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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 31 551 59 
 
MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS : A Study in 
 Sociology. 
 
 THE SAXON AND THE CELT : A Study in 
 Sociology. 
 
 ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD : 
 
 New Series, 
 
 MODERN HUMANISTS. 
 
 THE FALLACY OF SAVING : A Study in 
 Economics. 
 
 THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION : A Study 
 in Economics. 
 
 CHRIST AND KRISHNA: A Study in My- 
 thology. 
 
 Etc. Etc. 
 
MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN M. ROBERTSON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED 
 
 i6, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C. 
 
 1897 
 
1^ 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPEEE. 
 
 For a good many years past the anatomic 
 study of Shakspere, of whicli a revival seems 
 now on foot, lias been somewliat out of fashion, 
 as compared with its vogue in the palmy days 
 of the New Shakspere Society in England, 
 and the years of the battle between the icono- 
 clasts and the worshippers in Germany. When 
 Mr. Fleay and Mr. Spedding were hard at work 
 on the metrical tests ; when Mr. Spedding 
 was subtly undoing the chronological psy- 
 chology of Dr. Furnivall; when the latter 
 student was on his part undoing in quite 
 another style some of the judgments of 
 Mr. Swinburne ; and when Mr. Halliwell- 
 Phillipps was with natural wrath calling 
 on Mr. Browning, as President of the 
 Society; to keep Dr. Furnivall in order, we 
 (then) younger onlookers felt that literary his- 
 tory was verily being made. Our sensations, it 
 seemed, might be as those of our elders had 
 ( 1 ) 
 
2 Montaiyne and Bhakspcre. 
 
 been over Mr. Collier's emendated folio, and tlie 
 tragical end thereof. Then came a period of lull 
 in things Shaksperean, partly to be accounted 
 for by the protrusion of the Browning Society 
 and kindred undertakings. It seemed as if 
 once more men had come to the attitude of 1850, 
 when Mr. Phillipps had written : "An opinion 
 has been gaining ground, and has been 
 encouraged by writers whose judgment is 
 entitled to respectful consideration, that almost 
 if not all the commentary on the works of 
 Shakspere of a necessary and desirable kind 
 has already been given to the world."* And, 
 indeed, so much need was there for time to 
 digest the new criticism that it may be doubted 
 whether among the general cultured public the 
 process is even now accomplished. 
 
 To this literary phase in particular, and to 
 our occupation with other studies in general, 
 may be attributed the opportunity which still 
 exists for the discussion of one of the most inte- 
 resting of all problems concerning Shakspere. 
 Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi — 
 a host of peculiarly modern problem-makers 
 
 * Preface to Eng. trans, of Simrock on Tlie Plots of Sliaksperc's Plays, 
 1850. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 3 
 
 have been exercising our not inexhaustible taste 
 for the problematic, so that there was no very 
 violent excitement over even the series of new; 
 " Keys " to the sonnets which came forth in the 
 lull of the analysis of the plays ; and yet, even 
 with all the problems of modernity in view, it 
 seems as if it must be rather by accident of 
 oversight than for lack of interest in new 
 developments of Shakspere-study that so little 
 attention has been given among us to a question 
 which, once raised, has a very peculiar literary 
 and psychological attraction of its own — the 
 subject, namely, of the influence which the plays 
 show their author to have undergone from the 
 Essays of Montaigne. 
 
 As to the bare fact of the influence, there can 
 be little question. That Shakspere in one 
 scene in the Tempest versifies a passage from the 
 prose of Florio's translation of Montaigne's 
 chapter Of the Cannibals has been recognised 
 by all the commentators since Capell (1767), who 
 detected the transcript from a reading of thes 
 French only, not having compared the trans- 
 lation. The first thought of students was to 
 connect the passage with Ben Jonson's allusion 
 
4 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 in VoLPONE* to frequent " stealings from. Mon- 
 taigne " by contemporary writers ; and though. 
 VoLPONE dates from 1605, and the Tempest from 
 1610-1613, there has been no systematic attempt 
 to apply the clue chronologically. Still, it has 
 been recognised or surmised by a series of 
 writers that the influence of the essayist on the 
 dramatist went further than the passage in ques- 
 tion. John Sterling, writing on Montaigne in 
 1838 (when Sir Frederick Madden's pamphlet 
 on the autograph of Shakspere in a copy of 
 Florio had called special attention to the 
 Essays), remarked that " on the whole, the cele- 
 brated soliloquy in Hamlet presents a more 
 characteristic and expressive resemblance to 
 much of Montaigne's writings than any other 
 portion of the plays of the great dramatist which 
 we at present remember " ; and further threw 
 out the germ of a thesis which has since been 
 disastrously developed, to the effect that " the 
 Prince of Denmark is very nearlj"- a Montaigne, 
 lifted to a higher eminence, and agitated by 
 
 » Laiiv Politick Wonld-be. .411 ouv EnglLsh writei-s, 
 I mean such as are happy in the Italian, 
 Will deign to steal out of this author [Pastor Fitiol mainly 
 Almost as much as from Montaignie ; 
 He has so modern and facile a vein, 
 Kitting the time, and catching the court ear. 
 
 — Act iii. sc 2. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 5 
 
 more striking circumstances and a severer 
 destiny, and altogether a somewhat more pas- 
 sionate structure of man."* In 1846, again, 
 Philarete Chasles, an acute and original critic, 
 citing tlie passage in the Tempest, went on to 
 declare that " once on the track of the studies 
 and tastes of Shakspere, we find Montaigne at 
 every corner, in Hamlet, in Othello, in Coeio- 
 LANUS. Even the composite style of Shakspere, 
 so animated, so vivid, so new, so incisive, so 
 coloured, so hardy, offers a multitude of striking 
 analogies to the admirable and free manner of 
 M'ontaigne."t The suggestion as to the " To be 
 or not to be " soliloquy has been taken up by 
 some critics, but rejected by others ; and the pro- 
 positions of M. Chasles, so far as I am aware, 
 have never been supported by evidence. Never- 
 theless, the general fact of a frequent reproduc- 
 tion or manipulation of Montaigne's ideas in 
 some of Shakspere's later plays has, I think, 
 since been established. 
 
 Twelve years ago I incidentally cited, in an 
 essay on the composition of Hamlet, some dozen 
 
 » Loitdon and WcstmitKtcr Review, July, 1838, p. 321. 
 t .'Viticle in Journal dcs Ddbats, 7 November, 1846, reprinted in L'Anglc- 
 teirc an. Sciziimc Siccle, ed. 1879, p. 136. 
 
6 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 of the Essays of Montaigne from which Shak- 
 spere had apparently received suggestions, and 
 instanced one or two cases in which actual pecu- 
 liarities of phrase in Florio's translation of the 
 Essays are adopted by him, in addition to a pecu- 
 liar coincidence which has been pointed out by 
 Mr. Jacob Feis in his work entitled Shakspere 
 AND Montaigne ; and since then the late Mr. 
 Henry Morley, in his edition of the Florio trans- 
 lation, has pointed to a still more remarkable 
 coincidence of phrase, in a passage of Hamlet 
 which I had traced to Montaigne without noticing 
 the decisive verbal agreement in question. Yet 
 so far as I have seen, the matter has passed for 
 little more than a literary curiosity, arousing 
 no new ideas as to Shakspere's mental develop- 
 ment. The notable suggestion of Chasles on 
 that head has been ignored more completely 
 than the theory of Mr. Feis, which in comparison 
 is merely fantastic. Either, then, there is an 
 unwillingness in England to conceive of Shak- 
 spere as owing much to foreign influences, or 
 as a case of intelligible mental growth, or else 
 the whole critical problem which Shakspere 
 represents — and he may be regarded as the 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 7 
 
 greatest of critical problems — comes within tlie 
 general disregard for serious criticism, Tiotice- 
 able among us of late years. And tlie work of 
 Mr. Feis, unfortunately, is as a whole so 
 extravagant that it could hardly fail to bring a 
 special suspicion on every form of the theory of 
 an intellectual tie between Shakspere and Mon- 
 taigne. Not only does he undertake to show in 
 dead earnest what Sterling had vaguely sug- 
 gested as conceivable, that Shakspere meant 
 Hamlet to represent Montaigne, but he strenu- 
 ously argues that the poet framed the play in 
 order to discredit Montaigne's opinions — a thesis 
 which almost makes the Bacon theory specious 
 by comparison. Naturally it has made no con- 
 verts, even in Germany, where, as it happens, it 
 had been anticipated. 
 
 In France, however, the neglect of the special 
 problem of Montaigne's influence on Shakspere 
 is less easily to be explained, seing how much 
 intelligent study has been given of late by 
 French critics to both Shakspere and Mon- 
 taigne. The influence is recognised ; but here 
 again it is only cursorily traced. The latest 
 study of Montaigne is that of M. Paul Stapfer, 
 
8 Montaigne and ShaTcspere- 
 
 a vigilant critic, whose services to Shakspere- 
 
 study have been recognised in both countries. 
 
 But all that M. Stapfer claims for the influence 
 
 of the French essayist on the English dramatist 
 
 is thus put : — 
 
 "Montaigne is perhaps too purely French to have 
 exercised much influence abroad. Nevertheless his 
 influence on England is not to be disdained. Shaks- 
 pere appreciated him (le (joutait) ; he has inserted in 
 the Tempest a passage of the chapter Des Cannibales ; 
 and the strong expressions of the Essays on man, the 
 inconstant, irresolute being, contrary to himself, mar- 
 vellously vain, various and changeful, were perhaps not 
 unconnected with (pevtetre pas ctrangeres d) the concep- 
 tion of Hamlet. The author of the scene of the grave- 
 diggers must have felt the savour and retained the im- 
 pression of this thought, humid and cold as the grave : 
 ' The heart and the life of a great and triumphant 
 emperor are but the repast of a little worm.' The trans- 
 lation of Plutarch, or rather of Amyot, by Thomas 
 North, and that of Montaigne by Florio, had together 
 a great and long vogue in the English society of the 
 seventeenth century."* 
 
 So modest a claim, coming from the French 
 
 side, can hardly be blamed on the score of that 
 
 very modesty. It is the fact, however, that, 
 
 though M. Stapfer has in another workt com- 
 
 "' Mantniifnc (Serie des Grands Ecrivaiiis Frati^ais), 1895, p. 105. 
 f Molihx d Sliakspere. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 9 
 
 pared Shakspere witli a French classic 
 critically enougli, he has here understated his 
 case. He was led to such an attitude in his 
 earlier study of Shakspere by the slightness of 
 the evidence offered for the claim of M, Chasles, 
 of which he wrote that it is " a gratuitous suppo- 
 sition, quite unjustified by the few traces in his 
 writings of his having read the Essays."* But 
 that verdict was passed without due scrutiny. 
 The influence of Montaigne on Shakspere was 
 both wider and deeper than M. Stapfer has sug- 
 gested ; and it is perhaps more fitting, after all, 
 that the proof should be undertaken by some of 
 us who, speaking Shakspere' s tongue, cannot 
 well be suspected of seeking to belittle him when 
 we trace the sources for his thought, whether in 
 his life or in his culture. There is still, indeed, 
 a tendency among the more primitively patriotic 
 to look jealously at such inquiries, as tending to 
 diminish the glory of the worshipped name ; 
 but for anyone who is capable of appreciating 
 Shakspere's greatness, there can be no question 
 of iconoclasm in the matter. Shakspere igno- 
 rantly adored is a mere dubious mystery ; Shaks- 
 
 * Shakspere and Classical Antiquity, Eng. tr. p. 297. 
 
10 Montadg'oe and Shakspere. 
 
 pere followed up and comprehended, step by 
 step, albeit never wboUy revealed, becomes more 
 remarkable, more profoundly interesting, as lie 
 becomes more intelligible. "We are embarked, 
 not on a quest for plagiarisms, but on a study of 
 tbe growtb of a wonderful mind. And in tbe 
 idea that much of the growth is traceable to the 
 fertilising contact of a foreign intelligence there 
 can be nothing but interest and attraction for 
 those who have mastered the primary socio- 
 logical truth that such contacts of cultures are 
 the very life of civilisation. 
 
II. 
 
 The first requirement in tlie study, obviously, 
 is an exact statement of the coincidences of 
 phrase and thought in Shakspere and Mon- 
 taigne. Not that such coincidences are the main 
 or the only results to be looked for; rather we 
 may reasonably expect to find Shakspere' s 
 thought often diverging at a tangent from that 
 of the writer he is reading, or even directly gain- 
 saying it. But there can be no solid argument 
 as to such indirect influence until we have fully 
 established the direct influence, and this can 
 only be done by exhibiting a considerable num- 
 ber of coincidences. M. Chasles, while avowing 
 that "the comparison of texts is indispensable 
 — we must undergo this fatigue in order to know 
 to what extent Shakspere, between 1603 and 
 1615, became familiar with Montaigne" — 
 strangely enough made no comparison of texts 
 whatever beyond reproducing the familiar para- 
 phrase in the Tempest, from the essay Of 
 Cannibals ; and left absolutely unsupported his 
 ( 11 ) 
 
12 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 assertion as to Hamlet, Othello, and Conio- 
 LANirs. It is necessary to produce proofs, and to 
 look narrowly to dates. Florio's translation, 
 though licensed in 1601, was not published till 
 1G03, the year of the piratical publication of the 
 First Quarto of Hamlet, in which the play lacks 
 much of its present matter, and shows in many 
 parts so little trace of Shakspere's spirit and 
 versification that, even if we hold the text to 
 have been imperfectly taken down in shorthand, 
 as it no doiibt was, we cannot suppose him to 
 have at this stage completed his refashioning 
 of the older pla)', which is undoubtedly the sub- 
 stratum of his.* We must therefore keep 
 closely in view the divergencies between this 
 text and that of the Second Quarto, printed in 
 1G04, in which the transmuting touch of Shaks- 
 pere is broadly evident. It is quite possible 
 that Shakspere may have seen parts of Florio's 
 translation before 1603, or heard passages from 
 it read ; or even that he might have read Mon- 
 taigne in the original. But as his possession of 
 the translation is made certain by the preserva- 
 
 * See this point discussed in tlie Free Review of July, 189s ' and compare 
 the lately published essay of Mr. John Corbin, on The Elizabethan Hamlet, 
 (Elkin Matthews, 1895). 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 13 
 
 tion of the copy bearing his autograph, and as 
 it is from Florio that he is seen to have copied 
 in the passages where his copying is beyond dis- 
 pute, it is on Florio's translation that we must 
 proceed. 
 
 I. In order to keep all the e\idence in view, 
 we may first of all collate once more the passage 
 in the Tempest with that in the Essays wliich it 
 unquestionably follows. In Florio's transla- 
 tion, Montaigne's words run : 
 
 "They [Lycurgus and Plato] could not imagine a 
 genuity so pure and simple, as we see it by experience, 
 nor ever believe our society might be maintained with 
 so little art and human combination. It is a nation 
 (would I answer Plato) that 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 occupations, 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, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, 
 and passion, were never heard of amongst them. How 
 dissonant would he find his imaginary commonwealth 
 from this perfection ?" 
 
 Compare the speech in which the kind old 
 
 Gonzalo seeks to divert the troubled mind of the 
 
 shipwrecked King Alonso ; 
 
14 Montaigne and Shalcspere. 
 
 "V the commonwealtli I would by contraries 
 Execute all things : for no kind of traffic 
 Would I admit ; no name of magistrate ; 
 Letters should not be known ; no use of service, 
 Of riches, or of poverty ; no contracts, 
 Succession ; 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. . . ." 
 
 There can be no dispute as to tlie direct trans- 
 cription here, wliere the dramatist is but inci- 
 dentally playing with Montaigne's idea, pro- 
 ceeding to put some gibes at it in the mouths of 
 Gonzalo's rascally comrades ; and it follows that 
 Gonzalo's further phrase, " to excel, the golden 
 age," proceeds from Montaigne's previous 
 words : " exceed all the pictures wherewith 
 licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the 
 golden age." The play was in all probability 
 written in or before 1610. It remains to show 
 that on his first reading of Florio's Montaigne, 
 in 1603-4, Shakspere was more deeply and 
 widely influenced, though the specific proofs are 
 in the nature of the case less palpable. 
 
 II. Let us take first the more decisive coinci- 
 dences of phrase. Correspondences of thought 
 
Montai<jne and Shalispere. 15 
 
 ■\vkicli in themselves do not establisli tlieir direct 
 connection, have a new significance when it is 
 seen that other coincidences amount to manifest 
 reproduction. And such a coincidence we have, 
 to begin with, in the familiar lines : 
 
 "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough-hew them how we will."* 
 
 I pointed out in 1885 that this expression, which 
 does not occur in the First Quarto Hamlet, cor- 
 responds very closely with the theme of Mon- 
 taigne's essay, that fortune is oftentimes met 
 wiTHALL IN PURSUIT OF REASON,tin which occurs 
 the phrase, " Fortune has more judgment+ than 
 we," a translation from Menander. But Profes- 
 sor Morley, having had his attention called to 
 the subject by the work of Mr. Feis, who had 
 suggested another passage as the source of 
 Shakspere's, made a more perfect identiiication. 
 E-eading the proofs of the Florio translation for 
 his reprint, he found, what I had not observed 
 in my occasional access to the old folio, not then 
 reprinted, that the very metaphor of "rough- 
 hewing " occurs in Florio's rendering of a pas- 
 
 » Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2. 
 
 t Book I, Essay 33. { Advice in Florio. 
 
16 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 sage in the Essays : — * " My consultatioa doth, 
 somewhat roughly hew the matter, and by its first 
 shew lightly consider the same : the main and 
 chief point of the work I am wont to resign to 
 Heaven." This is a much more exact coinci- 
 dence than is presented in the passage cited by 
 Mr. Feis from the essay Of Physiognomy : — t 
 " Therefore do our designs so often mis- 
 carry. . . . The heavens are angry, and 
 I may say envious of the extension and 
 large privilege we ascribe to human wis- 
 dom, to the prejudice of theirs, and abridge 
 them so much more unto us by so much more we 
 endeavour to amplify them." If there were no 
 closer parallel than that in Montaigne, we should 
 be bound to take it as an expansion of a phrase 
 in Seneca's Agamemnon,! which was likely to 
 have become proverbial. I may add that the 
 thought is often repeated in the Essays, and that 
 in several passages it compares notably with 
 Shakspere's lines. These begin : 
 
 " Rashly, 
 — And praised be rashness for it — Let us know 
 Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well 
 
 » B. Ill, Ch. 8. Of the art of conferring. 
 
 t B. HI, Ch. 12. X -Act II, Sc. I, 144. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 17 
 
 When our deep plots do pall; and that should 
 
 learn us 
 There's a divinity " etc. 
 
 Compare the following extracts from Florio's 
 translation : — 
 
 " The Dmmon of Socrates were peradventure a certain 
 inpulsion or wiU which without the advice of his dis- 
 course presented itself unto him. In a mind so well 
 purified, and by continual exercise of wisdom and virtue 
 so well prepared as his was, it is likely his inclinations 
 (though rash and inconsiderate) were ever of great 
 moment, and worthy to be followed. Every man 
 feeleth in himseK some image of such agitations, of a 
 prompt, vehement, and casual opinion. It is in me to 
 give them some authority, that afford so little to our 
 wisdom. And I have had some (equally weak in reason 
 and violent in persuasion and dissuasion, which was 
 more ordinary to Socrates) by which I have so happily 
 and so profitably suffered myself to be transported, as 
 they might perhaps be thought to contain some matter 
 of divine inspiration."* 
 
 " Even in our counsels and deliberations, some chance 
 or good luck must needs be joined to them ; for what- 
 soever our wisdom can effect is no great matter. "t 
 
 " When I consider the most glorious exploits of war, 
 methinks I see that those who have had the conduct 
 of them employ neither counsel nor deliberation about 
 them, but for fashion sake, and leave the best part of 
 
 » Book I, ch. II, end. f Book I, ch. 23. 
 
18 Montai<j7W and Shakspere. 
 
 the enterprise to fortune ; and on the confidence they 
 have in her aid, they still go beyond the limits of all 
 discourse. Casual rejoicings and strange furies ensue 
 among their deliberations."* etc. 
 
 Compare finally Florio's translation of the 
 lines of Manilius cited by Montaigne at the end 
 of the 47th Essay of the First Book : 
 
 " 'Tis best for ill-advis'd, wisdom may fail,t 
 Fortune proves not the cause that should prevail, 
 But here and there without respect doth sail : 
 A higher power forsooth us overdraws. 
 And mortal states guides with immortal laws." 
 
 It is to be remembered, indeed, that the idea 
 expressed in Hamlet's words to Horatio is partly 
 anticipated in the rhymed speech of the Player- 
 King in the play-scene in Act III., which occurs 
 in the First Quarto : 
 
 "Our wills, our fates do so contrary run 
 That our devices still are overthrown ; 
 Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own." 
 
 Such a passage, reiterating a familiar common- 
 place, might seem at first sight to tell against 
 the view that Hamlet's later speech to Horatio 
 is an echo of Montaigne. But that view being 
 
 e Ibid. 
 
 t Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this confused line. The 
 original— £f iniilc coiisultis pntiiun est ; pntdaitia fallax—is sufficiently 
 close to Shakspere's phrase. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 19 
 
 found justified by tlie evidence, and tlie idea in 
 that passage being exactly coincident with Mon- 
 taigne's, while the above lines are only partially 
 parallel in meaning, we are forced to admit that 
 Shakspere may have been influenced by Mon- 
 taigne even where a partial precedent might be 
 found in his own or other English work. 
 
