The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty-Four What Shakespeare got from Florio + a word about George Peele

I am apt to believe that Mr Shakespeare's skill in the French and Italian tongues exceeded his knowledge in the Roman. For we find him not only beholding to Cinthio, Giraldi, and Bandello for his plots, but also able to write such a scene as that in Henry V where the princess Katharine and her governante converse in their native language quite believably. More cogent, though, to my memories of the playwright's performance on the tennis court is the very great number of Italian proverbs scattered up and down in his writings. Where did these come from if not from John Florio?

Southampton's tutor had been born in London, the son of an Italian refugee of Jewish ancestry. He was educated under the direction of the scholar Vergerio at Tubingen. He travelled through Italy and returned to England in the middle 1570s. Here he made a living from private lessons, taught at Oxford, and was authorised to wear the gown of Magdalen College. Patronised by Walsingham, he was recommended to Lord Burghley, who appointed him as tutor to his ward. This would have been at the start of the Nineties, about the time when Shakespeare was beginning that monumental work more durable than bronze or stone, the immortal sonnets, which as we have seen began as advice to the pupil Rizley.

So we have this interesting little triangle if not trinity - rich patron, learned teacher, eager poet. I think it was Rizley's wish to see some of the furnishings of Italian romance transported to England, and Shakespeare's wish both to please him and to have a certain edge over his rival playwrights by substituting for their classical scenes the much more colourful Italy of the Renaissance. As for the pedagogue, he was happy enough no doubt to have found both a powerful nobleman and a poet of genius to act as propagandists for the culture he personified.

Florio's library was magnificent. It contained more than three hundred volumes. It was this precious collection, to which Shakespeare soon had access, which provided the plot source of nearly every one of the early plays. Here he found the Novelle of Cinthio, and Luigi da Porto, and Boccaccio, and Bandello. Here he found the works of Machiavelli, and Ariosto, and Ser Giovanni, and Florio Fiorentino, and Petrarch, and Aretino, and Dante. Many of these texts were not yet translated into English, but with Florio to guide him to the treasures in the magic cavern the man from Stratford was soon rubbing lamps and releasing genii for himself. Everything he found got thoroughly turned into English in the process of his imagination, but Florio should be acknowledged as the one who gave him access to the cave.

All Mr Shakespeare ever needed to set his mind a-racing was a few words, the merest outline of a plot. Often, hearing of some such, I saw him stop his ears, covering them suddenly with his hands, rather than listen to the actual conclusion of the story. He always preferred to hear half a promising tale, and then let his own wild fancy do the rest. In this way several of his plays had their beginnings.

John Florio was a curious gentleman. The feature of him which I remember best was his little wax-like hands. When he had completed a game at tennis the smell that his body exhaled was of sweet earth-flesh, the odour of mushrooms. He had long, bristling moustaches which he would twist between his fingers and thumbs as he talked to you. As his several books show, he was a man of incontestable erudition and culture, even if he did like torturing rats.

To give you some idea of Mr Shakespeare's debt to Mr Florio, I think I will quote first from the latter's First Fruits:

'We need not speak so much of love; all books are full of love, with so many authors, that it were labour lost to speak of love.'

That saying, of course, gave Mr Shakespeare the title of one of his first plays, Love's Labour's Lost.

Among the three hundred proverbs which Florio boasted of having introduced into England from Italy, Shakespeare uses (to my count) more than thirty, and there are a few of them which the poet quotes more than ten times. It is interesting and revealing, your author suggests, to see the manner in which Shakespeare incorporates Florio's 'golden sentences' in his dialogue or fits them into his verse:

'All that glistereth is not gold ...' All that glisters is not gold Golden tombs do dust enfold ... (Florio, First Fruits, page 32) (Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 5) 'More water flows by the mill than the miller knows ...' More water glideth by the mill than wots the miller of (First Fruits, page 34) (Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 1) 'When the cat is abroad the mice play ...' Playing the mouse in absence of the cat ...' (First Fruits, page 33) (Henry V, Act I, Scene 2) 'He that maketh not, marreth not ...' What make you? Nothing? What mar you then? (First Fruits, page 26) (As You Like It, Act I, Scene 1) 'An ill weed groweth apace ...' Small herbs have grace; great weeds do grow apace (First Fruits, page 31) (Richard III, Act II, Scene 4) 'Fast bind, fast find ...' Fast bind, fast find, (Second Fruits, page 15) A proverb never stale in thrifty mind (The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 5) 'Give losers leave to speak ...' But I can give the loser leave to chide, (Second Fruits, page 69) And well such losers may have leave to speak

(Henry VI, Part II, Act III, Scene 1) 'The end maketh all men equal ...' One touch of nature makes the whole world kin ...' (First Fruits, page 31) (Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene 3) 'Necessity hath no law ...' Nature must obey necessity ... (First Fruits, page 32) (Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3) 'That is quickly done, that is done well ...' If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly ... (First Fruits, page 27) (Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7)

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.

Fair maid, white and red,

Comb me smooth, and stroke my head;

And every hair a sheave shall be,

And every sheave a golden tree.

It was the fourth line in particular that Mr Shakespeare loved. Gently dip, but not too deep. I often heard him murmur it to himself, apropos as it seemed to me of nothing.

George Peele was only thirty-eight when he died. Some called him 'the English Ovid'. The product of London streets and gutters, brought up in the shadow of an asylum for the poor, he is said to have been frivolous, shiftless, sensual, drunken, dissipated, and depraved. His physical person went like this: squint-eyed, short of leg, swart of complexion, his voice high-pitched like a woman's. I never met him, as he perished the self-same year that I first came to London. But I revere his memory for the reason that Mr Shakespeare did, for the way his spirit triumphed over every adversity to write that song that comes out of the well. His last act in this world, so Mr Shakespeare told me, had been to write a letter to Lord Burghley, begging for some assistance as he lay dying. Burghley, it goes without saying, did not bother to reply.