Shakespeare's Montaigne Read online

  MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE (1533–1592) was born in Aquitaine, not far from Bordeaux, in the château of his wealthy aristocratic family. Educated by his father in Latin and Greek from an early age, Montaigne attended boarding school in Bordeaux before studying law in Toulouse. He then embarked on a distinguished public career, serving as a counselor of court in Périgueux and Bordeaux, becoming a courtier to Charles the IX, and receiving the collar of the Order of Saint Michael. After the death of his father in 1568, Montaigne succeeded to the title of Lord of Montaigne, and in 1571 he retired from public life in order to devote himself to reading and writing, publishing the first two volumes of his essays in 1580 and a third in 1588. From 1581 to 1585, he was the elected mayor of Bordeaux, confronting ongoing strife between Catholics and Protestants as well as an outbreak of the plague. Married to Françoise de Cassaigne, Montaigne was the father of six daughters, only one of whom survived into adulthood. He continued to write new essays and to add new material to the existing ones until the end of his life. The complete essays appeared posthumously in 1595.

  JOHN FLORIO (1553–1625) was born in London, the son of Michelangelo Florio, a Tuscan convert to Protestantism who had moved to England because of his religious beliefs and who served as a language tutor to several highborn English families. Raised in Italian-speaking Switzerland and Germany, where his father fled after the Catholic Queen Mary I came to the English throne, John Florio returned to England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and followed in his father’s footsteps as an instructor of languages, teaching French and Italian at Magdalen College, Oxford, and, under King James I, working as a private tutor to the Crown Prince and the Queen Consort. Florio’s works include First Fruits, which yield Familiar Speech, Merry Proverbs, Witty Sentences, and Golden Sayings; A Perfect Induction to the Italian and English Tongues; Second Fruits, to be gathered of Twelve Trees, of divers but delightsome Tastes to the Tongues of Italian and English men; Garden of Recreation, yielding six thousand Italian Proverbs; an Italian–English dictionary, A World of Words (the second edition of which was entitled Queen Anna’s New World of Words); and his celebrated translation of Montaigne’s Essays.

  STEPHEN GREENBLATT is the author of, among other books, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the National Book Award, the James Russell Lowell Award, and the Pulitzer Prize). He is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.

  PETER G. PLATT is a professor and chair of English at Barnard College. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (2009) and Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (1997), and the editor of Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (1999). He has written articles about Shakespeare, Renaissance poetics and rhetoric, and John Florio. He is currently writing a book about Shakespeare and Montaigne.

  SHAKESPEARE’S MONTAIGNE

  The Florio Translation of the Essays

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  Translated from the French by

  JOHN FLORIO

  Edited and with an introduction by

  STEPHEN GREENBLATT

  Edited, modernized, and annotated by

  PETER G. PLATT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2014 by NYREV, Inc.

  Introductory essays and notes copyright © 2014 by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Hercules Segers, Three Books, c. 1620–30; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Montaigne, Michel de, 1533–1592.

  [Essais. Selections. English]

  Shakespeare’s Montaigne / by Michel de Montaigne ; translated by John Florio ; edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-722-8 (paperback)

  I. Florio, John, 1553?–1625, translator. II. Greenblatt, Stephen, 1943– III. Platt, Peter. IV. Title.

  PQ1642.E6G74 2014

  844'.3—dc23

  2013043477

  ISBN 978-1-59017-734-1

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Shakespeare’s Montaigne by Stephen Greenblatt

  “I am an Englishman in Italian”: John Florio and the Translation of Montaigne by Peter G. Platt

  Acknowledgments

  Note on the Text

  Dedicatory Poem by Samuel Daniel

  To the Courteous Reader (selections) by John Florio

  The Author to the Reader by Michel de Montaigne

  THE ESSAYS

  That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

  It Is Folly to Refer Truth or Falsehood to Our Sufficiency

  Of Friendship

  Of the Cannibals

  Of the Inequality That Is Between Us

  Of Age

  Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions

  A Custom of the Isle of Cea

  Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children

  An Apology of Raymond Sebond (selections)

  We Taste Nothing Purely

  Of a Monstrous Child

  Of Repenting

  Of Three Commerces or Societies

  Of Diverting or Diversion

  Upon Some Verses of Virgil (selections)

  Of Coaches

  Of the Lame or Cripple

  Of Experience (selections)

  Selected Bibliography

  Appendix: Floriolegium

  Notes

  Shakespeare’s Montaigne

  1

  WHEN, near the end of his career, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the tragicomic romance that seems at least in retrospect to signal his impending retirement to Stratford, he had in his mind and quite possibly on his desk a book of Montaigne’s Essays. One of those essays, “Of the Cannibals,” has long been recognized as a source upon which Shakespeare was clearly drawing.

