Crowdsourcing Shakespeare: The Search for John Florio's Library

Arthur Paone has perhaps invented a new research tool, something he calls “crowdsourcing research” to tackle what would otherwise be a monumental task. The task is to track down the 340 Italian, French and Spanish books that had been in the library of an Elizabethan lexicologist, John Florio. In 1625 Florio bequeathed the books to a Lord who apparently renounced the bequest. The interesting thing about those 340 books is that there is a group of scholars who believe that John Florio was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Hence a scrutiny of those books might answer many questions if indeed they had served as the source material for the plays written in the name of William Shakespeare. Where did they go? Were they kept together? The only way to answer these questions is to search every library in England that contains rare books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, a monumental project. But Paone makes it simple and doable. What he does in this pamphlet is to challenge the university students of England to get into those libraries, open the relevant rare books and see if there are any traces of John Florio in them. The crowdsourcing research procedure will have each of those students that find anything interesting to send them to Paone who will gather their findings together for all the world to examine.