Principal
Notes and Queries John Florio’s
A World of Words
(1598) as Link between Plot and Subplot...
John Florio’s A World of Words (1598) as Link between Plot and Subplot in Twelfth Night
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Volumen:
63
Idioma:
english
Revista:
Notes and Queries
DOI:
10.1093/notesj/gjw138
Date:
September, 2016
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422 NOTES AND QUERIES Twelfth Night V.i.30 as the earliest usage of the word. On the church alluded to, see Twelfth Night, ed. Donno, n. ad loc. 5 Alexander Dyce, A General Glossary to Shakespeare’s Works (Boston, MA, 1904), s.v. 6 Twelfth Night, ed. Donno, n. ad loc.; C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, rev. Robert D. Eagleson, rev. edn (Oxford, 1986), s.v. (‘with quibble on sense of ‘‘occasion, time’’ ’). The annotation is Eagleson’s. Onions had misidentified ‘cast of the dice’ as the literal meaning of throw here and ‘venture’ as a derivative metaphorical meaning: Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford, 1911), s.v. (‘fig. venture’). 7 Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon, rev. Gregor Sarrazin, 4th edn (Berlin, 1923), s.v. 8 The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 3rd edn (New York, 2016), gloss ad loc. Contrast The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston, MA, 1997), n. ad loc. (‘(1) time; (2) throw of the dice’). 9 David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (London, 2002). of multiple metaphorical fields, expresses the two characters’ verbal ingenuity. ERIC WEISKOTT Boston College doi:10.1093/notesj/gjw148 ß The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication 14 July, 2016 JOHN FLORIO’S A WORLD OF WORDS (1598) AS LINK BETWEEN PLOT AND SUBPLOT IN TWELFTH NIGHT EVER since John Manningham wrote his diary note on a performance of Twelfth Night that he attended in February 1602 (o.s. 1601), the main source for Shakespeare’s play has been ultimately traced back to the play Gli Ingannati, by the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati (performed in 1532; first published in 1537 and then reprinted several times down to the 1611 collected edition of the Commedie degli Accademici Intronati).1 We also know that Shakespeare took additional elements from various versions of this plot available at the time, either in Italian or in F; rench translation. He must also have consulted the English version, entitled ‘Of Apolonius and Silla’, included in Barnabe Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession (1581). Riche’s collection of short stories additionally contains a tale (‘Of Two Brethren and Their Wives’) that seems to have furnished Shakespeare with elements of the Malvolio plot. The main source of the latter, however, has recently been identified as the punishment of a character called ‘Bonifacio’ in Giordano Bruno’s only play, Candelaio, printed in Paris in 1582.2 Bruno spent the following two and a 1 ‘At our feast wee had a play called ‘‘Twelve night, or what you will’’; much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in Love with him, by counterfayting a letter, as from his Lady, in generall termes, telling him what shee liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparraile, &c., and then when he came to practise, making him beleeve they tooke him to be mad.’ (Quoted in The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt [New York, 1997], 3334.) 2 Cf. Hilary Gatti, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio and Possible Echoes in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’, Viator, Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Newcastle on January 16, 2017 postdates by almost a century the last citation for that meaning at Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘throw, n.1’, 1 (‘The time at which anything happens; an occasion’), from Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (1513). Some Shakespeare scholars have recognized Orsino’s wordplay, while others have missed the primary meaning ‘time’. In his General Glossary to Shakespeare’s Works, Alexander Dyce offered that throw meant ‘both ‘‘a throw of the dice’’ and ‘‘time’’ (the latter signification being common in our earliest poets)’.5 In her edition of Twelfth Night, Elizabeth Story Donno notes ‘occasion’ as the primary meaning at V.i.32, citing C. T. Onions’s Shakespeare Glossary.6 In his Shakespeare Lexicon, Alexander Schmidt mistook the primary meaning of throw for a dicing metaphor, glossing at this throw ‘by this device, by this trick’ in his entry for throw ‘a cast of dice’.7 The gloss in the Norton Shakespeare (‘throw of the dice’) gives no indication of the older meaning or the wordplay.8 Throw ‘time’ is missing from David Crystal and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words.9 The pun on ‘throw (of the dice)’ helps account for Shakespeare scholars’ inconsistent understanding of the primary meaning of throw at Twelfth Night V.i.32. The pun probably also explains why Shakespeare reached for this obsolescent word in 1600 or 1601. The mixture of colloquialisms, a proverb, and a punning obsolescent word, like the collision September 2016 September 2016 NOTES AND QUERIES xliii (2012), 357–76, and Elisabetta Tarantino, ‘Bruno’s Candelaio, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: Building on Hilary Gatti’s Work’, in Martin McLaughlin, Ingrid D. Rowland, and Elisabetta Tarantino (eds), Authority, Innovation and Early Modern Epistemology. Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti (Oxford, 2015), 118–36. 3 Cf. Gatti, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio’, 362–4. On Florio as cultural mediator (not least with regard to Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italian) see Frances Yates, John Florio (Cambridge, 1934); Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian’, Shakespeare Survey, xlvii (1994), 161–70; Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge, 2005); Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005). 4 Cf. Samuel Pepys’s and William Archer’s criticism of the play on these two counts respectively, as summarized, for instance, in Sonia Massai (ed.), William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. A Sourcebook (London, 2007), 135. play Virginio addresses his daughter’s old Nurse Clementia, who had been mumbling to herself, with the words ‘Che fai, che tu parli cosi dentro a te? egliè pur passata la Befania’ (‘What are you doing, mumbling away to yourself like that? The Epiphany is actually over’), jokingly referring to the popular belief that on the eve of the Epiphany animals could talk.5 If Shakespeare consulted the original Italian play alongside one or more of the other versions available to him, and looked up the unfamiliar noun ‘Beffana/Befania’ in Florio’s dictionary, this is what he would have found: Beffania, the Epiphanie: it is spoken in mockerie. Beffa, a flout, a scoffe, a gibe, a frumpe, a iest, a mocke. Beffana, a bug-beare, a bull-begger, a scarcrowe, a toy to mocke an ape. Beffare, to flout, to scoffe, to gibe, to frump, to iest, to mocke. Beffardo, Beffatore, a flouter, a scoffer, a frumper, a mocker.6 This series of listings effectively links the festivity of the Epiphany or Twelfth Night with ‘a jest’ or ‘a toy to mocke an ape’. The connection between the ‘Beffana’ and the idea of a beffa (which in modern Italian still means a ‘practical joke’, usually with a malicious undertone) would have been highlighted by the divergences in spelling whereby the name given for the festivity in the Ingannati’s Prologue is in fact listed in Florio as the noun signifying ‘jest’, while he uses a slightly different spelling (closer to that found in Gli Ingannati I.ii) for the popular name of the Epiphany. Florio himself must have realized that there was something odd in this, and in the 1611 edition of his dictionary the two spellings, ‘Beffanı̀a’ and ‘Beffàna’, are listed as synonymous.7 5 Quoted from the 1569 edition of the play, printed together with the Twelfth Night entertainment with no separate title page: Il Sacrificio. Comedia de gli Intronati— celebrato ne i giuochi d’un Carnovale in Siena. Di nuovo ristampata, & ricorretta. In Venetia, Appresso Altobello Salicato, MDLXIX. (Emphasis added.) 6 John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598), STC 11098, p. 41, EEBO image 31. 7 John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words (London, 1611), STC 11099, p. 58, EEBO image 36. Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Newcastle on January 16, 2017 half years in London, where he stayed at the French Embassy and associated with John Florio. And indeed in John Florio one finds several mentions of Bruno’s works, including as source material for his revised Italian– English dictionary, Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611).3 This note argues that a consideration of the ultimate Italian source of Twelfth Night in conjunction with the first version of Florio’s Italian–English dictionary, A World of Words (1598), helps solve two puzzles concerning Shakespeare’s play: the relevance of the title to the play as a whole; and the link between the main romantic and Plautine plot on the one hand and, on the other, the subplot concerning the gulling of Malvolio.4 The Intronati (whose chosen name means ‘thunder-struck’, i.e. by love) presented their play as originating from a Twelfth-Night misogynistic prank. On the night of the Epiphany, 1532 (o.s. 1531), they had put on an entertainment entitled Il Sacrificio, in which they ostensibly burned mementos from their ladies in order to rid themselves of all thoughts of love. The gentlewomen predictably took offence, and by way of reparation the Accademici then put together Gli Ingannati, ‘virtually in three days’. This is reported in a witty Prologue, full of double-entendres, that refers to Twelfth Night as ‘la notte di Beffana’, using the popular corruption of the name for ‘Epifania’ that is still in use in Italy today (with the modern spelling ‘Befana’). In addition, in act I scene ii of the 423 424 NOTES AND QUERIES 8 Queen Anna’s New World of Words, unnumbered pages, EEBO images 6 and 7. On ‘Sacrificio’, see note 5 above. ‘Inganni’ could refer to Gli Ingannati itself or to either of two other plays, first printed in 1562 and 1592 respectively, that are based on the Sienese comedy. Some interesting considerations on this tangle of Italian comedies are offered in Lawrence, ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?’, 128–29 and n. 35. 