The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3562]
As a large number of Shakespeare's plays were written primarily for private or Court presentation, to edify or amuse his patron and his patron's friends, or with their immediate political or factional interests in mind to influence the Court in their favour, the shadowed purposes of such plays, the acting or speaking of a character "from those parts of the composition, which are inferred only, and not distinctly shewn," as well as a number of hitherto supposedly inexplicable asides and allusions, such as Bottom's "reason and love keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity, that some honest neighbours will not make them friends," would give to those acquaintances who were in Shakespeare's confidence an added zest and interest in such plays quite lacking to the uninitiated, or to a modern audience.
I propose in this chapter to demonstrate the facts that John Florio—the translator of Montaigne's Essays and tutor of languages to Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton—was Shakespeare's original for Sir John Falstaff and other of his characters; that the Earl of Southampton and Lady Southampton were cognizant of the shadowed identity, and that Florio himself recognised and angrily resented the characterisation when a knowledge of its personal application had spread among their mutual acquaintances.
In preceding chapters and in former books I have advanced evidence of a cumulative nature for Southampton's identity as the patron addressed in the Sonnets; the identity of Chapman as the "rival poet," and Shakespeare's caricature of him as Holofernes; the identity of Matthew Roydon as the author of Willobie his Avisa, as well as Shakespeare's caricature of him as the curate Nathaniel; and the identity of Mistress Davenant as the "dark lady" of the Sonnets. If, then, we find in the same plays in which these personal reflections are shown a certain distinctly marked type of character, bearing stronger prima facie evidence than the others of having been developed from a living original, may we not reasonably infer that the individual so represented might also have been linked in life in some manner approximating to his relations in the play, with the lives and interests of the other persons shadowed forth?
With this idea in mind I have searched all available records relating to Southampton, in the hope of finding among his intimates an individual whose personality may have suggested Shakespeare's characterisation, or caricature, set forth in the successive persons of Armado, Parolles, and Sir John Falstaff. The traceable incidents of John Florio's life, his long and intimate association with Shakespeare's patron, and reasonable inferences for the periods where actual record of him is wanting, gave probability, in my judgment, to his identity as Shakespeare's original for these and other characters. A further consideration of the man's personality, temperament, and mental habitude, as I could dimly trace them in his few literary remains that afford scope for unconscious self-revelation, left no doubt in my mind as to his identity as Shakespeare's model.
Supposing it to be impossible, with our present records, to visualise Shakespeare more definitely in his contemporary environment, it has been common with biographers, in their endeavours to link him with the men of his times, to draw imaginative pictures of his intimate and friendly personal relations with such men as Sir Walter Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Marston, and others, equally improbable, forgetting the social distinctions, the scholastic prejudices, and still more, the religious or political animosities that divided men in public life in those days, as they do, though in a lesser degree, to-day. The intimate relations of the Earl of Southampton with Lord Burghley, during the earliest period of his Court life, when he was affianced to Burghley's granddaughter, and his later intimacy with the Earl of Essex and with the gentlemen