It’s confession time; I’m an annotator (a person who adds explanatory or critical notes to a text) and often write in the margins of my own books to highlight passages I find challenging or that I want to remember.  Though an anathema to some, it’s actually as ancient a practice as books themselves.  As Desiderius Erasmus wrote 500 years ago, “I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds.”  My library includes some books that annotate other books. How else to easily and authoritatively expand an alluring detail?  For instance, why did Frank Baum come up with the name Oz?  “The generally accepted story,” according to “The Annotated Wizard of Oz,” by Michael Hearn, is that one evening while Baum was telling his children a story about Dorothy’s adventures, one asked what this wonderful land was called.  Baum’s eye alighted on a two-drawer filing cabinet labeled “A-N” and “O-Z,” and Oz was born.  

            My personal library also contains “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes,” “The Landmark Herodotus,” “The Riverside Shakespeare,” and other enlargers of favorite books.  When my sweetie recently re-read to me the Christmas chapter from “Wind in the Willows,” I followed along in the annotated version and learned that a central character, the Water Rat, was actually a water vole.  Earlier, following a haircut and shower, I announced I was “shaven and shorn,” and the memory bank I live with recalled that came from “The House That Jack Built” nursery rhyme.  After hauling out William and Ceil Baring-Gould’s “The Annotated Mother Goose” we found that it’s a cumulative poem (“in which the events are progressively narrated leading to an end where the interlinking becomes obvious,” according to Allnursersyrhymnes.com) like “Twelve Days of Christmas” and “There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.”  Sure enough, when, as part of Jack’s home construction, “the maiden all forlorn, who milked the cow with the crumpled horn” gets married to “the man all tattered and torn,” the ceremony’s performed by “the priest all shaven and shorn.” 

            Most nursery rhymes were originally so ephemeral that they long predate their first appearances in print.  “The oldest children’s songs for which records exist are lullabies” that “can be found in every human culture,” according to Wikipedia, and the “Roman nurses’ lullaby, ‘Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacta’ … may be the oldest to survive.”  Most of the versions we’re familiar with weren’t printed until the late 18^th century or early 19^th, and many were often quite dark and political.  After the innocuous “Goosey Goosey Gander” was published, “it was appended with some disturbing lines. ‘here I met an old man, who wouldn’t say his prayers, so I took him by his left leg and threw him down the stairs’.   According to noted English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie … ‘They are much the same as the lines which school-children address to the cranefly (“Daddy-long-legs”), sometimes pulling off its legs as they repeat,’ Old Father Long-Legs/ Can’t say his prayers;/ Take him by the left leg,/ And throw him down the stairs.”  “Baa Baa Black Sheep” had political undertones, according to Stellarhistory.com.  “The genesis of this rhyme is steeped in economic history, specifically that of the 13th century when King Edward I introduced a substantial tax on wool. During this period, the taxation laws decreed that for every three sacks of wool one owned, two sacks had to be given away — one to the King and one to the Church.”  And “the wool derived from a black sheep held less value compared to its white counterpart because it could not be dyed into other colors, thus limiting its marketability. This less desirable black wool often got left behind, hence the phrase in the rhyme that there was ‘none left for the little shepherd boy who lives down the lane.’”

            UCLA’s Clark library has an impressive collection of annotated books in which famous people made handwritten notes.  One is of particular interest: a copy of Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays” translated into English by John Florio in 1603 with Florio’s own notes in the margin.  Montaigne’s musings were revolutionary when he wrote them, and he spoke to readers of all descriptions.  As the London Times’ Bernard Levin (who died in 2004 and the Times called “the most famous journalist of his day”) asserted, “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put the book down at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’”  That has been my experience, and Levin and I aren’t alone.  Ralph Emerson wrote, “Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers.”  Florio’s translation of the “Essays” swept through England’s intelligentsia.  In “Shakespeare’s encounter with Michel de Montaigne,” an Oxford University Press blog article by William Hamlin, he wrote “due to Montaigne’s penchant for examining a given subject from multiple perspectives, writers have always found a treasure-trove of fresh perceptions and striking opinions in his prose …. Montaigne is often singled out as the most forward-looking writer of the Renaissance, and it’s not hard to see why.  His skeptical predisposition combined with his penetrating intelligence must have seemed irresistibly attractive to many English readers. Shakespeare was likely among them.   

Once Florio so ably translated Montaigne’s “Essay” into English, it drew Shakespeare like a bear to honey.  As Hamlin noted, “Of all the books that Shakespeare encountered – whether he owned them, borrowed them, or flipped through their pages in a bookstall near St. Paul’s – the most original and engrossing may well have been the Essays of Michel de Montaigne as translated by the scholar John Florio. Published in 1603, this work was probably known to Shakespeare even before it appeared in print. Florio, after all, had obtained the patronage of the Earl of Southampton in the early 1590s – the same Earl to whom Shakespeare had dedicated Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. So there’s every likelihood that the two writers met and talked shop within the Southampton circle …. Montaigne, in other words, was something of a sensation in late sixteenth-century London. And Shakespeare, a voracious and opportunistic reader, would have been curious to know whether this was a writer from whom he might learn, take pleasure, or steal.  He probably did all three. But we can only demonstrate the thefts.”  For one of many examples, “The Tempest includes an oration by Gonzalo lifted word-for-word from Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals.”  Hamlin added that, “Apart from Shakespearean drama itself, there’s scarcely another work from Elizabethan England that offers a similar display of lexical brio.”  And, according to the philosopher Nietzsche, “Shakespeare was Montaigne’s best reader.”  

Who was this Florio?  He was “the most important Renaissance humanist in England,” according to Wikipedia, and “contributed 1,149 words to the English language [including tarnish, conscientious, facilitate, amusing, regret, emotion, and the neutral pronoun “its.”], placing third after Chaucer (with 2,012 words) and Shakespeare (with 1,969 words).”  Florio began as the son of a Jewish Italian Franciscan friar who converted to the protestant faith and fled to London to avoid the Inquisition. There he married, was befriended by some powerful noblemen, and John was born in 1552, two years before Bloody Mary exiled all protestant foreigners.  The Florios moved to Switzerland where John received a strong humanist education and became fluently multilingual.  He returned to England at age 19, and at 25 he published his first book, “Firste Fruites,” a collection of “familiar speech, merry proverbs, witty sentences, and golden sayings” that provides “a perfect introduction to the Italian and English tongues.” 

A powerful family friend, William Cecil, sent Florio to Oxford, where he blossomed as a lexicographer and translator.  As scholar Herman Haller wrote, Florio’s 75,000-word dictionary, “A World of Words,” “is a work of art in itself,” and fifty of the 249 which he consulted in compiling the work were on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.

At 31 Florio lived and worked at the French embassy as the ambassador’s translator, personal secretary and legal representative.  In 1598 Florio published “A World of Words,” and five years afterwards, his extremely readable translation of Montaigne’s “Essays.”  Florio’s command of English easily rivaled Shakespeare’s, and Montaigne’s introspective musings was fresh and exiting, and became an English bestseller.  It also became one of Shakespeare’s primary sources of inspiration. Florio was as likeable as he was exceptional and went on to become a leading courtier to the king and queen and close friends of the likes of Giordano Bruno and Ben Jonson (who called Florio “his loving Father & worthy friend” in his annotation to his book “Volpone”), and he left behind his 370-book library – enormous for the time.  Mine’s much larger, for I’ve learned, as Montaigne put it, “To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.”