition, which cannot always be reduced to imagination. And as an extension, or prolegomena, to these questions, many marvel at the author’s profound biblical knowledge. According to Shaheen, the man from Stratford could never have acquired this in his family, whose parents were illiterate, nor at school (which he left at 13 to work with his father, a glove-maker), because the sacred texts read in class had nothing to do with those quoted in the work, nor at church, because even though he had been able to attend two religious services morning and evening for years, the liturgical texts of the time did not include many of the writings found in the plays. According to Tassinari, Florio had “the Bible under his skin,” and his writing is totally “imbued” with the Bible, to the point where certain passages are a veritable paraphrase of it. He studied theology in Tübingen and his father was familiar with three religions. Finally, it should also be noted that Florio, who spent 16 years at court, almost certainly collaborated on the James I Bible published in 1611, which Shakespeare is said to have contributed to!

The Man of the Court

Another aspect of Florio’s life at court caught my attention. He was a courtier, a man who lived very close to the English aristocracy and knew it from the inside. As tutor to the children of Queen Anne (after teaching Italian and French to London’s gilded youth, including the daughter of the French ambassador, with whom he lived for two and a half years with Giordano Bruno), John Florio lived in the intimacy of the monarchs. As Groom of the Royal Privy Chamber and responsible for cultural activities at court, music and masques, his knowledge of aristocratic pastimes is obvious. So it is not surprising to find in the pieces signed WS not only numerous references to music and musicians, but also specific allusions to hunting, chess, royal tennis, fencing, horse-riding, the breeding of pedigree dogs and card games.

By contrast, it is difficult to see how the hard-working man from Stratford, constantly travelling between his village and London on business, could have had access to these courtly pastimes in such detail, not only having heard about them, but having practised them himself.

This brings us to the primary argument of Daniel Bougnoux, who wrote the preface to the French version of Tassinari’s book, and which has to do with mediology. According to these principles, literary genius cannot be born of an author’s simple imagination. This is not the case in music or painting, for example. To write, and to copy passages from books as we see in Shakespeare’s works, you not only had to have read them over and over again, in the original languages (because many of them had not yet been translated into English), you even had to own them. The possession of a large library – such as Florio’s – and the intellectual resources needed to build, maintain and use it were therefore a sine qua non for writing these texts.

Bruno and Montaigne

According to Tassinari, if there are two essential influences on Shakespeare’s work, they are the Neapolitan philosopher Giordano Bruno and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. Two influences considered minor by orthodox Stratfordian critics, or dismissed outright. It should be added that, to date, no serious study of Bruno has appeared in English, and most of his works have not been translated into that language. In any case, critics reject any link with Shakespeare, as they fail to see how the Bard could have come into contact with the Neapolitan philosopher or with his works that had not been translated into English. At best, it points to “parallels” between Bruno’s thought and Hamlet. With Florio, however, there is no doubt about the kinship.

Giordano Bruno. Photo: Web/Creative Commons

As we have seen, Bruno stayed in London with the French ambassador Michel Castelnau de la Mauvissière for the two and a half years of his stay in England (1583-85). John Florio, who was already there as the tutor of the ambassador’s daughter, welcomed his six-year-old elder, whom he greatly respected. Bruno arrived with a letter of credence from the King of France, Henry III. A few months earlier, he had published his diabolical comedy The Candlestick, with which Shakespeare’s comedies have much in common. But it was not until 400 years later that Il Candelaio was translated into English, by Alan Powers, who now says on his website, “Yet it is arguably the best play ever written.” (http://www.habitableworlds.com/pages/bruno.html accessed 7 February 2018) During his time in London, Bruno was not idle: he had six books published in Italian and three in Latin.

To show Bruno’s influence on Shakespeare’s works, Tassinari quotes the Germans Tschischwitz and König, as well as the Italian Spampanato who, in a work published in 1926, “pointed out that there were traces of Il Candelaio almost everywhere in Shakespeare: see in Cymbeline (5. 5.) the etymology of mulier; in As you Like it (3. 3. and 4. 2.) the tale of the donkey; in King Lear (1. 2.) the attribution to Fate, or the stars, of the disasters caused by pride; in King Lear (1. 4.) the distinction between cunning and gentle folly; in Macbeth (4. 1.) the vision of witchcraft; in Richard II (3. 4.) the conversation between the queen and the two gentlemen in the Duke of York’s garden; in Love’s Labours Lost the joke addressed to Holoferne.” ( 292).

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by unknown painter in the Musée Condé. Photo: Web/Wikimedia/Pubic domain

Among the dozens of other “parallels,” Tassinari adds:

I found a surprising trace of the undeniable proximity between Bruno and Shakespeare: in Il Candelaio, Sanguino, Bartolomeo’s serf, is a rogue who disguises himself as Captain Palma, the leader of the round. His name is linked to the colour red, because sangue means ‘blood’ in Italian. Similarly, Dogberry is the head of security in Much Ado About Nothing, and his name also refers to red, dogberry being a bright red fruit, the wild cherry, fruit of the dog rose.