9 Cf. Penny Gay, Introduction to Elizabeth Story Donno’s edition of Twelfth Night (Cambridge, 2003), 4. 10 On the impact and import of this revelation, see Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Oxford, 1990), 137–9. 11 Cf. A Worlde of Wordes, p. 129, EEBO image 75: ‘Festa, a feast, a holyday, a banquet, ioy, pleasure, solace, a shew. Also a kinde of simnell, cracknell, or gingerbread.’ See also Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian’, 161, for a dialogue on comedies as enjoyable but frowned upon by preachers, the knaveries contained therein, and ‘la festa’ (‘holy dayes’) as the appropriate time for them, which is found on the first page of Florio’s earlier conversation manual, Firste Fruites (1578). The same association between comedies and holidays occurs on p. 15 of the latter work Elizabethan England of the Italian saying ‘L’Epifania tutte le feste si porta via’, i.e. ‘The Epiphany takes away, ends all holidays’, but it does seem to be an ancient enough saying to have been circulating among Italophones in Shakespeare’s days. The closest English equivalent listed in Tilley is ‘After Christmas comes Lent’ (C367). In Twelfth Night, Feste is only named once, in II.iv. However, upon his first appearance, in I.v, his jesting about ‘fearing no colours’ when one is dead elicits the put down ‘A good lenten answer’ from Maria: if we take together the two proverbs we have just mentioned, the English (‘After Christmas comes Lent’) and the Italian (‘L’Epifania tutte le feste si porta via’), we can appreciate how in the first scene featuring the fool Shakespeare is subtly playing with this character’s name.12 Finally, as well as providing the crucial link between ‘Epiphany’ and ‘mockery’, the page of Florio’s A World of Words that contains the entries on ‘Beffania’, etc. would have helped Shakespeare elucidate an important aspect of the Boccaccian source for All’s Well that Ends Well, another (‘problem’) comedy from about the same time as Twelfth Night: see, on the right-hand column, the entry ‘Beltramo, faire, handsome, goodly.’ ELISABETTA TARANTINO Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford doi:10.1093/notesj/gjw138 ß The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication 19 July, 2016 (STC 11096, EEBO image 28). (The second dialogue of Florio’s Second Frutes, 1591, condemns English comedies and tragedies as mere ‘[r]epresentations of histories, without any decorum’ in a context that suggests idle entertainment, but does not mention ‘feste’.) 12 As already indicated, throughout Twelfth Night Shakespeare conflates elements from different sources. This argument therefore remains valid even in the face of the undoubted recollection of Thomas Nashe’s works in this exchange, i.e. of Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599) in Maria’s reply, and Have with You to Saffron-walden (1596), which contains the phrase ‘fearst no colours’, in Feste’s jest. On the presence of Thomas Nashe in Twelfth Night, including yet another analogue for the gulling of Malvolio, see J. J. M. Tobin, ‘Gabriel Harvey in Illyria’, English Studies, lxi (August, 1980), 318–28. Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Newcastle on January 16, 2017 Concurrently, in the list of sources for this edition of his dictionary, which is three times as large as that for the 1598 version, Florio adds two entries that are connected to the play of Gli Ingannati, i.e. ‘Inganni. Comedia’ and ‘Sacrificio, Comedia’.8 On p. 118 of A World of Words (EEBO image 70), Florio further glosses ‘Epifania’ as ‘the epiphanie or twelftide. Also an apparition or manifestation’. Scene V.i in Twelfth Night is ‘epiphanic’ precisely in this sense, as Sebastian and Viola finally come face to face with each other under the astonished eyes of the assembled cast of characters. As has been remarked, the impact of this scene is greatly increased by Shakespeare having the ‘twins’ confront each other in this way, rather than allowing the heroine to resume first her feminine attire as is the case with Lelia in Gli Ingannati.9 And as is often noted, the name Viola is only ‘manifested’ to the audience in the course of this final scene.10 Thus the title Twelfth Night would have migrated, via Florio’s dictionary, from the occasion of the source play to the gulling of Malvolio, giving the latter the prominence already recognized in Manningham’s entry. Title, plot, and subplot can then be seen to derive from one conglomeration of Italian influences. The name of the fool in Twelfth Night also belongs to this semantic field, since the Italian word ‘feste’ refers to the ‘holidays’, and especially those over Christmas and the New Year.11 I have been unable to find traces in September 2016