Translating for Queen Anne: John Florio’s Decameron

Abstract

With the accession to the English throne of King James VI of Scotland in 1603, the Italo-English language teacher, lexicographer, and translator John Florio found himself in a conspicuously more advantageous position than he had enjoyed in the preceding Elizabethan decades. A number of Florio’s earlier patrons exercised considerable influence in the formative period of the first Stuart court — the dedicatory material to a different pair of English noble ladies preceding each of the three books of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais, published just as Elizabeth was dying in 1603, manifestly chart these patronage relationships — and Florio came to his position in Queen Anne of Denmark’s circle as “Reader in Italian and Groom of the Privy Chamber” through them. The most striking aspect of Florio’s arrival at court, however, is not so much that he had finally managed to realize a long-standing ambition, but rather that it would, in the end, prove to be of such little import. The greater part of Florio’s influential yeomanship in the transmission of Renaissance and early modern Italian cultures had by this time already been accomplished; excepting the revised edition of his Italian-English dictionary in 1611, the most consequential work that he would produce in these final decades of his life would be an English translation of the Decameron, published in 1620 following the death of Queen Anne and the disappearance of the court in which she had provided him such a hard-won place. In this essay I posit a previously unconsidered explanation for Florio’s effective invisibility on the public stage of the Stuart world, one for which Florio’s version of Boccaccio’s collection of novelle provides a number of suggestive clues. I focus in particular on the third story of the second day (Decameron II. 3).