1595 John (or Giovanni) Florio is best remembered now as the man behind Gonzago’s vision of a reformed commonwealth in The Tempest (1610–11). He was born in London around 1553, the son of a fugitive Franciscan friar who had converted to Protestantism and, for his linguistic skills and Protestant sympathies, been taken up by Queen Elizabeth’s chief advisor, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. With John, the family would continue to enjoy royal and aristocratic patronage.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553–1625) more or less invented the short prose exploration of a topic or event that he called the essai (French for ‘trial’ or ‘attempt’). In 1580 he published a collection of 107 of them, ranging from topics of general interest, such as the nature of sadness, virtue and vanity, to more specific political and social observations, like the Battle of Dreux (between Catholics and Huguenots in 1562) and suggestions for moderating the excess show and consumption of the French aristocracy. Montaigne’s tone was easy-going, often ironic; his beliefs were broadly humanistic, his angle of approach surprisingly modern in its moral relativism.
Typical of the Essais is Montaigne’s take on what he had read (in Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo (1511)), about the ‘cannibals’ of the Caribbean. OK, so they take the occasional bit out of each other, but is that any worse than the vicious religious wars that were ravaging Europe? Besides, they live in a world in which food is abundant, illness unknown, social and political rank non-existent. The very words for lying, greed and envy are unknown to them.
‘Of the Caniballes’, Florio’s translation of this essay, puts it like this:
It is a nation … that hath no kind of Trafficke, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politicke superiority, no contracts, successions, no partitions, no successions, … no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle.
Though he may well have read Montaigne’s source, Peter Martyr, there’s little doubt that Shakespeare drew on his friend John Florio for the vision of the ideal commonwealth that Gonzago projects in Act 2, scene 1 of The Tempest:
No kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil …
He is mocked for it in the play (by the bad guys), but Gonzago’s vision endures.