rs so apprehended may be shown by the light of contemporary
social, literary, or political records to have been, in some measure, a
reflection of a living model. Shakespeare had literally, in his own
phrase, held "the mirror up to nature"; the reflection, however, being
heightened and vivified by the infusion of his own rare sensibility, and
the power of his dramatic genius.

With all his genius Shakespeare was yet mortal, and human creativeness
cannot transcend nature. What we call creativeness, even in the greatest
artists, is but a fineness of sensibility and cognition, or rather
recognition, coupled with the power to express what they see and feel in
nature.

As a large number of Shakespeare's plays were written primarily for
private or Court presentation, to edify or amuse his patron and his
patron's friends, or with their immediate political or factional
interests in mind to influence the Court in their favour, the shadowed
purposes of such plays, the acting or speaking of a character "from
those parts of the composition, which are inferred only, and not
distinctly shewn," as well as a number of hitherto supposedly
inexplicable asides and allusions, such as Bottom's "reason and love
keep little company together nowadays; the more the pity, that some
honest neighbours will not make them friends," would give to those
acquaintances who were in Shakespeare's confidence an added zest and
interest in such plays quite lacking to the uninitiated, or to a modern
audience.

I propose in this chapter to demonstrate the facts that John Florio--the
translator of _Montaigne's Essays_ and tutor of languages to
Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton--was Shakespeare's
original for Sir John Falstaff and other of his characters; that the
Earl of Southampton and Lady Southampton were cognizant of the shadowed
identity, and that Florio himself recognised and angrily resented the
characterisation when a knowledge of its personal application had spread
among their mutual acquaintances.

In preceding chapters and in former books[29] I have advanced evidence
of a cumulative nature for Southampton's identity as the patron
addressed in the Sonnets; the identity of Chapman as the "rival poet,"
and Shakespeare's caricature of him as Holofernes; the identity of
Matthew Roydon as the author of _Willobie his Avisa_, as well as
Shakespeare's caricature of him as the curate Nathaniel; and the
identity of Mistress Davenant as the "dark