[80] All these and all that els the Comick Stage
With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
By which mans life in his likest image
Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced . . .
And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock her selfe and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly meriment
Is also deaded and in dolour drent.—(ll. 199-210).
[81a] A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand, was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of Spenser’s Works (cf. Outlines, ii. 394-5).
But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of bonnie and sweete nectar flowe,
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell
Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (ll. 217-22).
[83] Section IX. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597.
[84] Minto, Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The sonnet, headed ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ runs:
Sweet friend whose name agrees with thy increase
How fit arrival art thou of the Spring!
For when each branch hath left his flourishing,
And green-locked Summer’s shady pleasures cease:
She makes the Winter’s storms repose in peace,
And spends her franchise on each living thing:
The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing,
Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release.
So when that all our English Wits lay dead,
(Except the laurel that is ever green)
Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o’erspread,
And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen.
Such fruits, such flow’rets of morality,
Were ne’er before brought out of Italy.
Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet xcviii. beginning:
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
But like descriptions of Spring and Summer formed a topic that was common to all the sonnets of the period. Much has been written of Shakespeare’s alleged acquaintance with Florio. Farmer and Warburton argue that Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. They chiefly rely on Florio’s bombastic prefaces to his Worlde of Wordes and his translation of Montaigne’s Essays (1603). There is nothing there to justify the suggestion. Florio writes more in the vein of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher of languages to noblemen, he bears no resemblance to Holofernes, a village schoolmaster. Shakespeare doubtless knew Florio as Southampton’s protégé, and read his fine translation of Montaigne’s Essays with delight. He quotes from it in The Tempest: see p. 253.