Shakespeare's Montaigne Read online

  Why share such details? Because for Montaigne everything in a life is significant and because a preference for radishes has the same weight as the most exalted metaphysical reflection. “What egregious fools are we?” he writes, thinking of all the times we lament that we “have done nothing this day” (a lament that is, I assume, familiar to all of us). “What,” Montaigne exclaims, “have you not lived?” Living is “not only the fundamental but the noblest of your occupations.”

  Montaigne has shifted in these later essays from the Stoical pursuit of invulnerability in the face of pain and death to the goal that characterized the Stoics’ great philosophical opponents, the Epicureans: the pursuit of pleasure. The true meaning of this pursuit is not a feverish search for more and more extravagant delights; such a search seemed to him ridiculous and ultimately destructive. Rather, he wrote, “the most usual and common form of life is the best.” The key is to value ordinary existence and not to succumb to those ascetic moralists—and there were many in Montaigne’s world—who preached contempt for the flesh and for the whole transient, mortal world. “And of all the infirmities we have the most savage is to despise our being.”

  Against any such desire to escape from the human condition, Montaigne urged the simple cherishing of life. This cherishing he summed up in a sentence that Florio translates with perfect directness: “It is an absolute perfection and as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his being loyally.”

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  The progression I have just described, from Stoicism to skepticism to an Epicurean embrace of loyalty to one’s being, can be teased out of the different layers of Montaigne’s evolving text. But, as I have already remarked, the progression would have been much less visible to early readers, whether they knew the essays from de Gourney’s 1588 edition or from Florio’s translation. And in truth its significance can be exaggerated. For it is clear from the quotations assembled in “That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” that Montaigne has already been passionately reading and absorbing the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. When in a passage from the earliest version of that early essay Montaigne writes “Let death seize upon me whilst I am setting my cabbages, careless of her dart, but more of my unperfect garden,” we are encountering a wish we might well encounter in the last of his writings. So too the deep skepticism he articulates in “An Apology of Raymond Sebond” does not appear for the first time there or disappear thereafter; it simply takes its place alongside a more fully articulated desire to enjoy and cherish his life.

  It is important to grasp this constant interplay of different perspectives, in part because it is true to Montaigne’s cheerfully professed taste for contradicting himself and in part because it is an aspect of the text that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have experienced. Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson complained of those who read widely and write down, without any concern for consistency, whatever strikes them. “By which meanes,” he observes, “it happens, that what they have discredited, and impugned in one worke, they have before, or after, extolled the same in another.” What they reveal in doing so is not an interesting change in viewpoint but simply their own predominant quality, namely folly. “Such are all the Essayists,” Jonson writes, disclosing the object of his particular contempt, “even their Master Mountaigne.”3 Shakespeare would certainly have noted the same feature in Montaigne’s writing. We do not know if it bothered him, as it did Jonson; what we do know is that he repeatedly made forays into the essays to seize upon things he thought he could use.

  Two instances of such forays have been particularly noted by scholars. In his essay “Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children,” Montaigne, sharply criticizing aged parents who expect their grown children to be grateful to them and who cling avidly to their possessions, gives powerful voice to the resentment of the young:

  It is mere injustice to see an old, crazed, sinew-shrunken, and nigh-dead father sitting alone in a chimney-corner to enjoy so many goods as would suffice for the preferment and entertainment of many children, and in the meanwhile, for want of means, to suffer them to lose their best days and years without thrusting them into public service and knowledge of men.

  This geriatric avarice can make children despair, driving them “to seek by some way how unlawful soever to provide for their necessaries.” Far from producing dutiful obedience, a parental policy of clinging to wealth and treating the younger generation sternly only “maketh fathers irksome unto children, and which is worse, ridiculous.” How could it not have this effect? For, as Montaigne coolly notes, children in fact “have youth and strength in their hands, and consequently the breath and favour of the world, and do with mockery and contempt receive these churlish, fierce, and tyrannical countenances from a man that hath no lusty blood left him.”

  Shakespeare was evidently struck by these passages, for he worked them into his depiction of the bastard Edmund in King Lear, simmering with resentment, frustration, mockery, contempt, and a determination “to seek, by some way how unlawful soever” to provide for himself. Specifically, Shakespeare takes Montaigne’s words, in Florio’s translation, and fashions them into the forged letter that Edmund fobs off as his brother Edgar’s. “I hope,” Edmund declares with a fraudulent show of concern on his brother’s behalf, that he wrote this letter “but as an essay or taste of my virtue.” It is difficult not to see in that word “essay” a playful allusion to Montaigne, for what follows is simply a variation on themes from “Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children”:

  This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times, keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffered.

  Credulous old Gloucester swallows the bait and cries treason.