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Florio and Bruno also appear in each other’s works. The Mister Berowne in Love’s Labours Lost is none other than Bruno, and Messer Florio appears as a character in Bruno’s The Ashes Supper. Bruno has written a speech to the professors of Wittenberg, and Wittenberg University, where he was supposed to go when he left London, is where Horatio comes from in Hamlet and where Hamlet dreams of going: “The link between Bruno’s Copernicanism and that of Shakespeare and Florio is reinforced by Hamlet, who chooses to go and study at Wittenberg University, one of the main centres of Copernican thought” (303).

The symbolism of the two great intellectuals, Florio and Bruno, is similar in Tassinari’s opinion: “If Hamlet is modern, then he is modern like Bruno. The theatre of consciousness that Shakespeare brought to life is Bruno’s idea in On the Heroic Frenzies.

It should be remembered that when Bruno arrived in London, the 19-year-old Stratford man, newly married because his wife was pregnant, was still living in the countryside, and it is impossible that he could have read Bruno’s works, published only in Italian or Latin.

Finally, here is the last surprising clue that Tassinari raises, found in a study by Gisèle Venet (249-71): it has always been thought that the names of Rosencranz and Guildenstern, two characters in Hamlet, were invented by the author. In fact, they are the names of two real Danish students who were enrolled at the University of Wittenberg between 1586 and 1595, Francis Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstjerne. Here again, Giordano Bruno’s role as Florio’s intermediary seems more than likely.

More recently, Jean-Patrick Connerade, physicist and Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London, has drawn attention to the many scientific references in Shakespeare’s work, particularly to astronomy. At the Florio/Shakespeare colloquium at the Inaugural Congress of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance (EASTAP) in Paris on 27 October 2018, he said that these references “are so detailed and precise that they imply knowledgeable relationships with great scholars, in particular with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Giordano Bruno. Shakespeare and Florio are the only two writers of this period to espouse the Tychonian model of the universe, invented by Tycho Brahe.” The presence of the expression “Planet Sol” both in Troilus and Cressida and, earlier, in Florio’s Dictionary, and also the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were two of Brahe’s cousins who came with him to London to meet Bruno and Florio at the French ambassador’s house, are two strong clues that, according to Connerade, point to Florian authorship of Shakespeare’s works. A dossier in Le Monde, “Shakespeare trahi par l’astronomie?”, published January 16, 2019 and edited by Florence Rosier, explores this subject in greater depth.

Stratfordian critics are similarly blind to Montaigne’s influence. It should be remembered that Florio, the author of the first English translation of the Essais, published his version– which was much more elaborate than the original –in 1603. However, it had been completed since 1600. There are similarities, even outright copying, between passages in Florio’s translation of the Essays and others in Shakespeare’s prior to the publication of the English version. In Shakespeare’s Montaigne, Stephen Greenblatt explains in obvious bad faith that Shakespeare must have read extracts from Florio’s translation over his shoulder while he was writing, “well before the first edition” in 1603 (153).

Photo: Courtesy of Michel Vaïs

As we can see, Florio, who has long been neglected by Stratford experts, is increasingly seen as an adviser, a friend and an inspiration to William Shakespeare. In The Guardian (July 2013), Professor Saul Frampton made the bold claim that John Florio was Shakespeare’s editor. He believes that the profound differences between the plays published separately, in the in quarto editions, and the version that appears in the complete works (the First Folio), seven years after the death of the man from Stratford, show that Florio intervened, because we find expressions previously used by him, notably in his dictionaries and teaching manuals.

So, as Tassinari points out, Florio was given an increasingly important role, but always “alongside” the Stratford man. Given that the Shakespeare industry earns Britain more than British Airways, this is understandable. Defeating Stratford will be like not only slaughtering a god but also killing a very profitable industry!

My reading of Tassinari’s book in English, and my friendship with the author, convinced me to do my bit to make his research better known. To begin with, I convinced him to approach a truly independent publisher to publish a French version. This has now been done as the French publisher Le Bord de l’eau published his book in 2016. The last and more advanced version of Tassinari research on Florio is about to be published this year (2024) in a German translation by Res Novae Verlag. All that remains is to find researchers who are not blinkered and who will extend this thesis, which seems to be a little easier to find south of the Channel than in the north, or in North America.

Postscriptum

At the time of writing this English version of my article, a book written by several contributors was due to appear at Peter Lang’s publishing House in Switzerland. The four authors are part of a group of independent scholars formed in 2018 during the round table discussion, mentioned already, entitled “John Florio: a Transcultural Shakespeare at the Heart of Europe” held in Paris as part of a university Colloquium in theatre Studies “Decentering the vision(s)of Europe: the Emergence of New Forms.” In addition to being part of this small group, I also wrote the introduction to the collective volume. The group’s activity is now reflected in this website: https://johnflorio-shakespeare.com/.

