Shakespeare’s French Fruits

Summary

…a book the sprightly raciness of which none can deny… the testament of an age when…a sense of colour and character pervaded all, man-of-action and man-of-letters, so that every gallant is half a poet and every poet half a swasher. On this common ground of courageous merriment they all met; and there it is that Shakespeare and Eliot might have boused together and amused themselves with the chatter and febrile rages of Doll Tearsheet, and by their side some roaring Alsatian bravo…

Jack Lindsay, Forword to The Parlement of Prattlers

John Eliot's picaresque life certainly accords with the most colourful notions of the Elizabethan author. A Warwickshire man, like Shakespeare, who was two years his junior, he spent some time at Brasenose, Oxford, one of the generation of university wits; subsequently, through most of the 1580's, he studied, taught and roamed from place to place in France, Italy and perhaps Spain. A schoolmaster, a hack journalist, a novice for monkhood who was released without taking his vows, he was somehow mixed up in French politics (possibly as a secret agent) and on the assassination of Henri III in 1589 found it expedient to return to his native country. During the next four years Eliot was in London, teaching French in rivalry with the Huguenot refugees and translating political tracts from across the Channel for Wolfe, the bookseller who specialized in French affairs.