 III. The phrase " discourse of reason," which 
 is spoken by Hamlet in his first soliloquy,* and 
 which first appears in the Second Quarto, is not 
 used by Shakspere in any play before Hamlet ; 
 and he uses it again in Troilus and Cressida ; t 
 while "discourse of thought" appears in 
 Othello ; J and " discourse," in the sense of 
 reasoning faculty, is used in Hamlet's last solilo- 
 quy.§ In English literature this use of the 
 word seems to be special in Shakspere's period,|| 
 and it has been noted by an admirer as a finety 
 Shaksperean expression. But the expression 
 " discourse of reason" occurs sit least four times 
 in Montaigne's Essays, and in Florio's transla- 
 
 « " O heaven ! a beast that wants discourse of reason " (Act I, Scene 2.) 
 
 t Act II, Sc. 2. 
 
 t Act IV, Scene 2. § Act IV, Scene 4. 
 
 y See Furniss's Variorum edition of Hamlet, in he. 
 
20 ' Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 tion of them : in tlie essay* That to philoso- 
 phise IS TO LEARN HOW TO DIE ; again at the close 
 of the essayt A demain les affaires ; again in the 
 first paragraph of the Apology of Raimond 
 Sebonde+ ; and yet again in the chapter on The 
 History of Spurixa ; § and though it seems to 
 Ite scholastic in origin, and occurs once or twice 
 before 1600 in English books, it is difficult to 
 doubt that, like the other phrase above cited, it 
 came to Shakspere through Florio's Montaigne. 
 The word discours is a hundred times used 
 singly by Montaigne, as by Shakspere in the 
 phrase " of such large discourse," for the pro- 
 cess of ratiocination. 
 
 IV. Then again there is the clue of Shaks- 
 pere' s use of the word " consummation " in the 
 revised form of the " To be " soliloquy. This, 
 as Mr. Feis pointed out,|| is the word used by 
 Florio as a rendering of ancantissement in the 
 speech of Socrates as given by Montaigne in the 
 essayll Of Physiognomy. Shakspere makes 
 Hamlet speak of annihilation as " a consumma- 
 
 « B. I, Chap. 19 : Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68. 
 
 t B. II, Chap. 4 ; Ed. cited, p. 382. | B. II, Chap. 12 ; Ibid, p. 459. 
 
 § B. II, Chap. 33. II Shakspere and Montaigne, 1884, p. 88. 
 
 1 B. Ill, Chap. 12. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 21 
 
 tion devoutly to be wislied." Florio lias: "If 
 it (death) be a consummation of one's being, it 
 is also an amendment and entrance into a long 
 and quiet night. We find nothing so sweet in 
 life as a quiet and gentle sleep, and without 
 dreams." Here not only do the words coincide 
 in a peculiar way, but the idea in the two 
 phrases is the same ; the theme of sleep and 
 dreams being further common to the two 
 writings. 
 
 Beyond these, I have not noted any cor- 
 respondences of phrase so precise as to prove 
 reminiscence beyond possibility of dispute ; but 
 it is not difficult to trace striking correspond- 
 ences which, though falling short of explicit re- 
 production, inevitably suggest a relation; and 
 these it now behoves us to consider. The re- 
 markable thing is, as regards Hamlet, that they 
 almost all occur in passages not present in the 
 First Quarto. 
 
 V. When we compare part of the speech of 
 Ilosencrantz on sedition* with a passage in Mon- 
 taigne's essay. Or Custom, t we find a somewhat 
 close coincidence. In the play llosencrantz 
 
 * Act III, Scene 3. f B. I, ch. 22. 
 
22 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 "The cease of Majesty, 
 Dies not alone ; but like a gulf doth draw 
 What's near with it : it is a massy wheel 
 Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, 
 To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things 
 Are mortised and adjoined ; which, when it falls, 
 Each small annexment, petty consequence, 
 Attends the boisterous rain." 
 
 Florio has : 
 
 " Those who attempt to shake an Estate are com- 
 monly the first overthrown by the fall of it. . . The 
 contexture and combining of this monarchy and great 
 building having been dismissed and dissolved by it, 
 namely, in her old years, giveth as much overture and 
 entrance as a man will to hke injuries. Royal majesty 
 doth more hardly fall from the top to the middle, than 
 it tumbleth down from the middle to the bottom." 
 
 The verbal correspondence here is only less 
 
 decisive — as regards the use of the word 
 
 " majesty " — than in the passages collated by 
 
 Mr. Morley; while the thought corresponds as 
 
 closely. 
 
 YI. The speech of Hamlet,* " There is 
 nothing either good or bad but thinking makes 
 it so " ; and lago's " 'tis in ourselves that we are 
 thus or thus,"t are expressions of a favourite 
 
 » .ict II, Scene 2. t Othello, Act II, Scene 3. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 23 
 
 thesis of Montaigne's, to wMch. he devotes an 
 entire essay.* The Shaksperean phrases echo 
 closely such sentences as : — 
 
 "If that which we call evil and torment be neither 
 torment nor evil, but that our fancy only gives it that 
 quality, it is in us to change it. . . . That wliich 
 we term evil is not so of itself." . . . ." Every man 
 is either well or ill according as he finds himself." 
 
 And in the essayt Of Democritus and Heracli- 
 TTJS there is another close parallel : — 
 
 "Therefore let us take no more excuses from external 
 quaUties of things. To us it belongeth to give our- 
 selves account of it. Our good and our evil hath no 
 dependency but from ourselves." 
 
 VII. Hamlet's apostrophe to his mother on 
 
 the power of custom — a passage which, like the 
 
 others above cited, first appears in the Second 
 
 Quarto — is similarly an echo of a favourite 
 
 proposition of Montaigne, who devotes to it the 
 
 essayt Of Custom, and not to ci-iANaE readily a 
 
 RECEIVED LAW. In that there occur the typical 
 
 passages : — 
 
 " Custom doth so blear us that we cannot distinguish 
 the usage of things. . . . Certes, chastity is an ex- 
 
 * B. I, ch. 40, "That the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the 
 opinion we have of them." 
 t B. I, ch. 50. X B. I, ch. 22. 
 
24 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 cellent virtue, the commodity whereof is very well 
 known ; but to use it, and according to nature to 
 prevail with it, is as hard as it is easy to endear it and 
 to prevail with it according to custom, to laws and pre- 
 cepts." "The laws of conscience, which we say are 
 born of nature, are born of custom." 
 
 Again, in the essay Of Controlling one's Will* 
 we have : " Custom is a second nature, and not 
 less potent." 
 
 Hamlet's words are : — 
 
 "That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat 
 Of habits devil, is angel yet in this 
 That to the use of actions fair and good 
 He likewise gives a frock or livery 
 
 That aptly is put on 
 
 For use can almost change the stamp of nature.'' 
 
 No doubt the idea is a classic commonplace ; and 
 in the early Two Gentlemen of VERONAt we 
 actually have the line, " How use doth breed a 
 habit in a man ; " but here again there seems 
 reason to regard Montaigne as having suggested 
 Shakspere's vivid and many-coloured wording of 
 the idea in the tragedy. Indeed, even the line 
 cited from the early comedy may have been one 
 of the poet's many later additions to his text. 
 
 e B. Ill, ch. 10. t Act V, Scene 4. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 25 
 
 YIII. A less close but still a notewortliy re- 
 semblance is tbat between the passage in which 
 Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
 stern the veering of his mood from joy in things 
 to disgust with them, and the paragraph in the 
 Apology of Raimond Sebonde in which Mon- 
 taigne sets against each other the splendour of 
 the universe and the littleness of man. Here 
 the thought diverges, Shakspere making it his 
 own as he always does, and alteiing its aim ; 
 but the language is curiously similar. Hamlet 
 says: 
 
 "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this 
 goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promon- 
 tory : this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this 
 brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, 
 fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing 
 to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 
 What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! 
 how infinite in faculties ! in form and moving, how 
 express and admirable ! in action, how like an angel ! 
 in apprehension, how Uke a God! the beauty of the 
 world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what 
 is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me." 
 
 Montaigne, as translated by Florio, has : 
 
 " Let us see what hold-fast or free-hold he (man) hath 
 in this gorgeous and goodly equipage. . . . Who 
 hath persuaded him, that this admirable moving of 
 
26 Montaigne and Sliakspere. 
 
 heaven's vaults, that the eternal light of these lamps 
 so fiercely rolling over liis head . . . were estab- 
 lished . . . for his commodity and service? Is it 
 possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this 
 miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much 
 as master of himself, exposed and subject to offences 
 of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and 
 J}mperor of this universe? . . [To consider . . . 
 
 the power and domination these (celestial) bodies have, 
 not only upon our lives and conditions of our fortune 
 . . . . but also over our dispositions and inclina- 
 tions, our discourses and wills, which they rule, provoke, 
 and move at the pleasure of their influences.] .... 
 Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, 
 and therewithal the proudest and disdainfuUest. Who 
 perceiveth himself placed here, amidst the filth and 
 mire of the world . . . and yet dareth imaginarily 
 place himself above the circle of the Moon, and reduce 
 heaven under his feet. It is through the vanity of the 
 same imagination that he dare equal himself to God." 
 
 The passage in brackets is left here in its place, 
 not as suggesting anything in Hamlet's speech, 
 but as paralleling a line in Measure for 
 Measure, to be dealt with immediately. But 
 it will be seen that the rest of the passage, though 
 turned to quite another purpose than Hamlet's, 
 brings together in the same way a set of con- 
 trasted ideas of human greatness and smallness, 
 and of the splendour of the midnight firmament.* 
 
 * On reverting to Mr. Feis's book I find that in 1884 he had noted this 
 and others of the above parallels, which I had not obseived when writing 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 27 
 
 IX. Tlie nervous protest of Hamlet to 
 Horatio on the point of the national vice of 
 drunkenness,* of which all save the beginning 
 is added in the Second Quarto just before the 
 entrance of the Ghost, has several curious points 
 of coincidence with Montaigne's essayt on The 
 History of Spurina, which discusses at great 
 length a matter of special interest to Shakspere 
 ■ — the character of Julius Csesar. In the course 
 of the examination Montaigne takes trouble to 
 show that Cato's use of the epithet " drunkard" 
 to Ctesar could not have been meant literally; 
 that the same Cato admitted Csesar's sobriety in 
 the matter of drinking. It is after making light 
 of Csesar's faults in other matters of personal 
 conduct that the essayist conies to this decision : 
 
 "But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy 
 qualities, were altered, smothered, and eclipsed by this 
 furious passion of ambition. ... To conclude, this 
 
 on the subject in 1883. In view of some other parallels and clues drawn 
 by him, our agreements leave me a little uneasy. He decides, for instance 
 (P» 93) that Hamlet's phrase "foul as Vulcan's stithy" is a "sly thrust at 
 Florio " who in his preface calls himself " Montaigne's Vulcan '' ; that the 
 Queen's phrase " thunders in the index " is a reference to " the Index of the 
 Holy See and its thunders " ; and that Hamlet's lines " Why let the stricken 
 deer go weep " are clearly a satire against Montaigne, " who fights shy of 
 action." Mr. Feis's book contains so many propositions of this order that 
 it is difficult to feel sure that he is ever judicious. Still, I find myself in 
 agreement with him on some four or five points of textual coincidence in 
 the two authors. 
 
 * Act I, Scene 4. 
 
 t B. II, Chap. 33. 
 
28 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 only vice (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him 
 the fairest natural and richest ingenuity that ever was, 
 and hath made his memory abominahle to all honest 
 minds." 
 
 Compare the exquisitely Mgli-strung lines, so 
 congruous in their excited rapidity with Ham- 
 let's intensity of expectation, which follow on 
 his notable outburst on the subject of drunken- 
 ness : 
 
 "So oft it chances in particular men, 
 That for some vicious mode of nature in them, 
 As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty, 
 Since nature cannot choosy its origin), 
 By the o'ergrowth of some complexion. 
 Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason ; 
 Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens 
 The form of plausive maaners ; that these men, — 
 Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect ; 
 Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, — 
 Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace. 
 As infinite as man may undergo) 
 Shall in the general censure take corruption 
 From that particular fault. . . ." 
 
 Even the idea that " nature cannot choose its 
 origin" is suggested by the context in Mon- 
 taigne.* Shakspere's estimate of Caesar, of 
 course, diverged from that of the essay. 
 
 » It is further relevant to note that in the essay Of Driinkenuess (ii. 2) 
 Montaigne obseiTes that " dninlcenness amongst others appeareth to me a 
 gross and brutish vice," that " the woret estate of man is where he loseth 
 the knowledge and government of himself," and that "the grossest and 
 rudest nation that liveth I amongst us at this day, is only that which keepeth 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 29 
 
 X. I find a certain singularity of coincidence 
 between the words of King Claudius on king- 
 ship : 
 
 " There's such divinity doth hedge a king, 
 That treason can but peep to what it would, 
 Acts little of his will," 
 
 and a passage in the essay* Of the Incommobity 
 OF Greatness : 
 
 " To be a king, is a matter of that consequence, that 
 only by it he is so. That strange glimmering and eye- 
 dazzling light, which round about environeth, over- 
 casteth and hideth from us : our weak sight is thereby 
 bleared and dissipated, as being filled and obscured by 
 that greater and further-spreading brightness." 
 
 The working out of the metaphor here gives at 
 once to Shakspere's terms " divinity " and " can 
 hut peep " a point not otherwise easily seen ; but 
 the idea of a dazzling light may be really what 
 was meant in the play; and one is tempted to 
 pronounce the passage a reminiscence of Mon- 
 
 it in credit" The reference is to Germany ; but Shakspere in Othello (Act 
 II, Sc. 3) makes laeo pronounce the English harder drinkers than either 
 the Danes or the Hollanders ; and the lines : 
 
 " This heavy-headed revel, east and west. 
 
 Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations ; 
 
 They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase. 
 
 Soil our addition," 
 might also be reminiscent of Montaigne, though of couree there is nothing 
 peculiar in such a coincidence. 
 
 » B. Ill, Chap. 7. 
 
 
 
30 Montaigne and Shalcspere. 
 
 taigne. Here, however, it has to be noted that 
 
 in the First Quarto we have the lines : 
 
 "There's such divinity doth wall a king 
 That treason dares not look on." 
 
 And if Shakspere had not seen or heard the 
 passage in Montaigne before the publication of 
 Florio's folio — which, however, he may very well 
 have done — the theory of reminiscence here can- 
 not stand. 
 
 XI. In Hamlet's soliloquy on the passage of 
 the army of Fortinbras — one of the many pas- 
 sages added in the Second Quarto — there is a 
 strong general resemblance to a passage in the 
 essay Of Diversion.* Hamlet first remarks to 
 the Captain: 
 
 " Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats 
 Will not debate the question of this straw : 
 This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace ; " 
 
 and afterwards soliloquises : 
 
 " Examples gross as earth exhort me : 
 Witness, this army of such mass and charge. 
 Led by a delicate and tender prince, 
 Whose spirit, by divine ambition puff'd, 
 Makes mouths at the invisible event ; 
 Exposing what is mortal and unsure 
 
 » B. Ill, Chap. 4. 
 
Montaigne and Shalcspere. 31 
 
 To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, 
 Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great, 
 Is not to stir without great argument, 
 But greatly to find quarrel in a straw. 
 When honour is at stake .... 
 
 .... to my shame I see 
 The imminent death of twenty thousand men. 
 That for a fantasy and trick of fame. 
 Go to their graves like beds ; fight for a plot 
 Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause. . . " 
 
 Montaigne has tlie same general idea in the 
 essay Of Diversion : 
 
 " If one demand that fellow, what interest he hath in 
 such a siege : The interest of example (he will say) and 
 common obedience of the Prince : I nor look nor pre- 
 tend any benefit thereby . . I have neither passion 
 nor quarrel in the matter. Yet the next day you will 
 see him all changed, and chafing, boiling and blushing 
 with rage, in his rank of battle, ready for the assault. 
 It is the glaring reflecting of so much steel, the flashing 
 thundering of the cannon, the clang of trampets, and 
 the rattling of drums, that have infused this new fury 
 and rancour in his swelling veins. A frivolous cause, 
 will you say? How a cause? There needeth none to 
 excite our mind. A doting humour without body, witTi- 
 out substance, overswayeth it up and down." 
 
 The thought recurs in the essay, Of Con- 
 
 TEOLLING one's WiLL.* 
 » B. Ill, Chap. 10. 
 
32 Montaig-ne and Shakspere. 
 
 "Our greatest agitations have strange springs and 
 ridiculous causes. What ruin did our last Duke of 
 Burgundy run into, for the quarrel of a cart-load of 
 sheep-sMns? . . . See why that man doth hazard 
 both his honour and life on the fortune of his rapier 
 and dagger ; let him tell you whence the cause of that 
 confusion ariseth, he cannot without blushing ; so vain 
 and frivolous is the occasion." 
 
 And tlie idea in Hamlet's lines " rightly to be 
 great," etc., is suggested in tlie essay Of Re- 
 penting,* where we have . 
 
 " The nearest way to come unto glory were to do that 
 for conscience which we do for glory. . . The worth 
 of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in going 
 orderly. Her greatness is not exercised in greatness ; 
 in mediocrity it is." 
 
 In the essay Of ExPERiENCEt there is a sen- 
 tence partially expressing the same thought, 
 which is cited by Mr. Feis as a reproduction : 
 
 "The greatness of the mind is not so much to draw 
 up, and hale forward, as to know how to range, direct, 
 and circumscribe itself. It holdeth for great what is 
 sufficient, and sheweth her height in loving mean things 
 better than eminent." 
 
 Here, certainly, as in the previous citation, the 
 
 idea is not identical with that expressed by 
 
 Hamlet. But the elements he combines are 
 
 » B. Ill, Chap. 2. t B, III, Chap. 13. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 33 
 
 there ; and again, in the essay Of Solitariness* 
 we have the picture of the soldier fighting furi- 
 ously for the quarrel of his careless king, with 
 the question : " Who doth not willingly chop 
 and counter-change his health, his ease, yea 
 his life, for glory and reputation, the most un- 
 profitable, vain, and counterfeit coin that is in 
 use with us." 
 
 And yet again the thought crops up in the 
 Apology of Raimond Sebonde : 
 
 "This horror-causing array of so many thousands of 
 armed men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and un- 
 daunted courage, it would make one laugh to see on 
 how many vain occasions it is raised and set on fire. 
 . . . The hatred of one man, a spite, a pleasure. 
 . . . . causes which ought not to move two scolding 
 fishwives to catch one another, is the soul and motive 
 of all this hurly-burly." 
 
 XII. Yet one more of Hamlet's sayings pecu- 
 liar to the revised form of the play seems to be an 
 echo of a thought of Montaigne's. At the out- 
 set of the soliloquy last quoted from, Hamlet 
 
 says : — 
 
 " What is a man 
 If his chief good and market of his time, 
 
 » B. I, Chap. 38. 
 
34 Montaigne and Shalcspere. 
 
 Be but to sleep and feed ? A beast ; no more. 
 Sure He that made us with such large discourse, 
 Looking before and after, gave us not 
 That capability and godlike reason 
 To fust in us unused." 
 
 The bearing of the thought in the soliloquy, 
 
 where Hamlet spasmodically applies it to the 
 
 stimulation of his vengeance, is certainly never 
 
 given to it by Montaigne, who has left on 
 
 record* his small approbation of revenge ; but 
 
 the thought itself is there, in the essayt On 
 
 Goods and Evils. 
 
 "Shall we employ the intelligence Heaven hath 
 bestowed upon us for our greatest good, to our ruin, 
 repugning nature's design and the universal order and 
 vicissitude of things, which implieth that every man 
 should use his instrument and means for his own com- 
 modity ? " 
 
 Again, there is a passage in the essay Of the 
 Affection of Fathers to their Children,^ 
 where there occurs a specific coincidence of 
 phrase, the special use of the term " discourse," 
 which we have already traced from Shakspere to 
 Montaigne ; and where at the same time the con- 
 trast between man and beast is drawn, though 
 
 » B. HI, Chap. 4. t B. I, Chap. 40. J B. II, Chap. 8. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 35 
 
 not to tlie same purpose as in. tlae speecli of 
 
 Hamlet : — 
 
 " Since it hath pleased God to endow us with some 
 capacity of discourse, that as beasts we should not ser- 
 vilely he subjected to common laws, but rather with 
 judgment and voluntary liberty apply ourselves unto 
 them, we ought somewhat to yield unto the simple 
 authority of Nature, but not suffer her tyrannically to 
 carry us away ; only reason ought to have the conduct 
 of our inclinations." 
 
 Finally we liave a third parallel, with, a slight 
 coincidence of terms, in the essay* Of Giving 
 
 THE LIE : 
 
 "Nature hath endowed us with a large faculty to 
 entertain ourselves apart, and often calleth us unto 
 it, to teach us that partly we owe ourselves unto 
 society, but in the better part unto ourselves." 
 
 It may be argued that these, like one or two 
 of the other sayings above cited as echoed by 
 Shakspere from Montaigne, are of the nature 
 of general religious or ethical maxims, traceable 
 to no one source; and if we only found one or 
 two such parallels, their resemblance of course 
 would have no evidential value, save as regards 
 coincidence of terms. For this very passage, for 
 
 » B. II, Chap. i8. 
 
