John Florio

Giovanni Florio (1552 or 1553 – 1625), known as John Florio, was an English humanist, linguist, writer, translator, lexicographer, and language tutor. Born in London, he spent much of his childhood and youth in continental Europe after his family left England during the reign of Mary I, returning to London in the early 1570s. He died of plague in Fulham, London. He published the language-learning works Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Fruits (1591), and produced A World of Words (1598), the second Italian–English dictionary published in England, and much more extensive than William Thomas's earlier dictionary. His English translation of Montaigne's Essays was published in 1603. He published an expanded version, Queen Anna's New World of Words (1611), which contained nearly 74,000 definitions, and in 1620 he published a translation of Boccaccio's Decameron anonymously. Florio served as tutor to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and from 1604 to 1619 as a reader in Italian and groom of the privy chamber to Anne of Denmark (queen consort of James VI and I). Florio also taught Italian and French to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. Amongst his friends and associates were Giordano Bruno and Ben Jonson. Florio's work has been studied in relation to William Shakespeare, particularly the influence scholars have attributed to his translation of Montaigne and similarities identified between the two writers' works. In the 20th century, Florio and his father, Michelangelo Florio, were among the many people proposed by advocates of the Shakespeare authorship question as alternative authors of Shakespeare's works.