John Florio

Giovanni Florio (1552 or 1553 – 1625), known as John Florio, was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I. He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in England. Florio contributed 1,149 words to the English language, placing third after Chaucer (with 2,012 words) and Shakespeare (with 1,969 words), in the linguistic analysis conducted by Stanford professor John Willinsky.

Florio was the first translator of Montaigne into English, possibly the first translator of Boccaccio into English and he wrote the first comprehensive Italian–English dictionary (surpassing the only previous modest Italian–English dictionary by William Thomas published in 1550).

Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was a personal friend, and Jonson hailed Florio as "loving father" and "ayde of his muses". Philosopher Giordano Bruno was also a personal friend; Florio met the Italian philosopher in London, while both of them were residing at the French embassy. Bruno wrote and published in London his six most celebrated moral dialogues, including ''La cena de le ceneri'' (''The Ash Wednesday Supper'', 1584), in which Florio is mentioned as Bruno's companion.

John Florio worked as tutor to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton; from 1604 he became Groom of the Privy Chamber to Queen Anne, until her death in 1619. Later in his life, Florio was patronised by William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, whom he bequeathed his library.

Many of the intertextual borrowings by Shakespeare from Florio's works have been long attested, and assumptions have been made to claim secret connections between Florio and Shakespeare, even asserting a putative identity of Florio with the author of Shakespeare's works. Provided by Wikipedia