36 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 instance, tliere is a classic original, or at least a 
 familiar source, in Cicero,* wliere the common- 
 place of tlie contrast between man and beast is 
 drawn in terms that come in a general way 
 pretty close to Hamlet's. This treatise of 
 Cicero was available to Shakspere in several 
 English translations ; t and only the fact that 
 we find no general trace of Cicero in the play 
 entitles us to suggest a connection in this special 
 case with Montaigne, of whom we do find so 
 many other traces. It is easj"^ besides to push 
 the theory of any influence too far ; and when 
 for instance we find Hamlet saying he fares " Of 
 the chameleons dish : I eat the air, promise- 
 crammed," it would be as idle to assume a remi- 
 niscence of a pasage of Montaigne on the chame- 
 leonj as it would be to derive Hamlet's phrase 
 " A king of shreds and patches " from Florio's 
 rendering in the essay§ Of the Inconstancy of 
 
 QUE Actions : 
 
 " We are all framed of flaps and patches, and of so 
 shapeless and diverse a contexture, that every piece and 
 every moment playeth his part." 
 
 » Dc Officiis i, 4 : cf. 30. 
 
 t 1534, 1558, J583, 1600. See also the compilation entitled A Treatise of 
 Mat-all Phihsophie. by W. Baudwin, 4th enlargement by T. Paulfreyman, 
 1600, pp. 44 — 46, where there is a closely parallel passage from Zeno as well 
 as that of Cicero. 
 
 X Mr. Feis makes this attribution. § B. II, Chap. i. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 37 
 
 In tlie latter case we liave a mere coincidence 
 of idiom ; in tlie former a proverbial allusion.* 
 An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of 
 resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities 
 as the assertion that Shakspere' s contempo- 
 raries knew Hamlet's use of his tablets to be a 
 parody of the " much-scribbling Montaigne," 
 who had avowed that he made much use of his ; 
 the assertion that Ophelia's " Come, my coach ! " 
 has reference to Montaigne's remark that he has 
 known ladies who would rather lend their 
 honour than their coach ; and a dozen other 
 propositions, if possible still more amazing. 
 But when, with no foregone conclusion as to 
 any polemic purpose on Shakspere's part, we 
 restrict ourselves to real parallels of thought 
 and expression ; when we find that a certain 
 number of these are actually textual ; when we 
 find further that in a single soliloquy in the 
 
 * This may fairly be argued, perliaps, even of the somewhat close parallel, 
 noted by Mr. Feis, between Laertes' lines (i, 3) : 
 
 " For nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
 In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes 
 The inward sen-ice of the mind and soul 
 Grows wide withal," 
 and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the Afohgy : 
 "The mind is with the body bred, we do behold : 
 It jointly grows with it, it waxeth old." 
 Only the slight coincidence of the use ol the (then familiar) verb " wax " in 
 both passages could suggest imitation in the case of such a well-worn 
 commonplace. 
 
38 Moniaigrv^ and Shakspere. 
 
 play there are several reproductions of' ideas in 
 tlie essays, some of tliem frequently recurring in 
 Montaigne ; and when finally it is found that, 
 with only one exception, all the passages in 
 question have been added to the play in the 
 Second Quarto, after the publication of Florio's 
 translation, it seems 'hardly possible to doubt 
 that the translation influenced the dramatist in 
 his work. 
 
 Needless to say, the influence is from the very 
 start of that high sort in which he that takes 
 becomes co-thinker with him that gives, Shaks- 
 pere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital 
 as Montaigne's own assimilation of the thought 
 of his classics. The process is one not of sur- 
 face reflection, but of kindling by contact ; and 
 we seem to see even the vibration of the style 
 passing from one intelligence to the other; the 
 nervous and copious speech of Montaigne 
 awakening Shakspere to a new sense of power 
 over rhythm and poignant phrase, at the same 
 time that the stimulus of the thought gives him 
 a new confidence in the validity of his own reflec- 
 tion. Some cause there must have been for this 
 marked species of development in the dramatist 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 39 
 
 at that particular time ; and if we find pervading' 
 signs of one remarkable new influence, witli no 
 countervailing evidence of another adequate to 
 the effect, the inference is about as reasonable as 
 many which pass for valid in astronomy. For it 
 will be found, on the one hand, that there is no 
 sign worth considering of a Montaigne influence 
 on Shakspere before Hamlet ; and, on the other 
 hand, that the influence to some extent con- 
 tinues beyond that play. Indeed, there are still 
 further minute signs of it there, which should be 
 noted before we pass on. 
 
 XIII. Among parallelisms of thought of a 
 less direct kind, one may be traced between an 
 utterance of Hamlet's and a number of Mon- 
 taigne's sayings on the power of imagination 
 and the possible equivalence of dream life and 
 waking life. In his first dialogue with Rosen- 
 crantz and Guildenstern, where we have already 
 noted an echo of Montaigne, Hamlet cries : 
 
 "O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and 
 count myself a king of infinite space ; were it not that 
 I have bad dreams ; " 
 and Guildenstern answers : 
 
 "Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very 
 substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a 
 dream." 
 
40 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 The first sentence may be compared with a 
 number in Montaigne,* of which the followingt 
 is a type : 
 
 "Man clean contrary [to the Gods] possesseth goods 
 in imagination and evils essentially. We have had 
 reason to make the powers of our imagination to be of 
 force, for all our felicities are but in conceipt, and as 
 it were in a dream ; " 
 
 while the reply of Guildenstem further recalls 
 several of the passages already cited. 
 
 XIV. Another apparent parallel of no great 
 importance, but of more verbal closeness, is that 
 between Hamlet's jeering phrase : J " Your worm, 
 is your only emperor for diet," and a sentence 
 in the Apology : " The heart and the life of a 
 great and triumphant emperor are the dinner of 
 a little worm," which M. Stapfer compares 
 further with the talk of Hamlet in the grave- 
 diggers' scene. Here, doubtless, we are near the 
 level of proverbial sayings, current in all 
 countries. 
 
 XY. As regards Hamlet, I can find no 
 further parallelisms so direct as any of the fore- 
 going, except some to be considered later, in con- 
 
 * See some cited at the close of this essay in another connection, 
 t B. II, Chap. 12. X Act IV, Scene 3. 
 
MontaigTie and Shakspere. 41 
 
 nection with tlie "To be " soliloquy. I do not 
 tMnk it can be made out that, as M. Chasles 
 afErmed, Hamlet's words on his friendship for 
 Horatio can be traced directly to any of Mon- 
 taigne's passages on that theme. " It would be 
 easy," says M. Chasles, "to show in Shakspere 
 the branloire perenne* of Montaigne, and the 
 whole magnificent passage on friendship, which 
 is found reproduced (^e trouve reporte) in Ham- 
 let." The idea of the world as a perpetual mu- 
 tation is certainly prevalent in Shakspere' s 
 work ; but I can find no exact correspondence of 
 phrase between Montaigne's pages on his love 
 for his dead friend Etienne de la Boetie and the 
 lines in which Hamlet speaks of his love for 
 Horatio. He rather gives his reasons for his 
 love than describes the nature and completeness 
 of it in Montaigne's way; and as regards the 
 description of Horatio, it could have been inde- 
 pendently suggested by such a treatise as 
 Seneca's De Constantia Sapientis, which is a 
 monody on the theme with which it closes : esse 
 aliquem invictum, esse aliquem in quern nihil 
 
 * *' Le mmide est nn branloire perenne " (Book III, Essay 2). Fiorio trans- 
 lates that particular sentence : " The world runs all on wheels "—a bad 
 rendering. 
 
42 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 fortuna possit — " to be sometliing unconquered, 
 sometliing against which, fortune is powerless." 
 In the fifth section the idea is worded in a 
 fashion that could have suggested Shakspere's 
 utterance of it; and he might easily have met 
 with some citation of the kind. But, on the 
 other hand, this note of passionate friendship is 
 not only new in Shakspere but new in Hamlet, 
 in respect of the First Quarto, in which the main 
 part of the speech to Horatio does not occur, and 
 in view of the singular fact that in the first Act 
 of the play as it stands Hamlet greets Horatio 
 as a mere acquaintance ; and it is further to be 
 noted that the description of Horatio as " one 
 in suffering all that suffers nothing " is broadly 
 suggested by the quotation from Horace in Mon- 
 taigne's nineteenth chapter (which, as we have 
 already seen, impressed Shakspere), and by 
 various other sayings in the Essays. After the 
 quotation from Horace [Non vultus instantis 
 tyranni), in the Nineteenth Essay, Florio's 
 translation runs : 
 
 "She (the soul) is made mistress of her passions and 
 concupiscences, lady of indigence, of shame, of poverty, 
 and of all fortune's injuries. Let him that can, attain 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere- 43 
 
 to this advantage. Herein consists the true and sove- 
 reign liberty, that affords us means wherewith to jest 
 and make a scorn of force and injustice, and to deride 
 imprisonment, gyves, or fetters." 
 
 Again, in the essay Of Three Commerces or 
 
 Societies,* we liave tliis : 
 
 "We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and 
 dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply our- 
 selves to diverse fashions. It is a being, but not a life, 
 to be tied and bound by necessity to one only course. 
 The goodliest minds are those that have most variety 
 and pliableness in them. . . . Life is a motion un- 
 equal, irregular, and multiform. . . . 
 
 " . . . . My fortune having inured and allured 
 me, even from my infancy, to one sole, singular, and 
 perfect amity, hath verily in some sort distasted me 
 from others. ... So that it is naturally a pain 
 unto me to communicate myself by halves, and with 
 modification. . . . 
 
 "I should commend a high-raised mind that could 
 both bend and discharge itself ; that wherever her for- 
 tune might transport her, she might continue constant. 
 . . . I envy those which can be familiar with the 
 meanest of their followers, and vouchsafe to contract 
 friendship and frame discourse with their own servants." 
 
 Again, la Boetie is panegyrised by Montaigne 
 for Ms rare poise and firmness of character;! 
 
 » B. Ill, Chap. 3. t B. II, Chap. 17. 
 
44 MontaujTie and Shakspere. 
 
 and elsewhere in the essays we find many allu- 
 sions to the ideal of the imperturbable man, 
 which Montaigne has in the above cited passages 
 ])rought into connection with his ideal of friend- 
 ship. It could well be, then — though here we 
 cannot argue the point with confidence — that in 
 this as in other matters the strong general 
 impression that Montaigne was so well fitted to 
 make on Shakspere' s mind was the source of 
 such a change in the conception and exposition 
 of Hamlet's relation to Horatio as is set up by 
 Hamlet's protestation of his long-standing 
 admiration and love for his friend. Shakspere's 
 own relations with one or other of his noble, 
 patrons would make him specially alive to such 
 suggestion. 
 
 XVI. We now come to the suggested resem- 
 blance between the "To be or not to be" soliloquy 
 and the general tone of Montaigne on the sub- 
 ject of death. On this resemblance I am less 
 disposed to lay stress now than I was on a first 
 consideration of the subject thirteen years ago. 
 While I find new coincidences of detail on a 
 more systematic search, I am less impressed by 
 the alleged general resemblance of tone. In 
 point of fact, the general drift of Hamlet's 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 45 
 
 soliloquy is rather alien to the general tone of 
 Montaigne on the same theme. That tone, as 
 we shall see, harmonises much more nearly with 
 the speech of the Duke to Claudio, on the same 
 theme, in Measure for Measttre. "What really 
 seems to subsist in the " To be " soliloqiiy, after 
 a careful scrutiny, is a series of echoes of single 
 thoughts ; but there is the diihculty that some 
 of these occur in the earlier form of the soliloquy 
 in the First Quarto, a circumstance which tends 
 — though not necessarily* — to throw a shade of 
 doubt on the apparent echoes in the finished 
 form of the speech. We can but weigh the facts 
 as impartially as may be. 
 
 First, there is the striking coincidence of the 
 word "consummation" (which appears only in 
 the Second Quarto), with Florio's translation of 
 aneantissement in the essay Of Physiognomy, as 
 above noted. Secondly, there is a curious re- 
 semblance between the phrase "take arms against 
 a sea of troubles" and a passage in Florio's ver- 
 sion of the same essay, which has somehow been 
 
 * It may fairly be laid down as practically certain, from what we know 
 of the habit of circulating works in manuscript at that period, and from 
 what Florio tells us in his preface, that translations of some of the essays 
 had been passed about before Florio's folio was printed. 
 
46 Montaigne and STiahspere- 
 
 overlooked in tte disputes over Shakspere's 
 line. It runs : 
 
 "I sometimes suffer myself by starts to be surprised 
 with the pinchings of these unpleasant conceits, which, 
 whilst I arm myself to expel or wrestle against them, 
 assail and beat me. Lo here another huddle or tide of 
 mischief, that on the neck of the former came rushing 
 upon me." 
 
 Tkere arises here tlie difficulty tkat Skaks- 
 pere's line kad been satisfactorily traced to 
 .^Elian's* story of tke Celtic practice of rushing 
 into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons ; 
 and tke matter must, I tkink, be left open until 
 it can be ascertained wketker tke statement con- 
 cerning tke Celts was available to Skakspere in 
 any translation or citation.t 
 
 Again, tke pkrase " Conscience dotk make 
 cowards of us all" is very like tke ecko of two 
 passages in tke essayj Or Conscience : " Of suck 
 marvellous working power is tke sting of con- 
 science : wkick often inducetk us to bewray, to 
 accuse, and to combat ourselves" ; " which as 
 it doth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it 
 
 * Varia Historia, XII, 23. 
 
 t The stoi-y certainly had a wide vogue, being found in Aristotle, 
 Eildemian Ethics, iii, i, and in Nicolas of Damascus ; while Strabo (vii, ii. 
 § I) gives it further currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri. 
 
 X B. II, Chap. 5. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 47 
 
 Store us with assurance and trust; " and the 
 lines about " the dread of something after 
 death" might point to the passage in the Fortieth 
 Essay, in which Montaigne cites the saying of 
 Augustine that " Nothing but what follows 
 death, mahes death to be evil " (malam mortem 
 non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem,) cited by 
 Montaigne in order to dispute it. The same 
 thought, too, is dealt with in the essay* on A 
 Custom of the Isle of Cea, which contains a pas- 
 sage suggestive of Hamlet's earlier soliloquy on 
 self-slaughter. But, for one thing, Hamlet's 
 soliloquies are contrary in drift to Montaigne's 
 argument ; and, for another, the phrase " Con- 
 science makes cowards of us all " existed in the 
 soliloquy as it stood in the Eirst Quarto, while 
 the gist of the idea is actually found twice in a 
 previous play, where it has a proverbial ring.t 
 And " the hope of something after death " 
 figures in the First Quarto also. 
 
 Finally, there are other sources than Mon- 
 taigne for parts of the soliloquy, sources nearer, 
 too, than those which have been pointed to in 
 
 » B. II, Chap. 3 
 
 t Richard III, I, 4 ; V, 3. 
 
48 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 the Senecan. tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr. 
 CunlifEe has. pointed out,* a broad correspondence 
 between the whole soliloquy and the chorus of 
 women at the end of the second Act of the 
 Troades, where the question of a life beyond is 
 pointedly pxit : 
 
 " Verum est ? an timidos fabula decepit, 
 Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?" 
 
 It is true that the choristers in Seneca pro- 
 nounce definitely against the future life : 
 "Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. . . 
 Rumores vacui verbaque inania, 
 Et par soUicito fabula somnio." 
 
 But wherever in Christendom the pagan's words 
 were discussed, the Christian hypothesis would 
 be pitted against his unbelief, with the effect of 
 making one thought overlay the other ; and in 
 this fused form the discussion may easily have 
 reached Shakspere' s eye and ear. So it would 
 be with the echo of two Senecan passages noted 
 by Mr. Munro in the verses on " the undis- 
 covered country from whose bourn no traveller 
 returns." In the HERctiLES FuEENst we have : 
 "Nemo ad id sero venit, unde nunquam 
 Quum semel venit potuit reverti ; '' 
 
 ' The Influence ofSeiuca on Elizabethan Tragedy, 1893, p. 80-5. 
 t Actus III, 865-866. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 49 
 
 and in the Hercules CEtjeus* tliere is tlie same 
 
 thouglit : 
 
 " regnum canis inquieti 
 TJnde non unquam remeavit ullus." 
 
 But here, as elsewhere, Seneca himself was 
 employing a standing sentiment, for in the best 
 known poem of Catullus we have : 
 
 " Qui nunc it per iter tenebrioosum 
 lUuO, unde negant redire quemquam."t 
 
 And though there was in Shakspere's day no 
 English translation of Catullus, the commen- 
 tators long ago notedf that in Sandford's trans- 
 lation of Cornelius Agrippa (? 1569), there 
 occurs the phrase, " The countrie of the dead is 
 irremeable, that they cannot return," a fuller 
 parallel to the passage in the soliloquy than any- 
 thing cited from the classics. 
 
 Finally, in Marlowe's Edward II.,§ written 
 
 before 1593, we have : 
 
 "Weep not for Mortimer, 
 That scorns the world, and, as a traveller. 
 Goes to discover countries yet unknown. "|| 
 
 * Actus IV, 1526-7. 
 
 t This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in Doeriug's edition. 
 X See Bosvvell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, in loc. 
 § Yet again, in Mareton's Jiisatiak Countess, the commentators have 
 noticed the same sentiment: — _ ,, 
 
 "Death, 
 From whose stern cave none traclts a baclcward path." 
 It was in fact a poetic commonplace. 
 |[ Act 5, Scene 6. 
 
50 Montaiyne and Shalcspere. 
 
 So that, without going to the Latin, we have 
 obvious English sources for notable parts of the 
 soliloquy. 
 
 Thus, though Shakspere may (1) have seen 
 part of the Florio translation, or separate trans- 
 lations of some of the essays, before the issue of 
 the First Quarto ; or may (2) easily have heard 
 that very point discussed by Florio, who was 
 the friend of his friend Jonson, or by those who 
 had read the original ; or may even (3) himself 
 have read in the original; and though further 
 it seems quite certain that his " consummation 
 devoutly to be wished " was an echo of Florio's 
 translation of the Apology of Socrates ; on the 
 other hand we are not entitled to trace the 
 soliloquy as a whole to Montaigne's stimulation 
 of Shakspere' s thought. That Shakspere read 
 Montaigne in the original once seemed probable 
 to me, as to others ; but, on closer study, I con- 
 sider it unlikely, were it only because the Mon- 
 taigne influence in his work begins, as aforesaid, 
 in Hamlet. Of all the apparent coincidences I 
 have noticed between Shakspere's previous plays 
 and the essays, none has any evidential value. 
 (1) The passage on the music of the spheres in 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 51 
 
 tlie Merchant of Venice* recalls the passage on 
 the subject in Montaigne's essay of Custom ; t 
 but then the original source is Cicero, In Som- 
 NiuM SciPiONis, which had been translated into 
 English in 1577. (2) FalstafE's rhapsody on the 
 virtues of sherrisj recalls a passage in the essay 
 of Drunkenness, § but then Montaigne avows 
 that what he says is the common doctrine of wine- 
 drinkers. (3) Montaigne citesH the old saying 
 of Petronius, that " all the world's a stage," 
 which occurs in As You Like It ; but the phrase 
 itself, being preserved by John of Salisbury, 
 would be current in England. It is, indeed, said 
 to have been the motto of the Globe Theatre. 
 Thus, while we are the more strongly convinced 
 of a Montaigne influence beginning with Ham- 
 let, we are bound to concede the doubtfulness 
 of any apparent influence before the Second 
 Quarto. At most we may say that both of Ham- 
 let's soliloquies which touch on suicide evidently 
 owe something to the discussions set up by Mon- 
 taigne's essays. H 
 
 » Act v., so. I. t I., 22. J 2 H. IV., iv. 3, § ii. 2 11 ii. lo. 
 
 t So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a desertion of one's post 
 witliout the deity's peraiission is first found, in English literature, in 
 Sidney, and he would find it in Montaigne's essay on the Ciistoiii of tltc Isle 
 o/Cca (edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 367). 
 
52 Montaitjne and Shakspere. 
 
 XVII. In the case of the Duke's exhortation 
 to Claudio in Measxjee for Measure, on the 
 contrary, the whole speech may be said to be a 
 synthesis of favourite propositions of Mon- 
 taigne. The thought in itself, of course, is not 
 new or out-of-the-way; it is nearly all to be 
 found suggested in the Latin classics; but in 
 the light of what is certain for us as to 
 Shakspere' s study of Montaigne, and of the 
 whole cast of the expression, it is difficult to 
 doubt that Montaigne is for Shakspere the 
 source. Let us take a number of passages from 
 Florio's translation of the Nineteenth Essay, to 
 begin with: 
 
 " The end of our career is death : it is the necessary 
 object of our aim ; if it affright us, how is it possible 
 we should step one foot further without an ague?" 
 
 "What hath an aged man left hira of his youth's 
 vigour, and of his fore past life? . . . When youth 
 fails in us, we feel, nay we perceive, no shaking or 
 transchange at all in ourselves : which is essence and 
 verity is a harder death than that of a languishing 
 and irksome life, or that of age. Forasmuch as the 
 leap from an ill being into a not being is not so danger- 
 ous or steepy as it is from a delightful and flourishing 
 being into a painful and sorrowful condition. A weak 
 bending and faint stopping body hath less strength to 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 53 
 
 bear and undergo a heavy burden : So hath our soul." 
 
 "Our religion hath no surer human foundation than 
 the contempt of life. Discourse of reason doth not only 
 call and summon us unto it. For why should we fear to 
 lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be moaned? But 
 also, since we are threatened by so many kinds of death, 
 there is no more inconvenience to fear them all than to 
 endure one : what matter it when it cometh, since it 
 is xinavoidable ? . . . Death is a part of yourselves ; 
 you fly from yourselves. The being you enjoy is equally 
 shared between life and death. . . . The continual 
 work of your life is to contrive death ; you are in 
 death during the time you continue in life .... 
 during life you are still dying." 
 