  The playwright had long had some degree of acquaintance with French culture and language. For some time in and around 1604 he rented rooms in a house on Silver Street in London that belonged to a family of French Huguenots—Protestant refugees from religious persecution in their own country. Shakespeare probably already knew some French before he moved to Silver Street: He seems to have read in their original language several of the French sources he used in his plays, and Henry V (1599) includes a comical scene in which the French princess, instructed by her waiting gentlewoman, tries to learn the English words for the parts of the body: “La main, de hand; les doigts, de fingres. Je pense que je suis la bonne écolière; j’ai gagné deux mots d’anglais vitement.” The scene ends with a flurry of dirty puns that depends on a familiarity with French obscenities.

  Yet close attention to the allusions in The Tempest and elsewhere makes clear that Shakespeare read Montaigne not in French but in an English translation. That translation, published in a handsome folio edition in London in 1603, was by John Florio. For Shakespeare—and not for Shakespeare alone but for virtually all of his English contemporaries—Montaigne was Florio’s Montaigne. The essays selected here, in their rich Elizabethan idiom and wildly
inventive turns of phrase, constitute the way Montaigne spoke to Renaissance England.

  Shakespeare quite possibly knew Florio, who was twelve years his senior, personally. English-born, the son of Italian Protestant refugees, Florio was on friendly terms with such writers as Ben Jonson and Samuel Daniel. In the early 1590s, he was a tutor to the Earl of Southampton, the wealthy nobleman to whom Shakespeare dedicated two poems in 1593 and 1594. But it is not simply a likely personal connection that accounts for the fact that Shakespeare read Montaigne in Florio’s translation. The translation seemed to address English readers of Shakespeare’s time with unusual directness and intensity.

  It is not that the translation was impeccably accurate. Montaigne’s French is often difficult and occasionally obscure, and there were many occasions in which the translator was venturing no more than an educated guess. But Florio was an exceptionally gifted linguist, steeped in Italian and French and at the same time in love with the resources of the English language. He had the great good fortune to be working at the moment when that language was at its most vital. The brilliance of his achievement was so generally acknowledged that even those English readers with very good command of French—John Donne, Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton, to name a few—chose to encounter Montaigne through Florio’s English. To read the Essays in Florio’s translation is to read them, as it were, over the shoulders of some of England’s greatest writers.

  2

  In 1580 when Shakespeare was an unknown sixteen-year-old with very dim prospects, Montaigne, then at the ripe age of forty-seven, published the first two books of his essays. Nine years earlier, he had made the decision to withdraw from the public sphere and to retire to his estate for a life devoted to reading and thinking. Montaigne was independently wealthy. In the fifteenth century his paternal great-grandfather had made a fortune as a merchant and had bought the château near Bordeaux where Montaigne was born in 1533, thereby transforming himself and his descendants into the hereditary lords of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, had as a young man been a soldier in the French wars in Italy and had served as the mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez) of Toulouse, was descended from a wealthy family of Spanish Jewish origin that had converted to Catholicism. Michel Eyquem—the man we know as Montaigne—was their third son, but the death of his two elder brothers meant that he became the head of the family and the heir to the title.

  But if from an economic perspective Montaigne’s decision to retire was not particularly fraught, nonetheless it was for him personally a momentous and difficult one. Though still fairly young, he had been active in public affairs for years. At the age of twenty-one, he had been made a counselor, first in Périgueux and then in the Bordeaux parliament, and he had been leading a vigorous political and social life both in his own region and in the royal court in Paris. By the 1550s France was in the grip of profound tensions between Catholics and Protestants that would eventually erupt into full-scale massacre and civil war, and there were strong incentives for people of goodwill to dedicate their energies to an attempt to avert the looming disaster. One eloquent expression of the intellectual, moral, and political ferment that Montaigne and his generation experienced is the daring treatise against tyranny written by his closest friend, Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow counselor at Bordeaux. The treatise, which captured Montaigne’s admiring attention and sparked the friendship that arose between them, evokes a moment in which thoughtful men and women were asking the most basic questions about the social order, the oppressive force of custom, the nature of obedience, and the ineradicable longing for liberty.

  In his great essay “Of Friendship,” Montaigne bears witness to the intensity of the bond between himself and La Boétie—“We were co-partners in all things”—and to the almost unbearable grief brought about by his friend’s untimely death in 1563. Nothing in his subsequent life, including his marriage in 1565, came close to the emotional depth of this relationship, and he mourned its loss with far more passionate grief than he expressed at the death of five of the six children born to him by his wife.

