Note 6 — INTRODUCTORY
Reading edition
It is only necessary to read the life of John Florio in the Dict. of National Biography or the Encyc. Brit. to appreciate the absurdity of this attempt to find him in Shakespeare’s Falstaff. An almost equally silly attempt has been made by another sapient critic to identify him with Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Now no two characters could be more dissimilar than those of Falstaff and Holofernes, yet Florio according to one wiseacre was the prototype of the former, and according to another wiseacre of the latter! But there is no limit to the absurdities which are symptomatic of the rabies Stratfordiana.