 The same line of expostulation occurs in other 
 essays. In the Fortieth we have : 
 
 " Now death, which some of all horrible things call 
 the most horrible, who knows not how others call it the 
 only haven of this life's torments ? the sovereign good 
 of nature ? the only stay of our liberty ? and the ready 
 and common receipt of our evils P . . . . 
 
 " . . . . Death is but felt by discourse, because it 
 is the emotion of an instant. A thousand beasts, a 
 thousand men, are sooner dead than threatened." 
 
 Then take a passage occurring near the end of 
 the Apology of Raimond Sebonde : 
 
 " We do foolishly fear a kind of death, whereas we 
 have already passed and daily pass so many others. 
 . . . The flower of age dieth, fadeth, and fleeteth, 
 when age comes upon us, and youth endeth in the 
 
54 Montaigne and Shalcspere- 
 
 flower of a full-grown man's age, childhood in youth, 
 and the first age dieth in infancy; and yesterday 
 endeth in this day, and to-day shall die in to-morrow." 
 
 Now compare textually tlie Duke's speech : 
 
 " Be absolute for death : either death or life 
 Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with 
 
 life: — 
 If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing 
 That none but fools would keep : a breath thou art, 
 (Servile to all the skiey influences) 
 That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st, 
 Hourly afflict : merely, thou are death's fool ; 
 For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun. 
 And yet run'st towards him still : Thou art not noble ; 
 For all the accommodations that thou bear'st 
 Are nursed by baseness : Thou art by no means 
 
 vaUant, 
 For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork 
 Of a poor worm : Thy best of rest is sleep, 
 And that thou oft provok'st ; yet grossly fear'st 
 Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself ; 
 For thou exist'st on many thousand grains 
 Which issue out of dust : Happy thou art not ; 
 For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get. 
 And what thou hast forget'st : Thou art not certain. 
 For thy complexion shifts to strange effects, 
 After the moon : If thou art rich, thou art poor ; 
 For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, 
 Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, 
 And death unloads thee : Friend hast thou none ; 
 For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire, 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 55 
 
 Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum. 
 
 For ending thee no sooner : Thou hast no youth nor 
 
 age, 
 But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep. 
 Dreaming on both : for all thy blessed youth 
 Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms 
 Of palsied eld ; and when thou art old and rich. 
 Thou hast neither heat, afiEection, hmbs, nor beauty, 
 To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this. 
 That bears the name of life? Yet in this life 
 Lie hid more thousand deaths : yet death we fear. 
 That makes these odds all even."* 
 
 Then collate yet further some more passages 
 from the Essays : 
 
 "They perceived her (the soul) to be capable of 
 diverse passions, and agitated by many languishing 
 and painful motions . . . subject to her infirmities, 
 diseases, and oflEences, even as the stomach or the foot 
 . . . dazzled and troubled by the force of wine ; 
 removed from her seat by the vapours of a burning 
 fever. . . , She was seen to dismay and confound all 
 her faculties by the only biting of a sick dog, and to 
 contain no great constancy of discourse, no virtue, no 
 philosophical resolution, no contention of her forces, 
 that might exempt her from the subjection of these 
 accidents. . . ."f 
 
 « When this is compared with the shorter speech of similar drift in the 
 anonymous play of Edward HI. (-" To die is all as common as to live " etc., 
 Act iv., sc. 4) it will be seen that the querying form as well as the elabo- 
 ration constitutes a special resemblance between the speech in Shakspere and 
 the passages in Montaigne. 
 
 t Apology oj Raimond Scbonde. 
 
56 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 " It is not without reason we are taught to take notice 
 of our sleep, for the resemblance it hath with death. 
 How easily we pass from waking to sleeping ; with how 
 little interest we lose the knowledge of light, and of 
 ourselves. . . ."* 
 
 "Wherefore as we from that instant take a title of 
 being, which is but a twinkling in the infinite course of 
 an eternal night, and so short an interruption of our 
 perpetual and natural condition, death possessing what- 
 ever is before and behind this moment, and also a good 
 part of this moment, "f 
 
 "Every human nature is ever in the middle between 
 being born and dying, giving nothing of itself but an 
 obscure appearance and shadow, and an uncertain and 
 weak opinion."! 
 
 Compare finally tlie line " Thy best of rest is 
 
 sleep " (where the word rest seems a printer's 
 
 error) with the passage " We find nothing so 
 
 sweet in life as a quiet and gentle sleep," already 
 
 cited in connection with our fourth parallel. 
 
 XVIII. The theme, in fine, is one of Mon- 
 taigne's favourites. And the view that Shaks- 
 pere had been impressed by it seems to be 
 decisively corroborated by the fact that the 
 speech of Claudio to Isabella, expressing those 
 fears of death which the Duke seeks to calm, is 
 
 * ii, 6, 0/ Exercise or Practice. f Apology. X Ibid, near end. 
 
Montaigne and Sliahspere. 57 
 
 likewise an eclio of a whole series of passages in 
 
 Montaigne. Shakspere's lines run : 
 
 "Ay, but to die, and go we know not where. 
 To lie in cold obstruction and to rot : 
 This sensible warm motion to become 
 A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
 To bathe in fiery floods or to reside 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice, 
 To be imprisoned in the viewless winds. 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst 
 Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts 
 Imagine howling ! — 'tis too horrible !...." 
 
 So far as I know, the only idea in this passage 
 which belongs to the current English supersti- 
 tion of Shakspere's day, apart from the natural 
 notion of death as a mere rotting of the body, 
 is that of the purgatorial fire ; unless we assume 
 that the common superstition as to the souls of 
 unbaptised children being blown about until the 
 day of judgment was extended in the popular 
 imagination to the case of executed criminals. 
 He may have heard of the account given by 
 Empedocles, as cited in Plutarch,* of the punish- 
 ment of the offending daemons, who were whirled 
 between earth and air and sun and sea ; but 
 
 * On Isis and Osiris, o. 26. 
 
58 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 there is no suggestion in tliat passage tliat human 
 
 souls were so treated. Dante's Inferno, with its 
 
 pictures of carnal sinners tossed about by the 
 
 winds in the dark air of the second circle,* and 
 
 of traitors punished by freezing in the ninth,t 
 
 was probably not known to the dramatist ; nor 
 
 does Dante's vision coincide with Claudio's, in 
 
 which the souls are blown " about the pendent 
 
 world." Shakspere may indeed have heard 
 
 some of the old tales of a hot and, cold purgatory, 
 
 such as that of Drithelm, given by Bede,+ 
 
 whence (rather than from Dante) Milton drew 
 
 his idea of an alternate tortur6.§ But there 
 
 again, the correspondence is only partial; 
 
 whereas in Montaigne's Apology of Eaimond 
 
 Sebonde we find, poetry apart, nearly every 
 
 notion that enters into Claudio's speech : 
 
 "The most universal and received fantasy, and which 
 endureth to this day, hath been that whereof Pytha- 
 goras is made author. . . which is that souls at 
 their departure from us did but pass and roU from one 
 to another body, from a lion to a horse, from a horse 
 
 » Canto V. t Canto xxxii. 
 
 X It would seem to be from those early monkish legends that the mediKval 
 Inferno was built up. The torture of cold was the northern contribution to 
 the scheme. Compare Warton, History of English Poetry, sec. 49, and 
 Wright's Saint Patrick's Pnrgatory, 1844, p. 18. 
 
 § Paradise Lost, B. 11., 587-603. 
 
Montaigne and Shalxspere. 59 
 
 to a king, incessantly wandering up and down, from 
 house to mansion. . . Some added more, that the 
 same souls do sometimes ascend up to heaven, and 
 come down again. . . Origen waked them eternally, 
 to go and come from a good to a bad estate. The 
 opinion that Varro reporteth is, that in the revolutions 
 of four hundred and forty years they reconjoin them- 
 selves unto their first bodies. . . Behold her (the 
 soul's) progress elsewhere : He that hath lived well re- 
 conjoineth himself unto that star or planet to which he 
 is assigned ; who evil, passeth into a woman. And if 
 then he amend not himself, he transchangeth himself 
 into a beast, of condition agreeing to his vicious cus- 
 toms, and shall never see an end of his punishments 
 until ... by virtue of reason he have deprived him- 
 self of those gross, stupid, and elementary qualities that 
 were in him. . . They (the Epicureans) demand, 
 what ordei' there should be if the throng of the dying 
 should be greater than that of such as be born . . . 
 and demand besides, what they should pass their time 
 about, whilst they should stay, until any other mansion 
 were made ready for them. . . Others have stayed 
 the soul in the deceased bodies, wherewith to animate 
 serpents, worms, and other beasts, which are said to 
 engender from the corruption of our members, yea, and 
 from our ashes. . . Others make it immortal without 
 any science or knowledge. Nay, there are some of ours 
 who have deemed that of condemned men's souls devils 
 were made. . ."* 
 
 It is at a short distance from tkis passage that 
 
 we find the suggestion of a frozen purgatory : 
 
 * Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 597-598. 
 
60 Montaigrie and Shakspere. 
 
 " Amongst them (barbarous nations) was also found 
 the belief of purgatory, but after a new form, for what 
 we ascribe unto fire they impute unto cold, and imagine 
 that souls are both purged and punished by the vigor 
 of an extreme coldness."* 
 
 And over and above this peculiar corres- 
 pondence between tke Essays and the two 
 speeches on death, we may note how some of the 
 lines of the Duke in the opening scene connect 
 with two of the passages above cited in connection 
 with Hamlet's last soliloquy, expressing the idea 
 that nature or deity confers gifts in order that 
 they should be used. The Duke's lines are 
 among Shakspere's best : 
 
 "Thyself and thy belongings 
 Are not thine own so proper as to waste 
 Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee. 
 Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
 Not light them for themselves : for if our virtues 
 Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
 As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely 
 
 touched 
 But to fine issues : nor nature never lends 
 The smallest scruple of her excellence. 
 But, Uke a thrifty goddess, she determines 
 Herself the glory of a creditor. 
 Both thanks and use. . . " 
 
 Here we have once more a characteristically 
 
 » Ibid. p. 621. 
 
Montaigne and Sliahspere. 61 
 
 Shaksperean transmutation and development of 
 
 tlie idea ratter tlian a reproduction ; and the 
 
 sume appears when we compare the admirable 
 
 lines of the poet with a homiletic sentence from 
 
 the Apology of Raimond Sebonde : — 
 
 "It is not enough for us to serve God in spirit and 
 soul ; we owe him besides and we yield unto him a 
 corporal worshipping : we apply our limbs, our motions, 
 and all external things to honour him.'' 
 
 But granting the philosophic as well as the 
 poetic heightening, we are still led to infer a 
 stimulation of the poet's thought by the Essays 
 — a stimulation not limited to one play, but 
 affecting other plays written about the same 
 time. Another point of connection between 
 Hamlet and Measure for Measure is seen 
 when we compare the above passage, " Spirits 
 are not finely touched but to fine issues," with 
 Laertes' lines* : 
 
 "Nature is fine in love, and when 'tis fine 
 It sends some precious instance of itself 
 After the thing it loves." 
 
 And though such data are of course not con- 
 clusive as to the time of composition of the 
 plays, there is so much of identity between the 
 
 * Act iv., sc. 5. 
 
62 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 thouglit in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and 
 a notable passage in Troiltis and Ceessida, as 
 to strengthen greatly the surmise that the latter 
 play was also written, or rather worked-over, by 
 Shakspere about 1604. The phrase : 
 "if our virtues 
 
 Did not go forth of us, 'twere all the same 
 
 As if we had them not,'' 
 
 is developed in the speech of Ulysses to 
 
 Achilles* : 
 
 " A strange fellow here 
 Writes me that man — ^how dearly ever parted 
 How much in having, or without, or in — 
 Cannot make boast to have that which he hath. 
 Nor feels not what he knows, but by reflection; 
 As when his virtues shining upon others 
 Heat them, and they retort their heat again 
 To the first giver." 
 
 I do not remember in Montaigne any such 
 development of the idea as Shakspere here gives 
 it; indeed, we have seen him putting forth a 
 contrary teaching; and looking to the context, 
 where Ulysses admits the thesis to be " familiar," 
 we are bound to infer a direct source for it. In 
 all probability it derives from Seneca, who in 
 his treatise De BENEFiciisf throws out the germ 
 
 » iii. 3. t B. V, cc. 8, 9, 10. Cf, vi. 2, 3. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 63 
 
 of the ideas as to Nature demanding back her 
 gifts, and as to virtue being nothing if not 
 reflected; and even suggests the principle of 
 " thanks and use."* This treatise, too, lay to 
 Shakspere's hand in the translation of 1578, 
 where the passages : " Rerum natura nihil 
 dicitur perdere, quia quidquid illi avellitur, ad 
 illam redit; nee perire quidquam potest, quod 
 quo excidat non habet, sed eodem evolvitur unde 
 discedit"; and "quaedam quum sint honesta, 
 pulcherrima summae virtutis, nisi cum altero 
 non habent locum," are translated : 
 
 "The nature of a thing cannot be said to have fore- 
 gone aught, because that whatsoever is plucked from it 
 returneth to it again ; neither can anything be lost 
 which hath not whereout of to pass, but windeth back 
 again unto whence it came ; " 
 
 and 
 
 " Some things though they be honest, very goodly 
 and right excellently vertuous, yet have they not their 
 effect but in a co-partner." 
 
 Whether it was Shakspere's reading of Mon- 
 taigne that sent him to Seneca, to whom Mon- 
 taignet avows so much indebtedness, we of 
 course cannot tell; but it is enough for the 
 purpose of our argument to say that we have 
 
 * B. v,cc. 22-25. t "• 32. 
 
64 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 here anotlier point or stage in a line of ana- 
 lytical thouglit on whicli Shakspere was 
 embarked about 1603, and of wbicli tbe starting 
 point or initial stimulus was tbe perusal of 
 Florio's Montaigne. We have tbe point of con- 
 tact witb Montaigne in Hamlet, where tbe 
 saying tbat reason is implanted in us to be 
 used, is seen to be one of the many correspon- 
 dences of thought between the play and the 
 Essays. The idea is more subtly and deeply 
 developed in Measure foe Measuee, and still 
 more subtly and philosophically in Teoilus and 
 Cressida. The fact of the process of develop- 
 ment is all that is here affirmed, over and above 
 the actual phenomena of reproduction before set 
 forth. 
 
 As to these, the proposition is that in sum 
 they constitute such an amount of reproduction 
 of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about 
 habitual " stealings." There is no justification 
 for applying that to the passage in the Tempest, 
 since not only is that play not known to have 
 existed in its present form in 1605,* when Vol- 
 
 * The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his Essays on Shakspere (Enfi. tr., 
 p. 15), to show that the Tempest was written about 1604, seem to me to possess 
 no weight whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of Pros- 
 
 Sero in which Shalispere transmutes four lines of the Earl of Stirling's 
 >arins must have been written immediately after the publication of that 
 work. The argument is (l) that Shakspere must have seen Darins when it 
 came out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or never. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 65 
 
 PONE was produced, but the phrase plainly 
 alleges not one but many borrowings. I am 
 not aware that extracts from Montaigne have 
 been traced in any others of the English con- 
 temporary dramatists. But here in two plays 
 of Shakspere, then fresh in memory — the 
 Second Quarto having been published in 1604 
 and Measure for Measure produced in the 
 same year — ^were echoes enough from Montaigne 
 to be noted by Jonson, whom we know to have 
 owned, as did Shakspere, the Florio folio, and 
 to have been Florio' s warm admirer. And there 
 seems to be a confirmation of our thesis in the 
 fact that, while we find detached passages 
 savouring of Montaigne in some later plays of 
 the same period, as in one of the concluding 
 period, the Tempest, we do not again find in any 
 one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we 
 have seen in Hamlet and Measure for 
 Measure, though the spirit of Montaigne's 
 thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may 
 be said to tinge all the later tragedies. 
 
 (a) In Othello ( ? 1604) we have lago's " 'tis 
 in ourselves that we are thus or thus," already 
 considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase — 
 
66 Motitaujne and Shakspere. 
 
 " I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me. . . . 
 He that is rohh'd, not wanting what is stolen, 
 Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all." 
 
 — a philosopliical commonplace wMcli compares 
 ■witli various passages in the Fortietli Essay. 
 
 (b) In Lear (1G06) we have such a touch as 
 
 the king's lines* — 
 
 "And take upon's the mystery of things 
 As if we were God's spies ; " 
 
 — which recalls the vigorous protest of the 
 essays, that a man ought sobeely to meddle 
 
 WITH JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,t whcrC MoU- 
 
 taigne avows that if he dared he would put in 
 the category of imposters the 
 
 "interpreters and ordinary controllers of the designs of 
 God, setting about to find the causes of each accident, 
 and to see in the secrets of the divine will the incompre- 
 hensible motives of its works." 
 
 This, again, is a recurrent note with Mon- 
 taigne ; and much of the argument of the 
 Apology is typified in the sentence : — 
 
 " What greater vanity can there be than to go about 
 by our proportions and conjectures to guess at God ? " 
 
 (c) But there is a yet more striking coinci- 
 dence between a passage in the essayj of Judg- 
 
 " Act V. sc, 3. t i, 31. J ii, 13. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 67 
 
 ING OF Others' Death and the speecli of 
 Edmund* on tlie subject of stellar influences. In 
 tlie essay Montaigne sharply derides the habit of 
 ascribing human occurrences to the interference 
 of the stars — ^which very superstition he was 
 later to support by his own authority in the 
 Apology, as we have seen above, in the passage 
 on the "power and domination" of the celestial 
 bodies. The passage in the thirteenth essay is 
 the more notable in itself, being likewise a pro- 
 test against human self-sufficiency, though the 
 bearing of the illustration is directly reversed. 
 Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain 
 and carry all with us : whence it foUoweth that 
 we deem our death to be some great matter, and 
 which passeth not so easily, nor without a 
 solemn consultation of the stars." Then follow 
 references to Csesar's sayings as to his star, and 
 the " common foppery " as to the sun mourning 
 his death a year. 
 
 "And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers 
 itself to be so easily cony-catched, deeming that lOur 
 own interests disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved 
 at our least actions. ' There is no such society between 
 
 * Act i., sc, 2. 
 
68 Montaitjne and Shakspere. 
 
 heaven and us that by our destiny the shining of the 
 stars should be as mortal as we are.' " 
 
 There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence 
 of this passage in Edmund's speech, where the 
 word " foppery " is a special clue : 
 
 " This is the excellent foppery of the world ! that when 
 we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own 
 behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, 
 the moon, and the stars : as if we were villains by 
 necessity ; fools by heavenly compulsion ; knaves, 
 thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance ; drunk- 
 ards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of 
 planetary influence ; and all that we are evil in, by 
 divine thrusting on. . . ." 
 
 (d) Again, in Macbeth (1606), the words of 
 Malcolm to Macduff* : 
 " Give sorrow words : the grief that does not speak, 
 Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break '' 
 
 — an idea which also underlies Macbeth's " this 
 perilous stuff, which weighs upon the heart" — 
 recalls the essayt Of Sadness, in which Mon- 
 taigne remarks on the 
 
 "mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us 
 when accidents surpassing our strength overwhelm us," 
 and on the way in which " the soul, bursting afterwards 
 forth into tears and complaints . . . seemeth to clear 
 and dilate itself"; going on to tell how the German 
 
 • Act iv., sc. 3. t i. a. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 69 
 
 Lord Raisciac looked on his dead son "till the vehe- 
 mency of his sad sorrow, having suppressed and choked 
 his vital spirits, felled him stark dead to the ground." 
 
 The parallel liere, sucli as it is, is at least 
 
 mucli more vivid than that drawn between 
 
 Shakspere' s lines and one of Seneca : 
 
 Curae leves loquuntur : ingentes stupent* — " Light 
 trouhles speak : the great ones are dumb." 
 
 Certainly no one of these latter passages would 
 singly suffice to prove that Shakspere had read 
 Montaigne, though the peculiar coincidence of 
 one word in Edgar's speech with a word in 
 Florio, above noted, would alone raise the ques- 
 tion. But even had Shakspere not passed, as we 
 shall see cause to acknowledge, beyond the most 
 melancholy mood of Montaigne into one of far 
 sterner and more stringent pessimism, an 
 absence or infrequency of suggestions of Mon- 
 taigne in the plays between 1605 and 1610 would 
 be a very natural result of Jonson's gibe in 
 VoLPONE. That gibe, indeed, is not really so 
 ill-natured as the term " steal " is apt to make 
 it sound for our ears, especially if we are pre- 
 possessed — as even Mr. Fleay still seems to be 
 
 » HifipoPyttis, 615 (607). 
 
70 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 — ^by the old commentators' notion of a deep ill- 
 will on Jonson's part towards Shakspere. 
 There was probably no such ill-will in the 
 matter, the burly scholar's habit of robust 
 banter being enough to account for the form of 
 his remark. As a matter of fact, his own plays 
 are strewn with classic transcriptions ; and 
 though he evidently plumed himself on his 
 power of " invention "* in the matter of plots — 
 a faculty which he knew Shakspere to lack — 
 he cannot conceivably have meant to charge his 
 rival with having committed any discreditable 
 plagiarism in drawing upon Montaigne. At 
 most he would mean to convey that borrowing 
 from the English translation of Montaigne was 
 an easy game as compared with his own scholar- 
 like practice of translating from the Greek and 
 Latin, and from out-of-the-way authors, too. 
 
 However that might be, the fact stands that 
 Shakspere did about 1604 reproduce Mon- 
 taigne as we have seen ; and it remains to con- 
 sider what the reproduction signifies, as regards 
 Shakspere' s mental development. 
 
