ABSTRACT
The very ‘facts’ of Florio’s life are little documented. What we know of his biography has been reconstructed from the paratextual material Florio provides in his various publications and in fragments of information reported in the writings of his contemporaries. He is known to have spent several years at Oxford as a language teacher around the time of the publication of Firste Fruites; by the early 1580s he was living – together with the renegade Domenican friar Giordano Bruno – in the residence of the French ambassador, employed as tutor to his daughter; he was involved later in the 1580s, with his friend Matthew Gwinne, in the editing of Sidney’s Arcadia; by 1592, Florio was in the service of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, and he continued to accrue aristocratic patronage over the ensuing decade. The published work that Florio produced in these years ranged from a translation commissioned by Richard Hakluyt of Jacques Cartier’s A Short and Briefe Narration of the Two Navigations and Discoveries to the Northweast partes called Newe France (1580), to a further volume of language-learning dialogues, Second Fruits (1591), the first edition of an ambitious Italian-English dicitionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), and to the first English translation of Montaigne’s Essais (1603). Florio’s association with Queen Anne is marked by the altered prefatory apparatus of the Montaigne (1613), now almost entirely directed to the queen, and the new title of the greatly expanded dictionary, Queen Anna’s New World of Worlds (1611). Florio’s activities at court are sensitive to the spiritual inclinations of the sovereign he served. Some twenty-odd Counter-Reformational texts found their way into the library of books Florio claims to have consulted for the second edition of his dictionary and the translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron that he prepared during the final years of Queen Anne’s life, which was based in part on the censored Italian text published by Leonardo Salviati in 1582.
