Education and Power: Shakespeare, Florio and the Basilikon Doron,

When King James VI of Scotland ascended to the throne of England in 1603, John Florio, well known as one of the most outstanding interpreters of Italian humanistic culture in Elizabethan England, decided to translate his Basilikon Doron into Italian. In the same years in which James was writing his pedagogical treatise, and speculation about the successor of Queen Elizabeth I and the fear of instability and disorder haunted the English subjects, Shakespeare drew the eyes of the English spectators to the meanders of statecraft, and, especially in his Histories, combined a concern for education with the anxieties of an unsettled succession and the meaning of a royal persona. Both Florio and Shakespeare were certainly familiar with the humanist pedagogical discussion and in their respective capacities as a translator and dramatist were reacting to the issues it posed; translations and plays as textual and performative expressions interacting with power, presented themselves as privileged observatories on the linguistic and political features of the English Renaissance. The essay discusses precisely how different text-types exploited their own linguistic peculiarities to represent education to power: in other words, how the playwright’s and the translator’s voices, the one being dialogical and problem-oriented, the other essentially mimetic and literal, interpreted humanist precepts on education, in dialogue and confrontation with the king’s voice.