 * See the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour, first ed., preserved by 
 Gifford. 
 
III. 
 
 But first there has to be asked the question, 
 whether the Montaigue influence is unique or 
 exceptional. Of the many literary influences 
 which an Elizabethan dramatist might undergo, 
 was Montaigne's the only one which wrought 
 deeply upon Shakspere's spirit, apart from 
 those of his contemporary dramatists and the 
 pre-existing plays, which were then models and 
 points of departure? It is clear that Shakspere 
 must have thought much and critically of the 
 methods and the utterance of his co-rivals in 
 literary art, as he did of the methods of his 
 fellow-actors. The author of the advice to the 
 players in Hamlet was hardly less a critic than 
 a poet; and the sonnet* which speaks of its 
 author as 
 "Desiring this man's art and that man's scope," 
 
 is one of the least uncertain revelations that 
 these enigmatic poems yield us. We may confi- 
 dently decide, too, with Professor Minto,t that 
 the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning : 
 
 » The 29th. 
 
 t See his Characteristics of English Poets, 2nd. ed. p. 222. 
 
 ( 71 ) 
 
72 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 " Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse ? " 
 kas reference to Chapmau, in whom Shakspere 
 miglit well see one of Ms most formidable com- 
 petitors in poetry. But we are liere concerned 
 with influences of thought, as distinct from 
 influences of artistic example ; and the question 
 is : Do the plays show any other culture-contact 
 comparable to that which we have been led to 
 recognise in the case of Montaigne's Essays ? 
 
 The matter cannot be said to have been very 
 fully investigated when even the Montaigne 
 influence has been thus far left so much in the 
 vague. As regards the plots, there has been 
 exliaiistive and instructive research during two 
 centuries ; and of collations of parallel passages, 
 apart from Montaigne, there has been no lack ; 
 but the deeper problem of the dramatist's mental 
 history can hardly be said to have arisen till our 
 own generation. As regards many of the 
 parallel passages, the ground has been pretty 
 well cleared by the dispassionate scholarship 
 brought to bear on them from Farmer onwards ; 
 though the idolatry of the Coleridgean school, 
 as represented by Knight, did much to retard 
 scientific conclusions on this as on other points. 
 
Montaigne and Shalcspere. 73 
 
 Earmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere 
 (1767) proved for all open-minded readers that 
 much of Shakspere' s supposed classical know- 
 ledge was derived from translations alone ; * and 
 further investigation does but establish his 
 general view.f Such is the effect of M. Stapfer's 
 chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;! 
 and the pervading argument of that chapter will 
 be found to hold good as against the view sug- 
 gested, with judicious diffidence, by Dr. John 
 W. Cunliffe, concerning the influence of Seneca's 
 tragedies on Shakspere's. Unquestionably the 
 body of Senecan tragedy, as Dr. Cunliffe's valu- 
 able research has shown, did much to colour the 
 style and thought of the Elizabethan drama, as 
 
 * The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove Shakspere classically 
 \e:ivned is that rmAc in the-Critical Observations on Shakspere (1746) of the 
 Rev. John Upton, a man of great erudition and much random acuteness (shown 
 particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but 
 as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congeni- 
 ally criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's dic- 
 tion and syntax are pecuUarly unconvincing. 
 
 t It may not be out of place here to say a word for Farmer in passing, as 
 against the strictures of M. Stapfer, who, after recognising the general per- 
 tinence of his remarks, proceeds to say (Shakspere and Classical Antiquity, 
 Eng. trans, p. S3) that Farmer "fell into the egregious folly of speaking in a 
 strain of impertinent conceit ; it is as if the little man — for little he must 
 assuredly have been — was eaten up with vanity." This is in its way as un- 
 just as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has misunderstood Fanner's tone, 
 which is one of banter against, not Shakspere. but those critics who blun- 
 deringly ascribed to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. 
 Towards Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative ; and in the pre- 
 face to the second edition of his essay he wrote : "Shakspere wanted not 
 the stilts of languages to raise him above all other men." 
 
 X Oh. iv. of vol. cited. 
 
74 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 well as to suggest its themes and shape its tech- 
 nique. But it is noteworthy that while there 
 are in the plays, as we have seen, apparent echoes 
 from the Senecan treatises, and while, as we 
 have seen. Dr. CunlifEe suggests sources for some 
 Shaksperean passages in the Senecan tragedies, 
 he is doubtful as to whether they represent any 
 direct study of Seneca by Shakspere. 
 
 "Whether Shakspere was directly indebted to 
 Seneca," he writes, "is a question as difficult as it is 
 interesting. As English tragedy advances, there 
 grows up an accumulation of Senecan influence 
 within the English drama, in addition to the 
 original source, and it becomes increasingly diffi- 
 cult to distinguish between the direct and the 
 indirect influence of Seneca. In no case is the 
 difficulty greater than in that of Shakspere. Of 
 Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Massinger, 
 we can say with certainty that they read Seneca, and 
 reproduced their readings in their tragedies ; of Middle- 
 ton and Heywood we can say with almost equal 
 certainty that they give no sign of direct indebtedness 
 to Seneca; and that they probably came only under 
 the indirect influence, through the imitations of their 
 predecessors and contemporaries. In the case of Shaks- 
 pere we cannot be absolutely certain either way. Pro- 
 fessor Baynes thinks it is probable that Shakspere 
 read Seneca at school ; and even if he did not, we may 
 be sure that, at some period of his career, he would 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 75 
 
 turn to the generally accepted model of classical 
 tragedy, either in the original or in the translation."* 
 
 This seems partially inconsistent ; and, so far 
 as tlie evidence from particular parallels goes, 
 we are not led to take with, any confidence the 
 view put in the last sentence. The ahove-noted 
 parallels between Seneca's tragedies and Shaks- 
 pere's are but cases of citation of sentences 
 likely to have grown proverbial ; and the most 
 notable of the others that have been cited by 
 Dr. CunlifEe is one which, as he notes, points to 
 ^schylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of 
 Macbeth : 
 
 "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this Wood 
 
 Clean from my hand ? No, this my hand will rather 
 
 The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
 
 Making the' green one red : " 
 
 certainly corresponds closely with that of 
 
 Seneca's Hercules : t 
 
 "Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica 
 Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox 
 Tagusve ihera turhidus gaza fluens, 
 Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet 
 Mseotis in me gelida transfundat mare, 
 Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus, 
 Haerebit altum f acinus " 
 
 » The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 66-67. 
 t Hercnles Fiirens, ad fin. (1324-1329.). 
 
76 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 and that of Seneca's Hippolytus : * 
 
 "Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris, 
 Mseotis undis pontieo incumbens mari. 
 Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater 
 Tantum expiarit sceleris." 
 
 But these declamations, deriving as they do, to 
 begin with, from ^schylus,t are seen from their 
 very recurrence in Seneca to have become stock 
 speeches for the ancient tragic drama ; and they 
 were clearly well-fitted to become so for the 
 mediseval. The phrases used were already 
 classic when Catullus employed them before 
 Seneca : 
 
 "Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys 
 Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Ooeanus."t 
 
 In the Renaissance we find the theme repro- 
 duced by Tasso ; § and it had doubtless been 
 freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors 
 and contemporaries. What he did was but to 
 set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose 
 superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as 
 it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Mars- 
 ton did his best with it, in a play which may 
 
 " Hippolytus, Act. 11, 715-718 (723-726.) 
 
 t Cliocphori, 63-65. 
 
 X Carm. Ixxxviii, In Gellinm. See the note in Doering's edition. 
 
 § Gertisalcmmc, .wiii, 8. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 77 
 
 have been written before, thougb published 
 
 after, Macbeth* : — 
 
 "Although the waves of all tho Northern sea 
 Should flow for ever through those guilty hands, 
 Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be " 
 
 — a sad foil to Shakspere's 
 
 "The multitudinous seas incarnadine." 
 
 It is very clear, then, that we are not here 
 
 entitled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the 
 
 Senecan tragedies ; and even were it otherwise, 
 
 the passage in question is a iigure of speech 
 
 rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to 
 
 such reflection. And the same holds good of 
 
 the other interesting but inconclusive parallels 
 
 drawn by Dr. Cunliffe. Shakspere's 
 
 "Diseases desperate grown 
 By desperate appliance are relieved, 
 Or not at all,"t 
 
 which he compares with Seneca's 
 
 "Et ferrum et ignis ssepe medicinre loco est. 
 Extrema prime nemo tentavit loco,"| 
 
 — a passage that may very well be the original 
 for the modem oracle about fire and iron — is 
 really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocra- 
 
 * The ImaliaU Comttess, published in 1613. 
 
 t Hamlet, Act iv. sc. 3. X Agamemnon, 132-153. 
 
78 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 tes, that " Extreme remedies are proper for 
 extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be 
 more tban a proverb. In any case, it lay to 
 Shakspere's band in Montaigne,* as translated 
 by Florio : 
 
 "To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies." 
 
 Equally inconclusive is tbe equally close 
 parallel between Macbetb's 
 
 " Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ? " 
 
 and the sentence of Hercules : 
 
 " Nemo polluto queat 
 Animo mederi."t 
 
 Such a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial 
 vogue, and in The Two Noble Kinsmen (in 
 which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a 
 hand), we have the doctor protesting : " I think 
 she has a perturbed mind, which I cannot minis- 
 ter to."t 
 
 And so, again, with the notable resemblance 
 between Hercules' cry : 
 
 "Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius, 
 Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona, 
 Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus, 
 Etiam furorem."§ 
 
 • ii, 3 (near beginning.) t Hercules Fnrens, Act. V. 1261-2. 
 
 X Act iv, Sc. 3. § Hercules Fnrens, 1258-61. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 79 
 
 and Mactetli's : 
 
 " I have lived long enough : my way of life 
 Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf ; 
 And that which should accompany old age, 
 As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, 
 I must not look to have."* 
 
 Here tliere is indeed every appearance of imi- 
 tation; but, tlLOUgh the versification in Mac- 
 beth's speecb is certainly Shakspere's, sucb a 
 lament bad doubtless been made in other 
 English plays, in direct reproduction of Seneca ; 
 and Shakspere, in all probability, was again 
 only perfecting some previous declamation. 
 
 There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in 
 such phrases as : 
 
 " Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward 
 To that they were before ; "t 
 
 and 
 
 " We but teach 
 Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return 
 To plague the inventor."]; 
 
 • — which might be traced to other sources nearer 
 Shakspere's hand than Seneca. And beyond 
 such sentences and such tropes as those above 
 considered, there was really little or nothing in 
 
 ' Macbeth, Act v. Sc. 2. f Ibid. Act iv, Sc. 2. | Jbid. Act i., sc. 7. 
 
80 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 tlie tragedies of Seneca to catcli Shakspere's 
 eye or ear; notlung to generate in Mm a deep 
 pMlosophy of life or to move lim to tlie mani- 
 fold play of reflection which gives his later 
 tragedies their commanding intellectuality. 
 Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might 
 indeed have drawn from one or two of Seneca's 
 treatises, which do, in their desperately industri- 
 ous manner, cover a good deal of intellectual 
 ground, making some tolerable discoveries by 
 the way. But by the tests alike of quantity and 
 quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the 
 indirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and 
 treatises on Shakspere was slight compared 
 with the direct influence of Montaigne's essays. 
 Nor is it hard to see why ; even supposing Shaks- 
 pere to have had Seneca at hand in translation. 
 Despite Montaigne's own leaning to Seneca, as 
 compared with Cicero, we may often say of the 
 former what Montaigne says of the latter, that 
 " his manner of writing seemeth very tedious." 
 Over the De Beneficiis and the De Iea one is 
 sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does* over 
 Cicero, " I understand sufficiently what death 
 
 e B. ii, ch. 10. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 81 
 
 and voluptuousness are ; let not a man busy him- 
 self to anatomise them." For the swift and 
 penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either 
 goes to the heart of a matter once for all or 
 opens up a far vista of feeling and speculation, 
 leaving us newly related to our environment and 
 even to our experience, Seneca can but give us 
 a conscientious examination of the ground, foot 
 by foot, with a policeman's lantern, leaving us 
 consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. 
 Under no stress of satisfaction from his best 
 finds can we be moved to call him a man of 
 genius, which is just what we call Montaigne 
 after a few pages. It is the broad diiference 
 between industry and inspiration, between 
 fecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and 
 Shakspere. And, though a man of genius is 
 not necessarily dependent on other men of 
 genius for stimulus, we shall on scrutiny find 
 reason to believe that in Shakspere's case the 
 nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal. 
 Even before that is made clear, however, there 
 can be little hesitation about dismissing the 
 only other outstanding theory of a special intel- 
 lectual influence undergone by Shakspere — the 
 
82 Montai(jne and Shakspere. 
 
 theory of Dr. Benno TscMscliwitz, that he read 
 and was impressed by the Italian writings of 
 Giordano Bruno. In this case, the bases of the 
 hypothesis are of the scantiest and the flimsiest. 
 Bruno was in England from 1583 to 1586, 
 before Shakspere came to London. Among his 
 patrons were Sidney and Leicester, but neither 
 Southampton nor Pembroke. In all his writ- 
 ings only one passage can be cited which even 
 faintly suggests a coincidence with any in 
 Shakspere ; and in that the suggestion is faint 
 indeed. In Bruno's ill-famed comedy II 
 Candelajo, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio, 
 " Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the 
 pedant replies, " Litterte, syllabfe, dictio et 
 oratio, partes propinquse et remotte, on which 
 Octavio again asks : " lo dico, quale e il sug- 
 getto et il proposito."* So far as it goes this is 
 something of a parallel to Polonius's question to 
 Hamlet as to what he reads, and Hamlet's 
 answer, " Words, words." But the scene is 
 obviously a stock situation ; and if there are any 
 passages in Hamlet which clearly belong to the 
 pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of Hamlet 
 
 • Tschischwitz, SImkspcrc-Forschiwgcit, i. 1868, S. 52. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 83 
 
 witli Polonius is one of them. And beyond 
 this, Dr. Tschischwitz's parallels are flatly un- 
 convincing, or rather they promptly put them- 
 selves out of court. He admits that nothing else 
 in Bruno's comedy recalls anything else in 
 Shakspere ; * but he goes on to find analogies 
 between other passages in Hamlet and some of 
 Bruno's philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's 
 theorem that all things are made up of inde- 
 structible atoms, and that death is but a trans- 
 formation, Dr. Tschischwitz cites as a reproduc- 
 tion of it Hamlet's soliloquy : 
 
 " O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt ! " 
 
 It is difficult to be serious over such a conten- 
 tion ; and it is quite impossible for anybody out 
 of Germany or the Bacon-Shakspere party to 
 be as serious over it as Dr. Tschischwitz, who 
 finds that Hamlet's figure of the melting of flesh 
 into dew is an illustration of Bruno's " atomic 
 system," and goes on to find a further Brunonian 
 significance in Hamlet's jeering answers to the 
 king's demand for the body of Polonius. Of 
 
 » " Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere Bruno's Komodie 
 nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie enthalt so masslose Ob- 
 sconitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen starksten Stellen daneben fast jung- 
 friiuUch ei-scheint" (Work cited, S. 52). 
 
84 Montai(jne and Shakspere. 
 
 these passages lie finds the source or suggestion, 
 in one whicli he translates from Bruno's Cena 
 DE LE Ceneri : — 
 
 "For to this matter, of which our planet is formed, 
 death and dissolution do not come ; and the annihila- 
 tion of all nature is not possible ; but it attains from 
 time to time, by a fixed law, to renew itself and to 
 change all its parts, rearranging and recombining them ; 
 all this necessarily taking place in a determinate series, 
 under which everything assumes the place of another."* 
 
 In the judgment of Dr. Tschischwitz, this 
 theorem, which anticipates so remarkably the 
 modern scientific conception of the universe, 
 " elucidates " Hamlet's talk about worms and 
 bodies, and his further sketch of the progress of 
 Alexander's dust to the plugging of a beer- 
 barrel. It seems unnecessary to argue that all 
 this is the idlest supererogation. The passages 
 cited from Hamlet, all of them found in the 
 First Quarto, might have been drafted by a 
 much lesser man than Shakspere, and that 
 without ever having heard of Bruno or the 
 theory of the indestructibility of matter. There 
 is nothing in the case approaching to a repro- 
 duction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while 
 
 * Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's translation, so far as 
 syntax permits. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 85 
 
 on tke contrary the " leave not a wrack behind," 
 in the Tempest, is an expression which sets aside, 
 as if it were unknown, the conception of an end- 
 less transmutation of matter, in a context where 
 the thought would naturally suggest itself to 
 one who had met with it. Where Hamlet is 
 merely sardonic in the plane of popular or at 
 least exoteric humour. Dr. Tschischwitz credits 
 him with pantheistic philosophy. Where, on 
 the other hand, Hamlet speaks feelingly and 
 ethically of the serious side of drunkenness,* Dr. 
 Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence 
 in the Bestia Teioxfante, which gives a merely 
 Rabelaisian picture of drunken practices. t Yet 
 again, he puts Bruno's large aphorism, " Sol et 
 homo generant hominem," beside Hamlet's gibe 
 about the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog 
 — a phrase possible to any euphuist of the 
 period. That the parallels amount at best to 
 little. Dr. Tschischwitz himself indirectly admits, 
 though he proceeds to a new extravagance of 
 aiBrmation : 
 
 "We do not maintain that such expressions are phi- 
 losophemes, or that Shakspere otherwise went any 
 
 • Act i. Sc. 4. t Work died, Sc. 59. 
 
°° Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 deeper into Bruno's system than suited his purpose, but 
 that such passages show Shakspere, at the time of his 
 writing of Hamlet, to have already reached the heights 
 of the thought of the age (Zeitbewusstsein), and to have 
 made himself familiar with the most abstract of the 
 sciences. Many hitherto almost unintelligible passages 
 in Hamlet are now cleared up by the poet's acquain- 
 tance with the atomic philosophy and the writings of the 
 Nolan." 
 
 All tMs belongs to tlie uncritical method of 
 the German Shakspere-criticism of the days 
 before Rumelin. It is quite possible that Shaks- 
 pere may have heard something of Bruno's 
 theories from his friends ; and we may be sure 
 that much of Bruno's teaching would have pro- 
 foundly interested him. If Bruno's lectures at 
 Oxford on the immortality of the soul included 
 the matter he published later on the subject, 
 they may have called English attention to the 
 Pythagorean lore concerning the fate of the soul 
 after death,* above cited from Montaigne. We 
 might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lijies, trace 
 the verses on the " shaping fantasies " of " the 
 lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in the Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream,! to such a passage in 
 Bruno as this : — 
 
 * See Filth's iZ/t! 0/ Giordano llniiio, i88g, pp. 121-128. 
 t .\ct V, Sc. I. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 87 
 
 " The first and most capital painter is the vivacity of 
 the phantasy ; the first and most capital poet is the 
 inspiration that originally arises with the impulse of 
 deep thought, or is set up by that, through the divine 
 or akin-to-divine breath of which they feel themselves 
 moved to the fit expression of their thoughts. For each 
 it creates the other principle. Therefore are the phi- 
 losophers in a certain sense painters ; the poets, painters 
 and philosophers ; the painters, philosophers and poets : 
 true poets, painters, and philosophers love and recipro- 
 cally admire each other. There is no philosopher who 
 does not poetise and paint. Therefore is it said, not 
 without reason : To understand is to perceive the 
 figures of phantasy, and understanding is phantasy, or 
 is nothing without it."* 
 
 But since Shakspere does not recognisably 
 echo a passage wMcli he would have been 
 extremely likely to produce in such a context, 
 had he known it, we are bound to decide that he 
 had not even heard it cited, much less read it. 
 And so with any other remote resemblances 
 between his work and that of any author whom 
 he may have read. In regard even to passages 
 in Shakspere which come much nearer their 
 originals than any of these above cited come to 
 Bruno, we are forced to decide that Shakspere 
 got his thought at second or third hand. Thus 
 
 » Cited by N'oack, art. Bniiw, in PhilosojtlUc-gcschiclUlidies Lcvikon. 
 
88 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 tlie famous passage in Henry Y.,* in which, the 
 Archbishop figures the State as a divinely 
 framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly 
 traceable to Plato's Republic and Cicero's De 
 Hepublica; yet rational criticism must decide 
 with M. Stapfert that Shakspere knew neither 
 of these treatises, but got his suggestion from 
 some English translation or citation. 
 
 In fine, we are constrained by all our know- 
 ledge concerning Shakspere, as weU as by the 
 abstract principles of proof, to regard him in 
 general as a reader of his own language only, 
 albeit not without a smattering of others ; and 
 among the books in his own language which 
 we know him to have read in, and can prove him 
 to have been influenced by, we come back to 
 Montaigne's Essays, as by far the most impor- 
 tant and the most potential for suggestion and 
 provocation. 
 
 • Act i, Sc. 2. 
 
 t Work cited, p. go. 
 
IV. 
 