  La Boétie’s death, followed by the death in 1568 of his father, played an important role in enabling Montaigne to reach his decision to retire in 1571. Yet even in the wake of this decision, he remained far more involved in the public realm than the tone of his essays suggests. He tried unsuccessfully, after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, to mediate between the Catholic Henri de Guise and the Protestant Henri de Navarre; he served two two-year terms as the mayor of Bordeaux; he acted as an informal, confidential adviser to successive kings and to important men and women in the court. He took part in the siege by Catholic forces of the Protestant stronghold of La Fère; he was arrested in Paris in 1588 on orders of the Catholic League and then quickly released; constantly attempting to moderate murderous religious passions, he was distrusted and attacked by zealots on both sides. And in the midst of these public affairs, he continued to manage his large, complex estate with its extensive landholdings; he tried to protect his family and dependents from the periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague (which during one of his terms of office killed nearly half the inhabitants of Bordeaux); he visited the mineral baths of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy in the hope of some relief from the excruciating pain of the kidney stones by which he was afflicted. His was not an untroubled life of solitary meditation.

  Yet at its vital center was the resolution he inscribed in Latin on the wall of a little study next to the library in his house: “In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the service of the court and public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated to it his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”1 Though as these words suggest he embarked on some home improvements, the real fruit of this retirement was not the projected completion of his ancestral abode—for when is a house ever truly completed?—but rather the writing of the essays in which Montaigne continues to live.

  The essays—some of the earliest of which are less than a page in length—may have begun as little more than random jottings. Renaissance gentlemen made a practice of writing down in what were called commonplace books interesting thoughts or felicitous turns of phrase that they encountered in the course of their reading. A passionate reader from his youth, Montaigne had assembled in a room on the third floor of a tower in his château an unusually large collection of books, centered on classics in the Latin language in which he was perfectly fluent. In his essay “Of Three Commerces or Societies,” Montaigne gives us a glimpse of his time in this room:

  At home I betake me somewhat the oftener to my library, whence all at once I command and survey all my household. It is seated in the chief entry of my house; thence I behold under me my garden, my base court, my yard, and look even into most rooms of my house. There, without order, without method, and by piecemeals I turn over and ransack now one book, and now another. Sometimes I muse and rave; and walking up and down, I indite and enregister these my humors, these my conceits.

  “Without order, without method, and by piecemeals”—Montaigne’s account of his ransacking of books is not, as it would be among many of his contemporaries, a piece of calculated modesty, meant to hide his systematic labor; it gets at something real, not only in the way he read but in the way he thought and wrote. The genius of the essays is bound up with his realization that he should trust the apparently random motions of his mind, not forcing them into coherent order but “enregistering” them as they passed. He allowed himself to “try out” his mind’s faculties—the French word “essai” means a trial—by recording whatever struck him and made him “muse and rave.” And in doing so, he came to realize he could capture and transmit crucial elem
ents of his lived life.

  Montaigne’s essays are not an autobiography in any familiar sense. While they are full of personal details, they do not attempt to narrate what several of Shakespeare’s characters call “the story of my life.” Montaigne seems to have been allergic to sequential order and suspicious of biographical coherence. He eschewed the desire to construct an ennobling image of himself, for he knew perfectly well that such ideal pictures are at best partial and, still more often, fraudulent. He would not present himself as the fixed embodiment of this or that quality, for he experienced existence as a succession of inconsistent and disjointed thoughts and impulses. He could not narrate his life as a story of heroic virtue or indeed as a story of anything else, for precisely by virtue of being alive his existence was ongoing, incomplete, unfinished. “It is myself I portray,” he tells the reader, and therefore he wishes his imperfections and his natural form to be “read to the life.” What this means, as we learn when we encounter Montaigne’s writing, is that he is constantly in motion.

  To be sure, as he notes in his great essay “Of Repenting,” “There is no man (if he listen to himself) that doth not discover in himself a peculiar form of his, a swaying form, which wrestleth against the institution and against the tempest of passions which are contrary unto him.” But for Montaigne, this “swaying form”—une forme maistresse—does not cancel out or even diminish the ceaseless vicissitudes to which he and everyone else is subject. These vicissitudes are no mere accidents, set against an enduring substance; they are, Montaigne concludes, what it means to exist:

  I cannot settle my object. It goeth so unquietly and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this plight, as it is at the instant I amuse myself about it. I describe not the essence but the passage. Not a passage from age to age, or, as the people reckon, from seven years to seven, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history must be fitted to the present.