In each and every case, of course, Shakespeare has improved on Florio. For instance, how much more fleeting his water-by-the-mill because it glideth, a word which has both the movement of the river and the sunlight on it, and so is more ephemeral than the Italian lexicographer's flows. For instance, how much more immediate the poet's one touch of nature makes the whole world kin, where TOUCH and KIN bring home the mere abstraction of the original.
You may say, madam, that proverbs are much the same in any language, but surely you will concede that there are so many striking verbal similarities between Florio and Shakespeare as to make it likely that here we are not just up against coincidence. Besides, in Love's Labour's Lost (whose very title is borrowed, as I have shown, from the Italian-English manual), Shakespeare goes so far as to quote Florio in the Italian original, when he makes Holofernes say:
'Ah! good old Mantuan. I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice: Venetia, Venetia, Chi non te vede, non te pretia.'
Florio had written: 'Venetia qui non ti vedi non ti pretia; ma chi ti vede ben gli costa!' You will find this also in his First Fruits, published in London in the summer of '78.
These two volumes of English and Italian dialogues, Florio's First Fruits and his Second Fruits published some thirteen years later, seem to me to have provided Mr Shakespeare with a most unusual source of material. That the influence extended both ways might be surmised from the fact that while the subject of Love was omitted from the First Fruits, in the Second Fruits Mr Florio devotes no less than sixty pages to the tender passion, quoting Ovid constantly. I smell my master's hand in this, not least in Florio's conclusion that Love is as indispensable to mankind as eating or telling lies.
Incidentally, in the course of the Second Fruits John Florio not only gives us his opinion of the state of the English stage, but sets this in the context of a tennis game exactly like the ones he played with William Shakespeare. This is how the game is led up to:
'Let us make a match at tennis.
Agreed, this cool morning calls for it,
And afterwards we will dine together;
Then after dinner we will go see a play.
The plays they play in England are not right comedies;
Yet they do nothing else but play every day.
Yea, but they are neither right comedies, nor right tragedies.
How would you name them then?
Representations of histories without any decorum.'
I suggest that Mr Shakespeare's eye certainly passed over these dialogues, which are spoken prose set out with some of the appearance of verse. Whether he thought that Florio was having a hit at King John and his Henry VI trilogy with that remark about 'representations of histories without any decorum', I could not tell you. The criticism bears some truth within it. Though it might be just revenge for a lost game at tennis.
Florio's major work came out in 1603 - his Englishing of the Essais of Montaigne. There can be no doubt that Mr Shakespeare read this carefully. He makes use of Montaigne's essays on cannibals and on cruelty in passages of The Tempest, and I think there are traces of the Frenchman to be found in King Lear also, and the last revision of Hamlet. Montaigne's thoughts on Death were much to Shakespeare's taste in his later life. I have his copy of the Essays in Florio's translation, with his signature in it, which is followed by the words MORS INCERTA in his neatest hand.
John Florio's star rose highest after his years with Southampton, when he was appointed to be one of the tutors of the greatly gifted but ill-fated Prince Henry. When that boy died young, this gentleman's fortunes waned. He died of the plague at Fulham in 1625, having spent his last years in vain bickerings with his daughter Aurelia and his son-in-law, Dr Mollins. His wife Rose Spicer had been a sister of the poet Samuel Daniel, of whom I once heard Mr Shakespeare remark that he could never trust a poet whose name rhymed with itself.
This was, for him, an uncommonly harsh criticism. He was nearly always generous in his appraisal of other writers - saying nothing if he could not say something good. Even of Henry Chettle, that fat fool who was responsible for publishing Greene's upstart crow libel, he managed to find lines to like. Not that Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly (heigh-ho) nonsense, but Aeliana's Ditty.
The late Mr Shakespeare's usual practice, if you happened to mention a poet's name, was to remember at least one good line that the man had written. For that matter, if he heard good told of anyone, he would rub his hands together instinctively.
Most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard matter it is to trace them to their graves. Not so, of course, with William Shakespeare. But it was so in the case of a now obscure writer whose work (if you will forgive the pun) certainly much appealed to WS. I mean George Peele.
Poor Peele. He died young, and of the pox, and after his death for some reason he passed swiftly into legend as the very emblem of the witty poet, the so-called Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele, published in 1605, consisting for the most part of jokes and stories fathered on him. The author of Polyhymnia deserved a better fate. I often heard Mr Shakespeare refer with affection to him, and more than once I heard him quote the song that concludes that long poem, the lyric that begins His golden locks time hath to silver turned.
His favourite amongst Peele's poems, though, was not that, nor the famous Bethsabe's Song which begins Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, / Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair, although for sure I know that he loved the latter. Mr Shakespeare esteemed his friend George Peele most highly on account of nine lines in his The Old Wife's Tale, a song sung by a voice that speaks from a well. That song goes like this:
Fair maiden, white and red,
Comb me smooth, and stroke my head;
And thou shalt have some cockle bread.
Gently dip, but not too deep,
For fear thou make the golden beard to weep.