 To have any clear idea, however, of what Mon- 
 taigne did or could do for Shakspere, we must 
 revise our conception of the poet in the light of 
 the positive facts of his life and circumstances 
 — a thing made difficult for us in England 
 through the transcendental direction given to 
 our Shakspere lore by those who first shaped it 
 sympathetically, to wit, Coleridge and the 
 Germans. An adoring idea of Shakspere, 
 as a mind of unapproachable superiority, 
 has thus become so habitual with most of 
 us that it is difficult to reduce our 
 notion to terms of normal individuality, 
 of character and mind as we know them 
 in life. When we read Coleridge, Schlegel, and 
 Gervinus, or even the admirable essay of 
 Charles Lamb, or the eloquent appreciations of 
 Mr. Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and 
 Knight, we are in a world of abstract testhetics 
 or of abstract ethics ; we are not within sight of 
 the man Shakspere, who became an actor for a 
 ( 89 ) 
 
90 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 livelihood in an age wlien the best actors played 
 in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate 
 and not a little brutal ; tben added to his craft 
 of acting the craft of play-patcliing and re- 
 fashioning ; who had his partnership share of 
 the pence and sixpences paid by the mob of 
 noisy London prentices and journeymen and 
 idlers that filled the booth theatre in which his 
 company performed ; who sued his debtors rigor- 
 ously when they did not settle-up ; worked up 
 old plays or took a hand in new, according as 
 the needs of his concern and his fellow-actors 
 dictated; and finally went with his carefully 
 collected fortune to spend his last years in ease 
 and quiet in the country town in which he was 
 born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like 
 Dr. Furnivall, they know absolutsly all the 
 archseological facts as to theatrical life in Shaks- 
 pere's time, do not seem to bring those facts 
 into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of 
 his product; they remain under the spell of 
 Coleridge and Gervinus.* Emerson, it is true, 
 
 * It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr. Furnivall seeks to 
 frame an inductive notion of Shakspere, even when rejecting good evidence 
 and proceeding on deductive lines ; that in the works of Professor Dowden 
 on Shakspere there is always an effort towards a judicial method, though 
 he refuses to take some of the most necessaiT steps ; and that the work of 
 Mr, Appleton Morgan, President of the New York Shakspere Societj', 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 91 
 
 protested at tlie close of liis essay that lie " could 
 not marry this fact/' of Shakspere's being a 
 jovial actor and manager, " to his verse ; " but 
 that deliverance has served only as a text for 
 those who have embraced the fantastic tenet that 
 Shakspere was but the theatrical agent and 
 representative of Bacon ; a delusion of which the 
 vogue may be partly traced to the lack of psy- 
 chological solidity in the ordinary presentment 
 of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of 
 course, merely leaps over the difficulty, into 
 
 entitled Shakspere in Fact and Criticism (New York, 1888), is certainly not 
 open to the criticism I have passed. Mr. Morgan's essentially rationalistic 
 attitude is indicated in a sentence of his preface : " My own idea has been 
 that William Shakspere was a man of like passions with oureelves, whose 
 moods and veins were influenced, just as are oui-s, by his surroundings, em- 
 ployments, vocations .... and that, great as he was, and oceanic as 
 was his genius, we can read him all the better because he was, after all, a 
 
 man " In recognising the good sense of Mr. Morgan's general 
 
 attitude, I must not be understood to endorse his rejection of the "metrical 
 tests " of Mr. Fleay and other English critics. These seem to me to be about 
 the most important English contribution to the scientific comprehension of 
 Shakspere. On the other hand, it may be said that the naturalistic con- 
 ception of Shaltspere as an organism in an environment was first closely 
 approached in the present centui-^' by French critics, as Gulzot and Chasles 
 (Taine's picture of the Elizabethan theatre, adopted by Green, having been 
 founded on a study by Chasles) ; that the naturalistic comprehension of 
 Hamlet, as an incoherent whole resulting from the putting of new cloth 
 into an old garment, was first reached by the Gemian Riimelin {Shakspere 
 Studien) ; and that the structural anomalies of Hninlct as an acting play 
 were first clearly put by the Gemian Benedix (Die Shakspereomaiiie) — these 
 two critics thus making amends for much vain discussion of Hamlet by 
 their countiymen before and since ; while the naturaUstic conception of the 
 man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America. The admir- 
 able work of Messrs. Clarke and Wright and Fleay in the analysis of the 
 text and the revelation of its non-Shaksperean elements, seems to make 
 little impression on English culture ; while such a luminous manual as Mr. 
 Barrett Wendell's William Shakspere : a Study in Elizabethan Literature 
 (New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook and appreciation, points to 
 decided progress in rational Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the 
 Shakspere Primer of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently scientific 
 throughout. 
 
92 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 absolute irrelevance. Emerson was intellectu- 
 ally to blame in that, seeing as he did the 
 hiatus between the poet's life and the prevailing 
 conception of his verse, he did not try to con- 
 ceive it all anew, but rather resigned himself to 
 the solution that Shakspere's mind was out of 
 human ken. " A good reader can in a sort 
 nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence," 
 he said ; " but not into Shakspere's ; we are 
 still out of doors." We should indeed remain 
 so for ever did we not set about patiently pick- 
 ing the locks where the transcendentalist has 
 dreamily turned away. 
 
 It is imperative that we should recommence 
 vigilantly with the concrete facts, ignoring all 
 the merely EEsthetic and metaphysic syntheses. 
 Where Coleridge and Schlegel more or less in- 
 geniously invite us to acknowledge a miraculous 
 artistic perfection, where Lamb more movingly 
 gives forth the intense vibration aroused in his 
 spirit by Shakspere's ripest work, we must 
 turn back to track down the youth from Strat- 
 ford; son of a burgess once prosperous, but 
 destined to sink steadily in the world ; married 
 at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances, 
 
Muntaiijne and Shakspere. 93 
 
 with small prospect of income, to the woman of 
 twenty- five ; ill at ease in that position ; and 
 at length, having made friends with a travelling 
 company of actors, come to London to earn a^ 
 living in any tolerable way by means of his 
 moderate education, his " small Latin and less 
 Greek," his knack of fluent rhyming, and his 
 tvirn for play-acting. To know him as he began 
 we must measure him narrowly by his first per- 
 formances. These are not to be looked for in 
 even the earliest of his plays, not one of which 
 can be taken to represent his young and un- 
 aided faculty, whether as regards construction 
 or diction. Collaboration, the natural resort of 
 the modern dramatist, must have been to some 
 extent forced on him in those years by the 
 nature of his situation; and after all that has 
 been said by adorers of the quality of his wit and 
 his verse in such early comedies as Love's 
 Labour Lost and The Tvs^o Gentlemen cf 
 Yerona, the critical reader is apt to be left 
 pretty evenly balanced between the two reflec- 
 tions that the wit and the versification have in- 
 deed at times a certain happy naturalness of 
 their own, and that nevertheless, if they really 
 
 G 
 
94 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 be Shakspere's throughout, the most remark- 
 able thing in the matter is his later progress. 
 But even apart from such disputable issues, we 
 may safely say with Mr. Fleay that " there is 
 not a play of his that can be referred even on 
 the rashest conjecture to a date anterior to 1594, 
 which does not bear the plainest internal evi- 
 dence of having been refashioned at a later 
 time."* These plays, then, with all their evi- 
 dences of immaturity, of what Mr. Bagehot 
 called " clever young-mannishness," cannot serve 
 us as safe measures of Shakspere's mind at the 
 beginning of his career. 
 
 But it happens that we have such a measure 
 in performances which, since they imply no tech- 
 nical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary 
 substance, and can be shown to be the work of a 
 man brought up in the Warwickshire dialect,t 
 are not even challenged, I believe, by the ad- 
 herents of the Baconian faith. The tasks which 
 the greatest of our poets set himself when near 
 the age of thirty, and to which he presumably 
 brought all the powers of which he was then 
 
 e Life of Slmksfci-e, 1886, p. 12S. 
 
 t See Mr. Appleton Morgan's Shakspere's Venus and Admis : a Sbidy in 
 Warwickshire Dialect 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 95 
 
 conscious, were tlie uninspired and pitilessly 
 prolix poems of Yenus and Adonis and The 
 Eape of Ltjcrece, tlie first consisting of some 
 1,200 lines and tlie second of more than 1,800 ; 
 one a calculated picture of female concupiscence 
 and tlie other a still more calculated picture of 
 female chastity : the two alike abnormally 
 fluent, yet external, unimpassioned, endlessly 
 descriptive, elaborately unimpressive. Save for 
 the sexual attraction of the subjects, on the com- 
 mercial side of which the poet had obviously 
 reckoned in choosing them, these performances 
 could have no unstudious readers in our day 
 and few warm admirers in their own, so little 
 sign do they give of any high poetic faculty 
 save the two which singly go so often without 
 any determining superiority of mind — ^inex- 
 haustible flow of words and endless observation 
 of concrete detail. Of the countless thrilling 
 felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shaks- 
 pere is renowned above all English poets, not 
 one, I think, is to be found in those three 
 thousand fluently-scanned and smoothly-worded 
 lines : on the contrsiry, the wearisome succes- 
 sion of stanzas, stretching the succinct themes 
 
96 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all 
 narrative interest, migbt seem to signalise sucb 
 a lack of artistic judgment as must preclude all 
 great performance ; while tbe apparent plan of 
 producing an effect by mere multiplication of 
 words, mere extension of description witbout in- 
 tension of idea, migkt seem to prove a lack of 
 capacity for any real deptb of passion. Tkey 
 were simply manufactured poems, consciously 
 constructed for tke market, the first designed at 
 the same time to secure the patronage of the 
 Mrecenas of the hour. Lord Southampton, to 
 whom it was dedicated, and the second produced 
 and similarly dedicated on the strength of the 
 success of the first. The point here to be noted 
 is that they gained the poet's ends. They suc- 
 ceeded as saleable literature, and they gained 
 the Earl's favour. 
 
 And the rest of the poet's literary career, from 
 this point forward, seems to have been no less 
 prudently calculated. Having plenty of evi- 
 dence that men could not make a living by 
 poetry, even if they produced it with facility; 
 and that they could as little count on living 
 steadily by the sale of plays, he joined with liis 
 
Montaigne and Sliakspere. 97 
 
 trade of actor the business not merely of play- 
 wright but of part-sharer in the takings of the 
 theatre. The presumption from all we know 
 of the commercial side of the play-making of the 
 times is that, for whatever pieces Shakspere 
 touched up, collaborated in, or composed for his 
 company, he received a certain payment once for 
 all ; * since there was no reason why his partners 
 should treat his plays differently in this regard 
 from the plays they bought of other men. 
 Doubtless, when his reputation was made, the 
 payments would be considerable. But the main 
 source of his income, or rather of the accumula- 
 tions with which he bought land and house and 
 tithes at Stratford, must have been his share in 
 the takings of the theatre — a share which would 
 doubtless increase as the earlier partners disap- 
 peared. He must have speedily become the 
 principal man in the firm, combining as he did 
 the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of 
 plays with that of actor and worldng partner. 
 We are thus dealing with a temperament or 
 mentality not at all obviously original or 
 
 » Professor Dowden notes in liis Sliaj!sj)cre Primer (p. 12) that before 
 1600 the prices paid for plavs by Henslowe, the theatrical lessee, vaiy from 
 ^4 to ^8, and not till later did it rise as high as £20 for a play by a popular 
 dramatist. 
 
98 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 masterly, not at all conspicuous at tlie outset for 
 intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all 
 obtrusive of its " mission ; " but exhibiting 
 simply a gift for acting, an abundant facultj^ of 
 rhythmical speech, and a power of minute obser- 
 vation, joined with a thoroughly practical or 
 commercial handling of the problem of life, in a 
 calling not usually taken-to by commercialty- 
 minded men. What emerges for us thus far is 
 the conception of a very plastic intelligence, a 
 good deal led and swayed by immediate circum- 
 stances ; but at bottom very sanely related to Hfe, 
 and so possessing a latent faculty for controlling 
 its destinies ; not much cultured, not profound, 
 not deeply passionate ; not particularly reflective 
 though copious in utterance ; a personality 
 which of itself, if under no pressure of pecuniary 
 need, would not be likely to give the world any 
 serious sign of mental capacity whatever. 
 
 In order, then, that such a man as this should 
 develop into the Shakspere of the great trage- 
 dies and tragic comedies, there must concur two 
 kinds of life-conditions with those already noted 
 — the fresh conditions of deeply-moving experi- 
 ence and of deep intellectual stimulus. Without 
 
Montaigne and SJiakspere- 99 
 
 these, STicli a mind would no more arrive at the 
 highest poetic and dramatic capacity than, lack- 
 ing the spur of necessity or of some outside call, 
 it would be moved to seek poetic and dramatic 
 utterance for its own relief. There is no sign 
 here of an innate burden of thought, bound to 
 be delivered; there is only the sensitive plate 
 or responsive faculty, capable of giving back 
 with peculiar vividness and spontaneity every 
 sort of impression which may be made on it. 
 The faculty, in short, which could produce those 
 3,000 fluent lines on the bare data of the stories 
 of Yenus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece, 
 with only the intellectual material of a rakish 
 Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the 
 culture coming of a few years' association with 
 the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, 
 was capable of broadening and deepening, with 
 vital experience and vital culture, into the poet 
 of Lear and Macbeth. But the vital culture 
 must come to it, like the experience : this was 
 not a man who would go out of his way to seek 
 the culture. A man so minded, a man who 
 would bear hardship in order to win knowledge, 
 would not have settled down so easily into the 
 
100 Montaiyne and Shakspere. 
 
 actor-manager -with a good share in the com- 
 pany's profits. There is almost nothing to show 
 that the young Shakspere read anything save 
 current plays, tales, and poems. Such a notable 
 book as North's Plutaecii, published in 1579, 
 does not seem to have affected his literary 
 activity till about the year 1600 : and even then 
 the subject of Julius C^,sak may have been sug- 
 gested to him by some other play-maker, as was 
 the case with his chronicle histories. In his 
 contemporary, Ben Jonson, we do have the type 
 of the young man bent on getting scholarship 
 as the best thing possible to him. The brick- 
 layer's apprentice, unwillingly following the 
 craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately all 
 the while to liis Horace and his Homer, resolute 
 to keep and to add to the humanities he had 
 learned in the grammar school, stands out 
 clearly alongside of the other, far less enthusi- 
 astic for knowledge and letters, but also far 
 more plastically framed, and at the same time 
 far more clearly alive to the seriousness of the 
 struggle for existence as a matter of securing the 
 daily bread-and-butter. It may be, indeed — 
 who knows — that but for that peculiarly early 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere- 101 
 
 marriage, witli its consequent family responsi- 
 bilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself 
 a little more of youttful breathing-time : it may 
 be that it was the existence of Ann Hathaway 
 and her three children that made him a seeker 
 for pelf rather than a seeker for knowledge in 
 the years between twenty and thirty, when the 
 concern for pelf sits lightly on most intellectual 
 men. The thesis undertaken in Love's Labour 
 Lost — that the truly effective culture is that of 
 life in the world rather than that of secluded 
 study — perhaps expresses a process of inward and 
 other debate in which the wish has become 
 father to the thought. Scowled upon by jealous 
 collegians like Greene for presuming, actor as 
 he was, to write dramas, he must have asked 
 himself whether there was not something to be 
 gained from such schooling as theirs.* But 
 then he certainly made more than was needed to 
 keep the Stratford household going ; and the 
 clear shallow flood of Venus and Adonis and 
 the Rape of Lucrece stands for ever to show 
 how far from tragic consciousness was the young 
 
 * Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends ; — 
 
 But thou art all my art, and dost advance 
 ,\s high as learning my rude ignorance. 
 
102 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 husband and father when close upon thirty years 
 old. It was in 1596 that his little Hamnet died 
 at Stratford ; and there is nothing to show, says 
 Mr. Fleay,* that Shakspere had ever heen there 
 in the interval between his departure in 1587 
 and the child's funeral. 
 
 But already, it may be, some vital experience 
 had come. Whatever view we take of the drama 
 of the sonnets, we may so far adopt Mr. Fleay's 
 remarkable theoryt as to surmise that the 
 central episode of faithless love ocurred about 
 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and im- 
 passion the plastic personality of the rhymer of 
 Venus and Adonis ; to add a new string to the 
 heretofore Mercurial lyre. All the while, too, 
 he was undergoing the kind of culture and of 
 psychological training involved in his craft of 
 acting — a culture involving a good deal of con- 
 tact with the imaginative literature of the Re- 
 naissance, so far as then translated, and a psy- 
 chological training of great though little recog- 
 nised importance to the dramatist. It seems 
 
 * Li/c of Shakspere, pp. 29, 128. 
 
 t See it in liis Life of Shalisferc, pp. 120-124. Wr. Fleay's tlieorj', tliougli 
 perliaps the best " documentecl " of all, has received little attention in com- 
 parison with Mr. Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere- 103 
 
 obvious that tlie practice of acting, by a plastic 
 and receptive temperament, capable of manifold 
 appreciation, mast bave counted for much in de- 
 veloping the faculties at once of sympathy and 
 expression. In. this respect Shakspere stood 
 apart from his rivals, with their merely literary 
 training. And in point of fact, we do find in, 
 his plays, year by year, a strengthening sense of 
 the realities of human nature, despite their fre- 
 quently idealistic method of portraiture, the 
 verbalism and f actitiousness of much of their wit, 
 and their conventionality of plot. Above all 
 things, the man who drew so many fancifully 
 delightful types of womanhood must have been 
 intensely appreciative of the charm of sex ; 
 and it is on that side that we are to look for his 
 first contacts with the deeper forces of life. 
 What marks off the Shakspere of thirty-five, in 
 fine, from all his rivals, is just his peculiarly 
 true and new* expression of the living grace of 
 womanhood, always, it is true, abstracted to the 
 form of poetry and skilfully purified from the 
 blemishes of the actual, but none the less con- 
 
 * Only in Chancer (eg., The Book of the Duchess) do we find before his 
 time the successful expression of the same perception ; and Chaucer counted 
 for almost nothing in Elizabethan letters. 
 
104 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 vincing and stimulating. We are liere in 
 presence at once of a rare receptive faculty and 
 a rare expressive faculty: tlie plastic organism 
 of the first poems touched through and through 
 with a hundred vibrations of deeper experience ; 
 the external and extensive method gradually 
 ripening into an internal and intensive; the 
 innate facility of phrase and alertness of atten- 
 tion turned from the physical to the psychical. 
 J3ut still it is to the psychics of sex, for the 
 most part, that we are limited. Of the deeps of 
 human nature, male nature, as apart from the 
 love of woman, the playwright still shows no 
 special perception, save in the vivid portrait of 
 Shylock, the exasperated Jew. The figures in 
 which we can easily recognise his hand in the 
 earlier historical plays are indeed marked by his 
 prevailing sanity of perception; always they 
 show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling 
 sense of reality which shaped his life ; it is this 
 visible actuality that best marks them off from 
 the non-Shaksperean figures around them. 
 And in the wonderful figures of PalstafE and his 
 group we have a roundness of comic reality to 
 which nothing else in modern literature thus 
 
Montaigiie and Shakspere. 105 
 
 far could be compared. But still this, tlie most 
 remarkable of all, remains comic reality; and, 
 wbat is more, it is a comic reality of wMcb, as 
 in tbe rest of his work, the substratum was pre- 
 Sbaksperean. For it is clear that the figure of 
 FalstafE, as Oldcastle, had been popularly suc- 
 cessful before Shakspere took hold of it : * and 
 what he did here, as elsewhere, with his unin- 
 ventive mind, in which the faculty of imagina- 
 tion always rectified and expanded rather than 
 originated types and actions, was doubtless to 
 give the hues and tones of perfect life to the 
 half -real inventions of others. This must 
 always be insisted on as the special psychological 
 characteristic of Shakspere. Excepting in the 
 doubtful case of Love's Laboub, Lost, he never 
 invented a plot ; his male characters are almost 
 always developments from an already sketched 
 original ; it is in drawing his heroines, where he 
 is most idealistic, that he seems to have been 
 most independently creative, his originals here 
 being doubtless the women who had charmed 
 him, set living in ideal scenes to charm others. 
 And it resulted from this specialty of structure 
 
 * See Fleay's Life of Shakspere, pp. 130-1. 
 
