Florio also compiled the largest Italian-English dictionary of the time in 1598. Called the Worlde of Words, it contained a massive 44 000 entries. We also have a copy of this book in our collections. Interestingly, despite his otherwise Puritan tendencies, Florio’s dedication to teaching authentic colloquial language and to his humanist ideals were such that he included a wealth of ‘rude’ words in his dictionary, including one of the earliest printed examples of the ‘f’ word! It didn’t take much searching to find several other words we were surprised to see in an early printed book!
Florio’s language learning books have been linked to Shakespeare’s plays and in particular to Love’s Labour’s Lost, which begins at the RST this week. Some have seen Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost as a parody of Florio (of his scholarly pedantry). The very title of this play seems linked to a line in Florio’s earlier dialogue book, First Fruits:
“We need not speak so much of love, all books are full of love, with so many authors, that it were labour lost to speak of Love.”
Of course modern foreign language teaching actually takes centre stage in Act III, Scene 4 of Henry V, whenAlice, the old gentlewoman attempts to teach Katherine English, resulting in an amusing franglais conversation. Could Shakespeare have been inspired to write this by the likes of Florio and his style of teaching with the emphasis on conversation and ‘natural’ language acquisition?