The collective book deals with some of the most decisive aspects of the controversial relationship between John Florio and the play attributed to the Stratford man. The first contribution is a meticulous analysis of the countless traces of Giordano Bruno in the plays signed Shakespeare. The author recalls that the Neapolitan philosopher arrived in London, where he spent over two years fraternizing with Florio, with whom he was staying in the French ambassador’s residence – this, at a time when the teenage Shakespeare was still supposedly fabricating gloves with his dad. British scholars have completely neglected to make room for Bruno in their research despite the countless “Brunian echoes” in the plays: “It is a telling fact that The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, did not even have a ‘Giordano Bruno’ entry.”  Bruno’s echoes in Shakespeare’s plays are intricately connected to the authorship question.[1]

In the second text, the author points out that astronomy provides the Bard with an immense reservoir of metaphors: for example, the four ghosts dancing around Jupiter in Cymbeline, a play written in 1611, the same year Galileo discovered Jupiter’s 4 moons. In this way, Shakespeare’s highly modern theatre kept ahead of the times. In this light, Shakespeare does not appear as a genius with an infused scientific knowledge, but rather as an enlightened author who kept abreast of the scientific news of his time, and of the intellectual currents in Europe, who mastered several European languages. What follows is a play featuring those who may have collaborated in the Shakespeare enterprise: all the characters mentioned there are to be found in the play, first and foremost John Florio, and then most of those with whom he interacted during his astonishing career.

In the next contribution it is question of Montaigne’s profound influence on Shakespeare, a long-lasting influence. Here, the author returns once again to her notes on Othello, and remarks that scholars have overlooked the impact of the Essais translated into English by John Florio, not only in Othello, but in the entire canon as all the plays are steeped in Montaigne’s themes. The author shows that when Florio wrote the plays, he not only used Montaigne’s vocabulary but essentially based his plays on dominating Montaigne themes.

In the final chapter a new name and a seemingly foreign literary tradition have emerged out of the Shakespearean puzzle: Miguel de Cervantes and his Quixote. The north and the south finally meet: England and Italy, London and Madrid, the madness of Don Quixote and that of Hamlet. This essay is dedicated to the “liaison dangereuse” between Shakespeare, the creator of the greatest theatrical work of all times and Cervantes the author of the first, genial modern novel, Don Quixote. The new perspective opens on Shakespeare’s Spanish Connection where John Florio appears as the missing link between Hamlet and Don Quixote. In the diffusion and promotion of Renaissance Italian culture to Shakespeare’s England and to Cervantes’ Spain, the role of John Florio, this transcultural son of Italian exiles of Jewish origin was impressive, shocking but absolutely indisputable.

NOTE: This article was originally published in French in CS/SC #18, Dec. 2018, after a request to the author by Don Rubin, editor of the Book Reviews section. A follow-up was published in English by Luke Prodromou in CS/SC # 19, June 2019. Since the author received several requests from non-French speakers, we provide here an English, updated version of the original article.


Endnote

[1] This is a quote from Fabrice Collot’s chapter titled “Picking Up John Florio’s Life and Hand in Shakespeare”, in a book to be published in 2025.

Bibliography

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Connerade, Jean-Patrick. “John Florio: A Transcultural Shakespeare at the Heart of Europe.” Roundtable at the Inaugural Congress of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance (EASTAP), Decentering the Vision(s) of Europe: The Emergence of New Forms. Paris, 27 October 2018.

Collot, Fabrice. “Picking Up John Florio’s Life and Hand in Shakespeare.” John Florio. The Elizabethan Linguist Who did SHAKE the SPEARE. Peter Lang Publishing. Forthcoming (2025).

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———. “In Search of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.” The Guardian, London, August 10, 2013.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Montaigne, The Florio Translation of the Essays, a Selection, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, NYRB, 2014.

Powers, Alan. Candelaio, FeedARead.com, 2014.

Rosier, Florence, “Shakespeare trahi par l’astronomie?”.Le Monde, January 16, 2019.

Shaheen, Naseeb. “Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian.” Shakespeare’s Survey, Vol. 47, 1994.

Spampanato, Vincenzo. Sulla soglia del Seicento. Warburg Library Commons, 1926.

Tassinari, Lamberto. John Florio Alias Shakespeare, translation by Michel Vaïs, preface by Daniel Bougnoux, Lormont, Éditions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2016.

——-. John Florio, the Man Who Was Shakespeare. Giano Books, 2009.

Venet, Gisèle. “Giordano Bruno et Shakespeare: la poétique d’une écriture in l’Europe de la Renaissance.”  Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 2005, pp. 249-71. 


*Michel Vaïs was born in Tunisia, but he is living in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) since the age of 12. He became an actor at 17, in an avant-garde theatre company, then a director and a playwright, before getting degrees in three universities and teaching for 12 years. He received his Bachelor from Université de Montréal, Master of Arts from McGill University, and Doctorate in Theatre Studies from Université de Paris 8. He then became a broadcaster for Chaîne culturelle de Radio-Canada and editor at Revue de théâtre Jeu since its foundation in 1976 (and now senior editor). He presided the Quebec Association of Theatre Critics and joined the International Association of Theatre Critics in 1992. He became treasurer, then vice-president, and, from 1998-2023, Secretary General of the IATC, serving with five presidents. He has been elected Honorary Secretary General in 2024. He is also the French language editor for the IATC journal Critical Stages/Scènes critiques.

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