106 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 that the greater reality of his earlier male his- 
 toric figures, as compared with those of most of 
 his rivals, is largely a matter of saner and more 
 felicitous declamation — the play of his great and 
 growing faculty of expression — since he had no 
 more special knowledge of the types in hand 
 than had his competitors. It is only when his 
 unequalled receptive faculty has been acted upon 
 by a peculiarly concentrated and readily assimi- 
 lated body of culture, the English translation by 
 Sir Thomas North of Amyot's French transla- 
 tion of Plutarch's Lives, that we find Shaks- 
 pere incontestably superior to his contempo- 
 raries in the virile treatment of virile problems 
 no less than in the sympathetic rendering of 
 emotional charm and tenderness and the pathos 
 of passion. The tragedy of Eomeo and Juliet, 
 with all its burning fervours and swooning 
 griefs, remains for us a picture of the luxury of 
 woe : it is truly said of it that it is not funda- 
 mentally unhappy. But in Julius C^sak we 
 have touched a further depth of sadness. For 
 the moving tragedy of circumstance, of lovers 
 sundered by fate only to be swiftly joined in 
 exultant death, we have the profounder tragedy 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 107 
 
 of mutually destroying energies, of grievously 
 miscalculating men, of failure and frustration 
 dogging tlie steps of tlie strenuous and tlie wise, 
 of destiny searcHng out tlie fatal weakness of 
 the strong. To tlie poet lias now been added the 
 reader ; to tlie master of tlie pathos of passion the 
 student of the tragedy of universal life. It is 
 thus by culture and experience — culture limited 
 but concentrated, and experience limited but 
 intense — that the man Shakspere has been 
 intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere 
 as we find him when he comes to his greatest 
 tasks. For the formation of the supreme artist 
 there was needed alike the purely plastic organ- 
 ism and the special culture to which it was so 
 uniquely fitted to respond ; culture that came 
 without search, and could be undergone as spon- 
 taneously as the experience of life itself ; know- 
 ledge that needed no more wooing than Ann 
 Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. 
 In the English version of Plutarch's Lives, 
 pressed upon him doubtless by the play-making 
 plans of other men, Shakspere found the most 
 effectively concentrated history of ancient hu- 
 manity that could possibly have reached him; 
 
108 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 and lie responded to tlie stimulus with all his 
 energy of expression tecause he received it so 
 freely and vitally, in respect alike of his own 
 plasticity and the fact that the vehicle of the 
 impression was his mother tongue. It is plain 
 that to the last he made no secondary- study of 
 antiquity. He made blunders which alone 
 might warn the Baconians ofE their vain quest : 
 he had no notion of chronology : finding Cato 
 retrospectively spoken of by Plutarch as one 
 to whose ideal Coriolanus had risen, he makes a 
 comrade of Coriolanus say it, as if Cato were a 
 dead celebrity in Coriolanus' day; just as he 
 makes Hector quote Aristotle in Troy. These 
 clues are not to be put aside with sesthetic plati- 
 tudes : they are capital items in our knowledge 
 of the man. And if even the idolater feels per- 
 turbed by their obtrusion, he has but to reflect 
 that where the trained scholars around Shaks- 
 pere reproduced antiquity with greater accu- 
 racy in minor things, tithing the mint and anise 
 and cumin of erudition, they gave us of the 
 central human forces, which it was their special 
 business to realise, mere hollow and tedious 
 parodies. Jonson was a scholar whose variety 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 109 
 
 of classic reading miglit haye constituted Mm 
 a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are 
 mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's 
 moderns, because tbey are tbe expression of a 
 psychic faculty whicli could neither rightly per- 
 ceive reality, nor rightly express what it did per- 
 ceive. He represents industry in art without 
 inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of 
 Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in 
 order to turn them into verse, and of Shakspere 
 giving his lines unblotted to the actors — speak- 
 ing in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, 
 as spontaneously as he breathed — ^these historic 
 data, which happen to be among the most per- 
 fectly certified that we possess concerning the 
 two men, give us at once half the secret of one 
 and all the secret of the other. Jonson had the 
 passion for book knowledge, the patience for 
 hard study, the faculty for plot-invention ; and 
 withal he produced dramatic work which gives 
 little or no permanent pleasure. Shakspere 
 had none of these characteristics ; and yet, being 
 the organism he was, it only needed the culture 
 which fortuitously reached him in Ms own 
 tongue to make hijn successively the greatest 
 
110 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 dramatic master of eloquence, mirth, charm, 
 teuderness, passion, pathos, pessimism, and 
 philosophic serenity that literature can show, 
 recognisably so even though his work be almost 
 constantly hampered by the framework of 
 other men's enterprises, which he was so singu- 
 larly content to develop or improve. Hence the 
 critical importance of following up the culture 
 which evolved him, and above all, that which 
 finally touched him to his most memorable 
 performance. 
 
It is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, 
 in terms of our preliminary statement of evi- 
 dence. When Florio's translation was pub- 
 lished, in 1603, Shakspere was thirty-seven 
 years old, and he had written or refashioned 
 King John, Henry IV., The Merchant of 
 Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 
 Richard II., Twelfth Night, As You Like 
 It, Henry V., Romeo and Juliet, The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor, and Julius C^sar. It is 
 very likely that he knew Florio, being intimate 
 with Jonson, who was Florio's friend and 
 admirer ; and the translation, long on the stocks, 
 must have been discussed in his hearing. Hence, 
 presumably, his immediate perusal of it. Por- 
 tions of it he may very well have seen or heard 
 of before it was fully printed (necessarily a long 
 task in the then state of the handicraft) ; but in 
 the book itself, we have seen abundant reason to 
 believe, he read largely in 1603-4. 
 
 Having inductively proved the reading, and 
 at the same time the fact of the impression it 
 ( 111 ) 
 
112 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 made, we may next seek to realise deductively 
 what kind of impression it was fitted to make. 
 We can readily see what North's Plutarch could 
 be and was to the sympathetic and slightly-cul- 
 tured playwright ; it was nothing short of a new 
 world of human knowledge ; a living vision of 
 two great civilisations, giving to his universe a 
 vista of illustrious realities beside which the 
 charmed gardens of Renaissance romance and 
 the bustling fields of English chronicle-history 
 were as pleasant dreams or noisy interludes. He 
 had done wonders with the chronicles ; but in 
 presence of the long muster-rolls of Greece and 
 Itome he must have felt their insularity ; and he 
 never returned to them in the old spirit. But if 
 Plutarch could do so much for him, still greater 
 could be the service rendered by Montaigne. 
 The difference, broadly speaking, is very much 
 as the difference in philosophic reach between 
 JuLiTJS C^SAR and Hamlet, between Coriolantts 
 and Lear. 
 
 For what was in its nett significance Mon- 
 taigne's manifold book, coming thus suddenlj^, 
 in a complete and vigorous translation, into 
 English life and into Shakspere' s ken ? Simply 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 113 
 
 the most living book then existing in Europe. 
 This is not the place, nor am I the person, to 
 attempt a systematic estimate of the most endur- 
 ing of French writers, who has stirred to their 
 best efforts the ablest of French critics ; but I 
 must needs try to indicate briefly, as I see it, 
 his significance in general European culture. 
 And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for 
 the civilised world at this day, what Petrarch 
 has been too enthusiastically declared to be — • 
 the first of the moderns. He is so as against 
 even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses 
 directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, 
 in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against 
 Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impres- 
 sionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied 
 compositions ; he is so against Erasmus, because 
 Erasmus also is a framer of artificial composi- 
 tions in a dead language, where Montaigne 
 writes with absolute spontaneity in a language 
 not only living but growing. Only Chaucer, 
 and he only in the Canterbury Tales, can be 
 thought of as a true modem before Montaigne ; 
 and Chaucer is there too English to be signifi- 
 cant for all Europe. The high figure of Dante 
 
114 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 is decisively mediseval : it is the central point in 
 mediseval literature. Montaigne was not only 
 a new literary phenomenon in his own day : he 
 remains so still; for his impressionism, which 
 he carried to such lengths in originating it, is 
 the most modern of literary inspirations ; and all 
 our successive literary and artistic developments 
 are either phases of the same inspiration or 
 transient reactions against it. Where literature 
 in the mass has taken centuries to come within 
 sight of the secret that the most intimate form 
 of truth is the most interesting, he went, in his 
 one collection of essays, so far towards absolute 
 self-expression that our practice is still in the 
 rear of his, which is quite too unflinching for 
 contemporary nerves. Our ionne foi is still so- 
 phisticated in comparison with that of the great 
 Gascon. Of all essayists who have yet written, 
 he is the most transparent, the most sincere even 
 in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most 
 free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A 
 classic commonplace becomes in his hands a new 
 intimacy of feeling : where verbal commonplaces 
 have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our 
 sense, he goes behind them to rouse anew the 
 
Montaifj'ne and Shakspere. 115 
 
 living nerve. And there is no theme on whicli 
 he does not some time or other dart his sudden 
 and searching glance. It is truly said of him 
 by Emerson that " there have been men with 
 deeper insight ; but, one would say, never a man 
 with such abundance of thoughts : he is never 
 dull, never insincere, and has the genius to 
 make the reader care for all that he cares for. 
 Cut these words and they bleed ; they are vascu- 
 lar and alive." Such a voice, speaking at Shaks- 
 pere's ear in an English nearly as racy and 
 nervous as the incomparable old-new French of 
 the original, was in itself a revelation. 
 
 I have said above that we seem to see passing 
 from Montaigne to Shakspere a vibration of 
 style as well as of thought; and it would be 
 difficult to overstate the importance of such an 
 inj9.uence. A writer afEects us often more by the 
 pulse and pressure of his speech than by his 
 matter. Such an action is indeed the secret of 
 all great literary reputations ; and in no author 
 of any age are the cadence of phrases and the 
 beat of words more provocative of attention than 
 in Montaigne. They must have affected Shaks-I 
 pere as they have done so many others ; and in| 
 
116 Montaigm and Shakspere. 
 
 point of fact his work, from Hamlet forth, 
 shows a gain in nervous tension and pith, fairly 
 attributable to the stirring impact of the style 
 of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its 
 opulence of colour, its hardy freshness of figure 
 and epithet, its swift, unflagging stride. Seek 
 in any of Shakspere' s plays for such a strenuous 
 rush of idea and rhythm as pulses through the 
 soliloquy : 
 
 "How all occasions do inform against me," 
 and you will gather that there has been a techni- 
 cal change wrought, no less than a moral and an 
 intellectual. The poet's nerves have caught a 
 new vibration. 
 
 But it was not merely a congenial felicity and 
 energy of utterance that Montaigne brought to 
 bear on his English reader, though the more we 
 consider this quality of spontaneity in the essay- 
 ist the more we shall realise its perennial fascina- 
 tion. The culture-content of Montaigne's book 
 is more than even the self-revelation of an ex- 
 tremely vivacious and reflective intelligence; it 
 is the living quintessence of all Latin criticism 
 of life, and of a large part of Greek ; a quint- 
 essence as fresh and pungent as the essay- 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 117 
 
 ist's expression of his special individiiality. 
 For Montaigne stands out among all tlie 
 humanists of the epochs of the Renaissance 
 and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar 
 directness of his contact with Latin literature. 
 Other men must have come to know Latin as 
 well as he ; and hundreds could write it with an 
 accuracy and facility which, if he were ever 
 capable of it, he must, by his own confession, 
 have lost before middle life,* though he read it 
 perfectly to the last. But he is the only modern 
 man whom we know to have learned Latin as a 
 mother tongue ; and this fact was probably just 
 as important in psychology as was the similar 
 fact, in Shakspere's case, of his whole adult 
 culture being acquired in his own language. It 
 seems to me, at least, that there is something 
 significant in the facts : (1) that the man who 
 most vividly brought the spirit or outcome of 
 classic culture into touch with the general EiLro- 
 pean intelligence, in the age when the modern 
 languages first decisively asserted their birth- 
 right, learned his Latin as a living and not as 
 a dead tongue, and knew Greek literature almost 
 
 » Cp. the Essays, ii, 17 ; iii, 2. (Edit, cited, vol. ii, pp. 40, 231.) 
 
118 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 solely by translation; (2) tliat tlie dramatist 
 who of all of Ms craft has put most of breathing 
 vitality into his pictures of ancient history, 
 despite endless inaccuracies of detail, read his 
 authorities only in his own language ; and (3) 
 that the English poet who in our own century 
 has most intensely and delightedly sympathised 
 with the Greek spirit — I mean Keats — read his 
 Homer only in an English translation. As re- 
 gards Montaigne, the full importance of the fact 
 does not seem to me to have been appreciated by 
 the critics. Villemain, indeed, who perhaps 
 could best realise it, remarked in his youthful 
 eloge that the fashion in which the elder Mon- 
 taigne had his child taught Latin would bring 
 the boy to the reading of the classics with an 
 eager interest where others had been already 
 fatigued by the toil of grammar ; but beyond 
 this the peculiarity of the case has not been 
 much considered. Montaigne, however, gives 
 us details which seem full of suggestion to 
 scientific educationists. " Without art, without 
 book, without grammar or precept, without 
 whipping, without tears, I learned a Latin as 
 pure as my master could give; " and his first 
 
Montaigne and Bhahspere. 119 
 
 exercises were to turn bad Latin into good.* So 
 he read his Ovid's Metamorphoses at seven or 
 eight, where other forward boys had the native 
 fairy tales ; and a wise teacher led him later 
 through Virgil and Terence and Plautus and the 
 Italian poets in the same freedom of spirit. 
 Withal, he never acquired any facility in 
 Greek, t and, refusing to play the apprentice 
 where he was accustomed to be master,+ he de- 
 clined to construe in a difficult tongue ; read his 
 Plutarch in Amyot ; and his Plato, doubtless, in 
 the Latin version. It all goes with the peculiar 
 spontaneity of his mind, his reactions, his style ; 
 and it was in virtue of this unduUed spontaneity 
 that he was fitted to be for Shakspere, as he has 
 since been for so many other great writers, an 
 intellectual stimulus unique in kind and in 
 potency. 
 
 This fact of Montaigne's peculiar influence on 
 other spirits, comparatively considered, may 
 make it easier for some to conceive that his influ- 
 ence on Shakspere could be so potent as has 
 been above asserted. Among those whom we 
 know him to have acted upon in the highest 
 
 * Essays, i, 25 ; cf. i, 48. (Edit, cited, vol. i, pp. 304, 429.) 
 
 t ii, 4. (Edit, cited, i, 380. J ii, 10. (Edit, cited, i, 429. 
 
120 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 degree — setting aside tlie disputed case of Bacon 
 — are Pascal, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, 
 Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of Pascal, 
 despite Ms uneasy assumption that his philoso- 
 phy was contrary to Montaigne's, the influence 
 went so far that the Pensees again and again 
 set forth Pascal's doctrine in passages taken 
 almost literally from the Essays. Stung by the 
 lack of all positive Christian credence in Mon- 
 taigne, Pascal represents him as "putting all 
 things in doubt; " whereas it is just by first 
 putting all things in doubt that Pascal justifies 
 his own credence. The only difference is that 
 where Montaigne, disparaging the powers of 
 reason by the use of that very reason, used his 
 "doubt" to defend himself alike against the 
 atheists and the orthodox Christians, Catholic 
 or Protestant, himself standing simply to the 
 classic theism of antiquity, Pascal seeks to de- 
 molish the theists with the atheists, falling back 
 on the Christian faith after denying the capacity 
 of the human reason to judge for itself. The 
 two procedures were of course alike fallacious ; 
 but though Pascal, the more austere thinker of 
 the two, readily saw the invalidity of Mon- 
 
Montaigne and Shalcspere. 121 
 
 taigne's as a defence of theism, he could do no 
 more for himself than repeat the process, dispar- 
 aging reason in the very language of the essay- 
 ist, and setting up in his turn his private predi- 
 lection in Montaigne's manner. In sum, his 
 philosophy is just Montaigne's, turned to the 
 needs of a broken spirit instead of a confident 
 one — to the purposes of a chagrined and ex- 
 hausted convertite instead of a theist of the 
 stately school of Cicero and Seneca and Plu- 
 tarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the Pen- 
 sees might never have been written : they repre- 
 sent to-day, for all vigilant readers, rather the 
 painful struggles of a wounded intelligence to 
 fight down the doubts it has caught from con- 
 tact with other men's thought than any coherent 
 or durable philosophic construction. 
 
 It would be little more difiicult to show the 
 debt of the Esprit des Lois to Montaigne's 
 inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's 
 avowal that " In inost authors I see the man who 
 writes : in Montaigne, the man who thinks."* 
 That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in 
 
 * Pens^es Diverses. Less satisfying is tiie f urtlier peusie in the same coll- 
 ection :— " Les quatre grand poetes, Platen, Malcbraiiche, Sha/tcsbttty, Mon- 
 taigne." 
 
122 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 sociology as in pMlosopliy. His whole activity 
 is a seeking for causes ; and in tlie very act of 
 undertaking to "humble reason" lie proceeds 
 to instruct and re-edify it by endless corrective 
 comparison of facts. To be sure, lie departed so 
 far from his normal bonne foi as to affect to 
 think there could be no certainties while parad- 
 ing a hundred of his own, and with these some 
 which were but pretences ; and his pet doctrine of 
 daimonic fortune is not ostensibly favourable to 
 social science ; but in the concrete, he is more of a 
 seeker after rational law than any humanist of 
 his day. In discussing sumptuary laws, he 
 anticipates the economics of the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, as in discussing ecclesi- 
 astical law he anticipates the age of tolerance ; 
 in discussing criminal law, the work of Bec- 
 caria; in discussing a priori science, the pro- 
 test of Bacon; and in discussing education, 
 many of the ideas of to-day. And it would be 
 difficult to cite, in humanist literature before our 
 own century, a more comprehensive expression of 
 the idea of natural law than this paragraph of 
 the Apology : 
 
 "If nature enclose within the limits of her ordinary 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 123 
 
 progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the judg- 
 ments, the opinions of men, if they have their revolu- 
 tions, their seasons, their birth, and their death, even 
 as cabbages ; if heaven doth move, agitate, and roll 
 them at his pleasure, what powerful and permanent 
 authority do we ascribe unto them. If, by uncontrolled 
 experience, we palpably touch [orig. " Si par experi- 
 ence nous touchons ala main, "i.e., uous maintenons,nous 
 pretendons : an idiom which Florio has not understood] 
 that the form of our being depends of the air, of the 
 climate, and of the soil wherein we are born, and not 
 only the hair, the stature, the complexion, and the 
 countenance, but also the soul's faculties . . . in such 
 manner that as fruits and beasts do spring up diverse 
 and different, so men are born, either more or less war- 
 like, martial, just, temperate, and docile ; here subject 
 to wine, there to theft and whoredom, here inclined to 
 superstition, there addicted to misbelieving .... 
 If sometimes we see one art to flourish, or a belief, and 
 sometimes another, by some heavenly influence ; . . . 
 men's spirits one while flourishing, another while barren, 
 even as fields are seen to be, what become of all those 
 goodly prerogatives wherewith we still flatter 
 ourselves ?"* 
 
 All this, of course, has a further bearing than 
 
 Montaigne gives it in the context, and affects his 
 
 own professed theology as it does the opinions 
 
 he attacks ; but none the less, the passage strikes 
 
 at the dogmatists and the pragmatists of all the 
 
 preceding schools, and hardily clears the ground 
 
 * Edition cited, i., 622-623. 
 
124 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 for a new inductive system. And in tlie last 
 essay of all lie makes a campaign against bad 
 laws, wMcli unsays many of Ms previous sayings 
 on the blessedness of custom. 
 
 In tracing bis influence elsewhere, it would be 
 hard to point to an eminent French prose- writer 
 who has not been affected by him. Sainte-Beuve 
 finds* that La Bruyere " at bottom is close to 
 Montaigne, in respect not only of his style and 
 his skilfully inconsequent method, but of his way 
 of judging men and life " ; and the literary 
 heredity from Montaigne to Rousseau is recog- 
 nised by all who have looked into the matter. 
 The temperaments are profoundly different ; yet 
 the style of Montaigne had evidently taken as 
 deep a hold of the artistic consciousness of Rous- 
 seau as had the doctrines of the later writers on 
 whom he drew for his polemic. But indeed he 
 found in the essay on the Cannibals the very 
 theme of his first paradox ; in Montaigne's em- 
 phatic denunciations! of laws more criminal 
 than the crimes they dealt with, he had a deeper 
 inspiration still; in the essay on the training 
 
 ' Port Royal, 4ieme edit., ii. 400, iwk. 
 t B. iii, Chap. 13. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 125 
 
 of children lie had his starting-points for the 
 argumentation of Emile ; and in the whole un- 
 abashed self-portraiture of the Essays he had his 
 great exemplar for the Confessions. Even in 
 the very different case of Voltaire, we may go at 
 least as far as Villemain and say that the essay- 
 ist must have helped to shape the thought of the 
 great freethinker; whose Philosophe Ignorant 
 may indeed be connected with the Apology 
 without any of the hesitation with which Ville- 
 main suggests his general parallel. In fine, 
 Montaigne has scattered his pollen over all the 
 literature of Erance. The most typical thought 
 of La Rochefoucauld is thrown out* in the 
 essayt De Vutile et de I'honneste ; and the most 
 modern-seeming currents of thought, as M. Stap- 
 fer remarks, can be detected in the passages of 
 the all-discussing Gascon. 
 
 Among English-speaking writers, to say 
 nothing of those who, like Sterne and Lamb, 
 have been led by his example to a similar felicity 
 of freedom in style, we may cite Emerson as one 
 
 * " In the midst of our compassion, we feel within I know not what bitter 
 sweet touch of malign pleasure in seeing others suffer." (Comp. La Roche- 
 foucauld, Petisie 104.) 
 
 t B, ili, Chap, i. 
 
126 Montaigne and Shakspere- 
 
 wliose whole work is coloured, by Montaigne's 
 influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially de- 
 veloping one side of Emerson's gospel, may be 
 said to have found it all where Emerson found it, 
 in the Essay on Solitude.* The whole doctrine 
 of intellectual self-preservation, the ancient thesis 
 " flee from the press and dwell in soothfastness," 
 is there set forth in a series of ringing sentences, 
 most of which, set in Emerson or Thoreau, would 
 seem part of their text and thought. That this 
 is no random attribution may be learned from 
 the lecture on " Montaigne : the Sceptic," which 
 Emerson has included in his Repkesentative 
 Men. " I remember," he says, telling how in 
 Ms youth he stumbled on Cotton's translation, 
 " I remember the delight and wonder in which I 
 lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself 
 written the book in some former life, so sin- 
 cerely it spoke to my thought and experience." 
 That is just what Montaigne has done for a 
 multitude of others, in virtue of his prime 
 quality of spontaneous self-expression. As 
 Sainte-Beuve has it, there is a Montaigne in all 
 of us. Flaubert, we know, read him constantly 
 
 » i, Chap. 38. 
 
Montaigne anl Sli3,lcspere. 127 
 
 for style ; and no less constantly " found him- 
 self " in tlie self- revelation and analysis of the 
 essays. 
 