  I have already alluded at the beginning of this introduction to the second and the most frequently cited instance of Shakespeare’s borrowing from Montaigne. As early as 1784, the editor Edward Capell noted that in The Tempest Shakespeare’s imagination was caught by a passage in Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s “Of the Cannibals.” The people recently discovered in the New World, Montaigne writes,

  hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon were never heard of amongst them.

  Out of this utopian vision of noble savages in the state of nature Shakespeare crafts the words he gives to the good councillor Gonzalo who is daydreaming about what he would do were he in charge of colonizing the island on which he and the others have been shipwrecked:

  no kind of traffic

  Would I admit, no name of magistrate;

  Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

  And use of service, none; contract, succession,

  Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

  No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

  No occupation, all men idle, all;

  And women too—but innocent and pure;

  No sovereignty—

  . . . . . .

  All things in common nature should produce

  Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,

  Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,

  Would I not have; but nature should bring forth

  Of it own kind of foison, all abundance,

  To feed my innocent people. (II.i.148–64)

  The borrowing extends beyond certain expressions—kind of traffic, name of magistrate, use of service, and the like—to a vision of a whole society organized on principles directly counter to those in place in the familiar, gri
m realm of contemporary European reality. That is, here as in the case of King Lear, Shakespeare is mining Florio’s Montaigne not simply for turns of phrase but for key concepts central to the play in question.

  But though Gonzalo is a kind and sympathetic character, there is no getting around the fact that his vision of the ideal “commonwealth” is mocked for its incoherence and absurdity. And if the mockers are the cynical and treacherous Sebastian and Antonio, it remains the case that the “natural” social order borrowed from Montaigne for Gonzalo’s speech is grossly at odds with anything actually represented on Shakespeare’s ocean island. Indeed the island’s possessor before the arrival of the Europeans—Caliban, whose name is a kind of anagram for cannibal—is utterly unlike the proud, dignified, self-possessed cannibals of Montaigne’s essay. Together with the very mixed bag of Europeans, Shakespeare’s native seems designed to reveal Montaigne’s vision as hopelessly naïve. Shakespeare’s borrowing here, in short, is an act not of homage but of aggression.

  So too with the borrowing in King Lear: indeed Shakespeare’s aggression is still greater, since in that play the words are taken over not by a sweet but unworldly idealist but rather by a cunning and ruthless villain. It is not that Shakespeare necessarily viewed Montaigne’s views on the relations between parents and children as themselves wicked; rather the play suggests that they may be exploited by people far nastier than anything the essay allows itself to imagine.

  The best solution, Montaigne thought, was for the old and infirm to distribute most of their possessions to their children:

  A father over-burdened with years and crazed through sickness and, by reason of weakness and want of health barred from the common society of men, doth both wrong himself injure his idly and to no use to hoard up and keep close a great heap of riches and deal of pelf. He is in state good enough if he be wise to have a desire to put off his clothes to go to bed—I will not say to his shirt, but to a good warm night gown. As for other pomp and trash whereof he hath no longer use or need, he ought willingly to distribute and bestow them amongst those to whom by natural degree they ought to belong.

  This is the argument that the wicked Edmund attributes to his brother Edgar, in order to incense his father: “I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declining, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue” (I.ii.66–70).

  Why should arguments that seem so reasonable and even ethically responsible to Montaigne appear in King Lear as the center of something horrible? Here, as in The Tempest, it is as if Shakespeare thought Montaigne had a very inadequately developed sense of depravity and evil. What if the children do not want to leave the father with “a good warm night gown”? What if they want everything? Montaigne’s answer is that, though he would give his children “the full possession of my house and enjoying of my goods,” it would be on this “limited condition,” that “if they should give me occasion, I might repent myself of my gift and revoke my deed.” Everything in Lear is designed to show that this idea is tragically foolish. “O, sir, you are old,” the reptilian Regan tells her father,

  Nature in you stands on the very verge

  Of her confine. You should be ruled and led

  By some discretion that discerns your state

  Better than you yourself. (II.iv.139–43)

  There is no repenting of the gift, no revoking of the deed.

