Giovanni Florio's First Fruites (1578): dialogue and cultural exchange in Elizabethan England

© 2013 Dr. David ChidgeyIn this thesis I investigate the ambitious nature of Giovanni Florio’s First Fruites (1578), an Italian-English dialogue manual in parallel-text format. The ambitiousness of the text has been suggested by Frances Yates (1934), Michael Wyatt (2005) and, most importantly, Florio himself. Yates assessed Florio’s outlook as more literary and courtly than his predecessors, and Wyatt noted that the text tackles a variety of difficult grammatical issues from the opening dialogue. Their reading of First Fruites as ambitious is based on an analysis of its language pedagogy in comparison to Claudius Hollyband’s The French Littelton (1576). This thesis argues that Florio took advantage of a broader tradition of language manuals, and situates the text within that tradition. The connections between First Fruites and the earlier tradition (which are discussed for the first time in this work) show that Florio's manual not only taught English and Italian cultures and languages but also provided an introduction to vernacular rhetoric and literature for the benefit of the budding English diplomatic and courtly elite. Florio was born in London c. 1553. His father, Michel Angelo Florio, was an Italian Protestant who had fled the Roman Inquisition and emigrated to England during the reign of Edward VI, where he came under the protection of John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland. On the ascension of the Catholic Queen Mary I to the throne, Michel Angelo and his family were forced to flee England and settle in Switzerland. Sometime in the early-to-mid 1570s Giovanni returned to the land of his birth and a nation that had re-embraced Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth I. According to the early Oxford historian Anthony à Wood, he was appointed tutor in the Italian and French languages to Emmanuel Barnes at Oxford University about 1576. Florio’s time at Oxford exposed him to an intellectual milieu of progressive young scholars who were connected or sought connection with the entourage of the Earl of Leicester at court, and they had a strong interest in Italian vernacular culture. His appointment as tutor to Barnes is consistent with studies of Oxford in the sixteenth century that have demonstrated that under the supervision of their tutors progressive students often pursued innovative studies in modern languages that were complementary to the requirements of the university statutes. It is my contention that the ambitious project behind First Fruites was shaped in part by Florio’s experiences at Oxford, and by what he saw as the need of scholars seeking political or diplomatic careers at the Elizabethan court to be able to undertake informed study of foreign vernacular cultures, the fulfilment of which required skills in ‘familiar’ conversational language and knowledge of rhetorical precepts in the foreign vernaculars. First Fruites is dedicated to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who was one of the most senior courtier-politicians in Queen Elizabeth’s government and the most prominent advocate of things Italian in the Elizabethan period. It is also addressed to culturally diverse readership communities: Gentilhuomini Inglesi (English Gentlemen) and Gentilhuomini e Mercanti Italiani (Italian Gentlemen and Merchants). First Fruites is structured into three sections of diverse functionality. The first group of seventeen dialogues focuses on ‘familiar speech’ with diverse interlocutors in a variety of situations. They all have the Italian verb parlar (meaning ‘to talk’ or simply ‘speech’) in their title, indicating that they were mainly envisaged as conversational exercises. The next group of four dialogues contain a range of sayings, proverbs and other sententia. The third group of twenty-one dialogues is didactic in style rather than conversational, in that the dialogues cover a wide range of subject matter often presented in monologic form. They nearly all have the Italian words discorsi (meaning a speech or address on a certain matter) or ragionamenti (meaning reasoning or a line of argument on a certain matter) in their title and their contents are not so much familiar, conversational talk as moral and/or didactic abstractions on a diversity of topics. The dialogues of the first group are closest in concept to the dialogue-manual tradition, and much of the existing literature on First Fruites has tended to focus on them. The dialogues of the ‘Ragionamenti e Discorsi’ group have received very little scholarly attention (the notable exception being Yates’s identification and analysis of dialogues 34, 36-9, 41 and 42 as extracts from Portonaris’s Italian translation of the writings of the Spanish bishop Antonio Guevara). Del Re (1936) read the first seventeen dialogues of First Fruites – the ‘Parlar’ group - as having been primarily designed for Italians studying English. Following from Del Re, Wyatt recognized that the cultural descriptions of England in chapter fifteen of the text would have been useful to a newly arrived Italian merchant. My research supports these views and also shows that the ‘Parlar’ group represents an innovative and sophisticated approach to the learning of ‘familiar speech’ in both Italian and English, within an English cultural context. The ‘Parlar’ dialogues appealed to a culturally diverse patronage of political and mercantile elites: they offered conversational instruction in Italian (for ‘English Gentlemen’) and English (for ‘Italian Gentlemen and Merchants’) that also provided cultural enlightenment for the benefit of the latter readership. The final section of First Fruites - the ‘Ragionamenti e Discorsi’ group - represents a fundamental shift in the dialogue-manual tradition. This section reflects the ambition of the text to appeal to ‘English Gentlemen’ seeking higher calling to the Elizabethan court, who needed to be able to undertake informed study of foreign vernacular cultures, the fulfilment of which required more than just skills in ‘familiar’ conversational language. It also required the ability to perform rhetorical analysis of speeches, and the dialectical reading of literature in the foreign vernacular. ‘Familiar’ talk in the vernacular enabled the courtier-diplomat to conduct informal discussions on the international court scene, while rhetorical and dialectical precepts were important for recognising particular techniques of persuasion and argument that could be stored and imitated in original compositions. The ‘Ragionamenti e Discorsi’ dialogues showcase aspects of Italian vernacular rhetoric and were designed by Florio to assist his ‘English Gentlemen’ readership in the construction of eloquent, persuasive language of use to the English state in its political, commercial and cultural dealings with foreign nations. This thesis breaks new ground in the scholarship on Florio and Early Modern language manuals because it is the first monographic study of First Fruites that explains, using evidence from the text and in light of the pre-Florian tradition of the dialogue manual genre in England, the extent to which Florio’s first language manual was such an ambitious text