  It should not entirely surprise us that there is a distinct edge in Shakespeare’s use of Montaigne. There was a huge gap between them, a gap not linguistic (thanks in part to Florio) but social, cultural, and aesthetic. Montaigne was the friend of kings and princes, a nobleman directly involved in the key political and religious struggles of his age; Shakespeare, the son of a provincial glover, was a popular entertainer, permanently stained by a trade everyone regarded as vaguely shameful. Montaigne was a master of the Latin language, with access to all the rich resources of Renaissance humanism; Shakespeare had, as Jonson put it, “small Latin and less Greek.” Montaigne retired to his tower to write; Shakespeare spent most of his career in London where he wrote for money. Montaigne had a proud and powerful sense of his name and social position; Shakespeare participated in a collective enterprise, one over whose results he had only limited control. Montaigne decided to print his essays and, in doing so, to put himself on display. Shakespeare, who had an indifferent or ambivalent relationship to print, seems to have cultivated a certain anonymity. Montaigne was the master of prose essays with no set shape and no clear narrative arc, works meant to be read and mused upon in private; Shakespeare fashioned plays, many of them in verse, intended for public performance. Montaigne desired to strip away all costumes and reveal the naked body beneath; Shakespeare wrote for an all-male theater that relied upon costumes to conjure up the social and sexual realities. Montaigne created a single great character, himself; Shakespeare created innumerable characters, each with a distinct claim to attention.

  But if Montaigne and Shakespeare were diametrical opposites in these and other ways, and if the places in which their works most explicitly touch—that is, King Lear and The Tempest—eloquently demonstrate this opposition, nonetheless there is a whole world that they share. Scholars have seen Montaigne’s fingerprints on many other works by Shakespeare, whether in the echoing of words or ideas. When Hamlet exclaims to his mother, “Ecstasy? My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time,” (III.iv.130–31), Shakespeare may have picked up a hint from Montaigne’s “during his ecstasy, he seemed to have neither pulse nor breath” from “Of the Force of Imagination.” And Polonius’s “This above all: to thine own self be true” may owe something to “That above all, he be instructed to yield, yea to quit his weapons unto truth” from “Of the Institution of Education of Children.” More broadly, there is something strikingly Montaigne-like in Hamlet’s intertwining of Stoicism—

  Give me that man

  That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him

  In my heart’s core— (III.ii.64–66)

  with philosophical skepticism—

  And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?— (II.ii.297–98)

  and inner acceptance—

  If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. (V.ii.158–60).

  Perhaps, perhaps. But apart from the passages in King Lear and The Tempest, the attempts to establish the direct influence of Montaigne on Shakespeare have never seemed fully and decisively convincing. The problem is only in part one of dating: Though Florio’s Montaigne was published in 1603, at least three years after the probable composition and performance of Hamlet, Shakespeare could have seen a manuscript of Florio’s translation which, licensed for publication and referred to by Cornwallis in 1600, was evidently in circulation well before the first printing. The more intractable problem has to do with a shared historical moment, a shared grappling with pressing questions of faith, consciousness, and identity, and even, thanks to Florio, a shared language. Did Shakespeare really need Montaigne to think about the relation between imagination, ecstasy, and the beating of the pulse?

  But what is a problem for the scholarly attempt to establish a clear line of influence is from the perspective of the common reader a source of deep pleasure. Two of the greatest writers of the Renaissance—two of the greatest writers the world has ever known—were at work almost at the same time, reflecting on the human condition and inventing the stylistic means to register their subtlest perceptions in language. And though, as we have noted, they came from sharply differing worlds and worked in distinct genres, they share many of the same features. Both Montaigne and Shakespeare were masters of the disarming gesture, the creation of collusion and intimacy: essays that profess to be “frivolous and vain” (“The Author to the Reader”); plays with titles like As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. Both were skilled at seizing upon anything that came their way in the course of wide-ranging reading or ob
servation; both prized the illumination of a brilliant perception over systematic thought; both were masters of quotation and transformation; both were supremely adaptable and variable. Both believed that there was a profound link between language and identity, between what you say and how you say it and what you are. Both were fascinated with ethical meanings in a world that possessed an apparently infinite range of human behaviors. Both perceived and embraced the oscillations and contradictions within individuals, the equivocations and ironies and discontinuities even in those who claimed to be single-minded and single-hearted in pursuit of coherent goals.

  Montaigne and Shakespeare created works that have for centuries remained tantalizing, equivocal, and elusive, inviting ceaseless speculations and re-creations. In a world that craved fixity and order, each managed to come to terms with strict limits to authorial control, with the unpredictability and instability of texts, with a proliferation of unlimited, uncontrolled meanings. Each turned uncertainty into art. And in accepting open-endedness, each great writer found a way to be “loyal,” as Montaigne put it, to life. “As for me, then,” Montaigne wrote in his last essay, “Of Experience,” “I love my life and cherish it, such as it hath pleased God to grant it us.” Philosophical disputes, pious complaints, and ascetic ambitions to rise above the flesh seemed to him absurd and ungrateful. “I cheerfully and thankfully and with a good heart accept what nature hath created for me, and am therewith well pleased and am proud of it.” And, as if in tribute to Montaigne, Shakespeare too, in the closing speech of what was probably his final work, The Two Noble Kinsmen, gave voice through his character Theseus to strikingly similar sentiments:

  O you heavenly charmers,

  What things you make of us! For what we lack