 After all these testimonies to ]\Iontaigne's 
 seminal virtue, and after what we have seen of 
 the special dependence of Shakspere's genius 
 on culture and circumstance, stimulus and initi- 
 ative, for its evolution, there can no longer seem 
 to an open mind anything of mere paradox in 
 the opinion that the essays are the source of the 
 greatest expansive movement of the poet's mind, 
 the movement which made him — already a 
 master of the whole range of passional emotion, 
 of the comedy of mirth and the comedy and 
 tragedy of sex — the great master of the tragedy 
 of the moral intelligence. Taking the step from 
 Julius CiESAU to Hamlet as corresponding to 
 this movement in his mind, we may say that 
 where the first play exhibits the concrete per- 
 ception of the fatality of things, " the riddle of 
 the painful earth " ; in the second, in its final 
 form, the perception has emerged in philosophic 
 consciousness as a pure reflection. The poet 
 has in the interim been revealed to himself; 
 what he had perceived he now conceives. And 
 
123 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 tliis is the secret of the whole transformatioa 
 which the old play of Hamlet has received at his 
 hands. Where he was formerly the magical 
 sympathetic plate, receiving and rectifying and 
 giving forth in inspired speech every impression, 
 however distorted by previous instruments, that 
 is brought within the scope of its action, he is 
 now in addition the inward judge of it all, so 
 much so that the secondary activity tends to 
 overshadow the primary. The old Hamlet, it 
 is clear, was a tragedy of blood, of physical 
 horror. The least that Shakspere, at this age, 
 could have done with it, would be to overlay 
 and transform the physical with moral percep- 
 tion ; and this has already been in part done in 
 the First Quarto form. The mad Hamlet and 
 the mad Ophelia, who had been at least as much 
 comic as tragic figures in the older play, are 
 already purified of that taint of their barbaric 
 birth, save in so far as Hamlet still gibes at 
 Polonius and jests with Ophelia in the primitive 
 fashion of the pretended madman seeking his 
 revenge. But the sense of the futility of the 
 whole heathen plan, of the vanity of the revenge 
 to which the Christian ghost hounds his son, of 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 129 
 
 the moral void left by the initial crime and its 
 concomitants, not to be filled by any hecatomb of 
 slain wrongdoers — the sense of all this, which is 
 the essence of the tragedy, though so few critics 
 seem to see it, clearly emerges only in the 
 finished play. The dramatist is become the 
 chorus to his plot, and the impression it all 
 makes on his newly active spirit comes out in 
 soliloquy after soliloquy, which hamper as much 
 as they explain the action. In the old prose 
 story, the astute barbarian takes a curiously cir- 
 cuitous course to his revenge, but at last attains 
 it. , In the intermediate tragedy of blood, the 
 circuitous action had been preserved, and withal 
 the revenge was attained only in the general 
 catastrophe, by that daimonic " fortune " on 
 which Montaigne so often enlarges. For Shaks- 
 pere, then, with his mind newly at work in 
 reverie and judgment, where before it had been 
 but perceptive and reproductive, the theme was 
 one of human impotence, failure of will, weari- 
 ness of spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, 
 recoil from the immeasurable evil of the world. 
 Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sym- 
 pathetic spirit which has put itself in his place. 
 
130 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 as it had done witli a hundred suggested types 
 before, but with a new inwardness of comprehen- 
 sion, a self-consciousness added to the myriad- 
 sided consciousness of the past. Hence an invo- 
 lution rather than an elucidation of the play. 
 There can be no doubt that Shakspere, in 
 heightening and deepening the theme, has ob- 
 scured it, making the scheming barbarian into 
 a musing pessimist, who yet waywardly plays the 
 mock-madman as of old, and kills the " rat " 
 behind the arras ; doubts the Ghost while acting 
 on his message; philosophises with Montaigne 
 and yet delays his revenge in the spirit of the 
 Christianised savage, who fears to send the pray- 
 ing murderer to heaven. There is no solution 
 of these anomalies : the very state of Shaks- 
 pere' s consciousness, working in his subjective 
 way on the old material, made inevitable a 
 moral anachronism and contradiction, analogous 
 in its kind to the narrative anachronisms of his 
 historical plays. But none the less, this 
 tragedy, the first of the great group which above 
 all his other work make him immortal, remains 
 perpetually fascinating, by virtue even of that 
 "pale cast of thought" which has "sicklied it 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere- 131 
 
 o'er " in the sense of making it too intellectual 
 for dramatic xmity and strict dramatic success. 
 Between these undramatic, brooding soliloquies 
 whJcli stand so aloof from the action, but domi- 
 nate the minds of those who read and meditate 
 the text, and the old sensational elements of 
 murder, ghost, fencing and killing, which hold 
 the interest of the crowd — between these con- 
 stituents, Hamlet remains the most familiar 
 Shaksperean play. 
 
 This very pre-eminence and permanence, no 
 doubt, will make many students still demur to 
 the notion that a determining factor in the fram- 
 ing of the play was the poet's perusal of ilon- 
 taigne's essays. And it would be easy to over- 
 state that thesis in such a way as to make it 
 untrue. Indeed, M. Chasles has, to my think- 
 ing, so overstated it. Had I come to his main 
 proposition before realising the infusion of Mon- 
 taigne's ideas in Hamlet, I think I should have 
 felt it to be as excessive in the opposite direc- 
 tion as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M. 
 Chasles : * — 
 
 * L'Auglcterrc an Scizlcnie Sicclc, p 133. 
 
132 Montaigne and Shakspere- 
 
 " This date of 1603 (publication of Florio's translation) 
 is instructive; the change in Shakspere's style dates 
 from this very year. Before 1603, imitation of 
 Petrarch, of Ariosto, and of Spenser is evident in his 
 work : after 1603, this coquettish copying of Italy has 
 disappeared ; no more crossing rhymes, no more sonnets 
 and concetti. All is reformed at once. Shakspere, 
 who had hitherto studied the ancients only in the 
 fashion of the fine writers of modern Italy, . . . now 
 seriously studies Plutarch and Sallust, and seeks of 
 them those great teachings, on human life with which 
 the chapters of Michael Montaigne are filled. Is it not 
 surprising to see Julius Caesar and Coriolanus suddenly 
 taken up by the man who has just (tout a I'heure) been 
 describing in thirty-six stanzas, like Marini, the doves 
 of the car of Venus ? And does not one see that he comes 
 fresh from the reading of Montaigne, who never ceased 
 to translate, comment, and recommend the ancients 
 . . . ? The dates of Shakspere's Coriolanus, Cleo- 
 patra, and JuLitrs CaiSAB are incontestable. These 
 dramas follow on from 1606 to 1608, with a rapidity 
 which proves the fecund heat of an imagination still 
 moved." 
 
 All this must be revised in the light of a more 
 
 correct chronology. Shakspere's Julius Caesar 
 
 dates, not from 1604 but from 1600 or 1601, 
 
 being referred to in Weever's Mireor of Mar- 
 
 Ti-RS, published in 1601, to say nothing of the 
 
 reference in the third Act of Hamlet itself, 
 
 where Polonius speaks of such a play. And, 
 
 even if it had been written in 1604, it would still 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 133 
 
 be a straining of the evidence to ascribe its pro- 
 duction, with tbat of Coeiolantts and Antony 
 AND Cleopatea, to tbe influence of Montaigne, 
 when every one of these themes was sufficiently 
 obtruded on the Elizabethan theatre by North's 
 translation of Amyot's Plutaech. Any one 
 who will compare Coeiolanus with the transla- 
 tion in North will see that Shakspere has fol- 
 lowed the text down to the most minute and 
 supererogatory details, even to the making of 
 blunders by putting the biographer's remarks 
 in the mouths of the characters. The compari- 
 son throws a flood of light on Shakspere' s mode 
 of procedure ; but it teUs us nothing of his per- 
 usal of Montaigne. Rather it suggests a return 
 from the method of the revised Hamlet, with its 
 play of reverie, to the more strictly dramatic 
 method of the chronicle histories, though with a 
 new energy and concision of presentment. The 
 real clue to Montaigne's influence on Shaks- 
 pere beyond Hamlet, as we have seen, lies not 
 in the Roman plays, but in Measuee foe 
 Meastjee. 
 
 There is a misconception involved, again, in 
 M. Chasles' picture of an abrupt transition from 
 
134 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 Shakspere's fantastic youthful method to that 
 of Hamlet and the Roman plays. He overlooks 
 the interm.ediate stages represented by such 
 plays as Romeo and Juliet, Henry IY., King 
 John, the Merchant of Venice, and As Yotr 
 Like It, all of which exhibit a great advance on 
 the methods of Love's Labour Lost, with its 
 rhymes and sonnets and " concetti." The leap 
 suggested by M. Chasles is exorbitant; such a 
 headlong development would be unintelligible. 
 Shakspere had first to come practically into 
 touch with the realities of life and character 
 before he could receive from Montaigne the full 
 stimulus he actually did undergo. Plastic as 
 he was, he none the less underwent a normal 
 evolution; and his early concreteness and 
 verbalism and externality had to be gradually 
 transmuted into a more inward knowledge of 
 life and art before there could be superimposed 
 on that the mood of the thinker, reflectively 
 aware of the totality of what he had passed 
 through. 
 
 Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Shaks- 
 pere's mind is not that presented by CoRio- 
 LANUS and Antony and Cleopatra, which with 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere- 135 
 
 all their intense vitality represent rather his 
 marvellous power of reproducing impressions 
 tlian the play of his own criticism on the general 
 problem of life. For the full revelation of this 
 we must look rather in the great tragedies, 
 notably in Lear, and thereafter in the subsiding 
 movement of the later serious plays. There it 
 is that we learn to give exactitude to our con- 
 ception of the influence exerted upon him by 
 Montaigne, and to see that, even as in the cases of 
 Pascal and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Emerson, 
 what happened was not a mere transference or 
 imposition of opinions, but a living stimulus, a 
 germination of fresh intellectual life, which de- 
 veloped under new forms. It would be strange 
 if the most receptive and responsive of all the 
 intelligences which Montaigne has touched 
 should not have gone on differentiating itself 
 from his. 
 
VI. 
 
 What tlieii is the general, and what the final 
 relation of Shakspere's thought to that of Mon- 
 taigne ? How far did the younger man approve 
 and assimilate the ideas of the elder, how far did 
 he reject them, how far modify them ? In some 
 respects this is the most difficult part of our 
 inquiry, were it only because Shakspere is 
 firstly and lastly a dramatic writer. But he is 
 not only that : he is at once the most subjective, 
 the most sympathetic, and the most self-withold- 
 ing of dramatic writers. Conceiving all situa- 
 tions, all epochs, in terms of his own psychology, 
 he is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic 
 design on the opinions of his listeners ; and it is 
 only after a most vigilant process of moral logic 
 that we can ever be justified in attributing to 
 him this or that thesis of any one of his person- 
 ages, apart from the general ethical sympathies 
 which must be taken for granted. Much facile 
 propaganda has been made by the device of 
 crediting him in person with every religious 
 ( 136 ) 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 137 
 
 utterance foimd in his plays— even in the por- 
 tions which analytical criticism proves to have 
 coitis from other hands. Obviously we must 
 look to his general handling of the themes with 
 which the current religion deals, in order to 
 surmise his attitude to that religion. And in 
 the same way we must compare his general 
 handling of tragic and moral issues, in order to 
 gather his general attitude to the doctrine of 
 Montaigne. 
 
 At the very outset, we must make a clean, 
 sweep of the strange proposition of Mr. Jacob 
 Feis — ^that Shakspere deeply disliked the phi- 
 losophy of Montaigne, and wrote Hamlet to dis- 
 credit it. It is hard to realise how such a hope- 
 less misconception can ever have arisen in the 
 mind of anyone capable of making the historic 
 research on which Mr. Feis seeks to found his 
 assertion. If there were no other argument 
 against it, the bare fact that the tragedy of 
 Hamlet existed before Shakspere, and that he 
 was, as usual, simply working over a play 
 already on the boards, should serve to dismiss 
 such a wild hypothesis. And from every other 
 point of view, the notion is equally preposterous. 
 
133 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 Xo human being in Shakspere's day could have 
 gathered from Hamlet such a criticism of Mon- 
 taigne as Mr. Feis reads into it by means of 
 violences of interpretation which might almost 
 startle Mr. Donnelly. Even if they blamed 
 Hamlet for delaying his revenge, in the manner 
 of the ordinary critical moralist, they could not 
 possibly regard that delay as a kind of vice 
 arising from the absorption of Montaignesque 
 opinions. In the very year of the appearance of 
 Florio's folio, it was a trifle too soon to make the 
 assumption that Montaigne was demoralising 
 mankind, even if we assume Shakspere to have 
 ever been capable of such a judgment. And 
 that assumption is just as impossible as the 
 other. According to Mr. Feis, Shakspere de- 
 tested such a creed and such conduct as Ham- 
 let's, and made him die by poison in order to 
 show his abhorrence of them — this, when we 
 know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil 
 in the earlier play. On that view, Cordelia died 
 by hanging in order to show Shakspere's con- 
 viction that she was a malefactor ; and Desde- 
 mona by stifling as a fitting punishment for 
 adultery. The idea is outside of serious discus- 
 
Montaigne and Shaks-pere. 139 
 
 sion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held 
 Hamlet for a pitiable weakling is a sufficiently 
 skallow interpretation of the play; but to as- 
 siime that he made him die by way of condign 
 punishment for his opinions is merely ridicu- 
 lous. Once for all, there is absolutely nothing 
 in Hamlet's creed or conduct which Shakspere 
 was in a position to regard as open to his de- 
 nunciation. The one intelligible idea which Mr. 
 Feis can suggest as connecting Hamlet's conduct 
 with Montaigne's philosophy is that Montaigne 
 was a quietest, preaching and practising with- 
 drawal from public broils. But Shakspere's 
 own practice was on all fours with this. He 
 sedulously held aloof from all meddling in pub- 
 lic affairs ; and as soon as he had gained a 
 competence he retired, at the age of forty-seven, 
 to Stratford-on-Avon. Mr. Feis's argument 
 brings us to the very crudest form of the good 
 old Christian verdict that if Hamlet had been a 
 good and resolute man he would have killed his 
 uncle out of hand, whether at prayers or any- 
 where else, and would then have married 
 Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived 
 happily ever after.* And to that edifying 
 
 » This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms even of Mr. Lowell 
 and Mr. Dowden. 
 
140 Montaigne and Shakspere- 
 
 assumption, Mr. Feis adds tlie fantasy that 
 Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne 
 as a deterrent from the retributive slaughter of 
 guilty uncles by wronged nephews. 
 
 In the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871 
 anticipated Mr. Feis's view of Hamlet as a 
 sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a 
 whit more plausible. Herr Stedefeld entitles 
 his book* : " Hamlet : a Drama-with-a-purpose 
 (Tendenzdeama) opposing the sceptical and cos- 
 mopolitan view of things taken by Michael de 
 Montaigne " ; and his general position is that 
 Shakspere wrote the play as " the apotheosis of 
 a practical Christianity," by way of showing 
 how any one like Hamlet, lacking in Christian 
 piety, and devoid of faith, love, and hope, must 
 needs come to a bad end, even in a good cause. 
 We are not entitled to charge Herr Stedefeld's 
 thesis to the account of religious bias, seeing that 
 Mr. Feis in his turn writes from the standpoint 
 of a kind of Protestant freethinker, who sees in 
 Shakspere a champion of free inquiry against 
 the Catholic conformist policy of Montaigne; 
 
 * Hamlet: ein Teitdenzdrama Sheaksperifs Isic throughout book] gegen 
 die sheptisctie und cosmopoUtische WeUmischanmig des Michael de Monfaigtie, 
 von G. F. Stedefeld, Kieisgerichtsrath, Berlin, 1871. 
 
Montaigne and SJiokspere. 141 
 
 while strictly orthodox Christians have found 
 in Hamlet's various allusions to deity, and in his 
 " as for me, I will go pray," a proof alike of his 
 and of Shakspere's steadfast piety. Against 
 all such superficialities of exegesis alike our 
 safeguard must be a broad common-sense 
 induction. 
 
 We are entitled to say at the outset, then, only 
 this, that Shakspere at the time of working 
 over Hamlet and Measure for Measure in 
 1603-1604 had in his mind a great deal of the 
 reasoning in Montaigne's Essays ; and that a 
 number of the speeches in the two plays repro- 
 duce portions of what he had read. "We are not 
 entitled to assume that these portions are 
 selected as being in agreement with Shaks- 
 pere's own views : we are here limited to say- 
 ing that he put certain of Montaigne's ideas or 
 statements in the mouths of his characters where 
 they would be appropriate. It does not follow 
 that he shared the feelings of Claudio as to the 
 possible life of the soul after death. And when 
 Hamlet says to Horatio, on the strangeness of 
 the scene with the Ghost : 
 "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome! 
 
142 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
 Than are dreamt of in our philosophy " — 
 
 tliougli this may be said to be a summary of tlie 
 whole drift of Montaigne's essay,* That it is 
 
 FOLLY TO REFER TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD TO OUR 
 
 SUFFICIENCY ; and thougli we are entitled to be- 
 lieve that Shakspere had that essay or its thesis 
 in his mind, there is no reason to suppose that 
 the lines express Shakspere's own belief in ghosts. 
 Montaigne had indicated his doubts on that 
 head even in protesting against sundry denials 
 of strange allegations : and it is dramatically 
 fitting that Hamlet in the circumstances should 
 say what he does. On the other hand, when the 
 Duke in Measure for Measure, playing the 
 part of a friar preparing a criminal for death, 
 gives Claudio a consolation which does not con- 
 tain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable 
 of sacrificial salvation and sacramental forgive- 
 ness, we are entitled to infer from such a singu- 
 lar negative phenomenon, if not that Shaks- 
 pere rejected the Christian theory of things, at 
 least that it formed no part of his habitual 
 thinking. It was the special business of the 
 
 » B. i, Chap. 26. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 143 
 
 Duke, playing in such, a character, to speak to 
 Claudio of sin and salvation, of forgiveness and 
 absolution. Such, a singiilar omission must at 
 least imply disregard on the part of the dra- 
 matist. It is true that Isabella, pleading to 
 Angelo in the second Act, speaks as a believing 
 Christian on the point of forgiveness for sins ; 
 and the versification here is quite Shaksperean. 
 But a solution of the anomaly is to be found 
 here as elsewhere in the fact that Shakspere 
 was working over an existing play;* and that 
 in ordinary course he would, if need were, put 
 the religious pleading of Isabella into his own 
 magistral verse just as he would touch up the 
 soliloquy of Hamlet on the question of killing 
 his uncle at prayers — a soliloquy which we 
 know to have existed in the earlier forms of the 
 play. The writer who first made Isabella plead 
 religiously with Angelo would have made the 
 Duke counsel Claudio religiously. The Duke's 
 speech, then, is to be regarded as Shakspere's 
 special insertion ; and it is to be taken as nega- 
 tively exhibiting his opinions. 
 
 » It is not disputed that tlie plot existed beforehand in Whetstone's 
 Promos and Cassandra ; and there was probably an intermediate drama. 
 
144 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 In the same way, the express withdrawal of 
 the religious note at the close of Hamlet — 
 where in the Second Quarto we have Shakspere 
 making the dying prince .say " the rest is 
 silence " instead of " heaven receive my soul," as 
 in the First Quarto — may reasonably be taken 
 to express the same agnosticism on the subject 
 of a future life as is implied in the Duke's 
 speech to Claudio. It cannot reasonably be 
 taken to suggest a purpose of holding Hamlet 
 up to blame as an unbeliever, because Hamlet 
 is made repeatedly to express himself, in talk 
 and in soliloquy, as a believer in deity, in 
 prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches 
 are mostly reproductions of the old play, the 
 new matter being in the nature of the pagan 
 allusion to the " divinity that shapes our ends." 
 "What is definitely Shaksperean is just the 
 agnostic conclusion. 
 
 Did Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism 
 from Montaigne ? What were really Montaigne's 
 religious and philosophic opinions? We must 
 consider this point also with more circumspec- 
 tion than has been shown by most of Mon- 
 taigne's critics. The habit of calling him 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 145 
 
 " sceptic," a habit initiated by tbe Catbolic 
 priests who denounced his heathenish use of the 
 term " Fortune," and strengthened by various 
 writers from Pascal to Emerson, is a hindrance 
 to an exact notion of the facts, inasmuch as the 
 word " sceptic " has passed through two phases 
 of significance, and may still have either. In. 
 the original sense of the term, Montaigne is a 
 good deal of a " sceptic," because the main pur- 
 port of the Apology of Raimond Sebonde ap- 
 pears to be the discrediting of human reason all 
 round, and the consequent shaking of all 
 certainty. And this method strikes not only 
 indirectly but directly at the current religious 
 beliefs ; for Montaigne indicates a lack of 
 belief in immortality,* besides repeatedly ignor- 
 ing the common faith where he would naturally 
 be expected to endorse it, as in the nineteenth 
 and fortieth essays hereinbefore cited, and in his 
 discussion of the Apology of Socrates. As is 
 complained by Dean Church : t " His views, both 
 of life and death, are absolutely and entirely un- 
 
 * Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590. 
 
 t Oxford Essays, p. 279. Sterling, from liis Cliristian-Carlylese point of 
 view, declared of Montaigne that " All tiiat we find in liim of Christianity 
 would be suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral 
 beings" (London and Westminster Review, July, 1838, p. 346.) 
 
146 Montaiyne and Shakspere. 
 
 affected by tlie fact of his profession to believe 
 the G-ospel." That profession, indeed, partakes 
 rather obviously of the nature of his other 
 formal salutes* to the Church, which are such as 
 Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later 
 generation. His profession of iidelity to 
 Catholicism, again, is rather his way of showing 
 that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in 
 Protestantism, than the expression of any real 
 conformity to Catholic ideals; for he indicates 
 alike his aversion to heretic-hunting and his 
 sense of the folly of insisting on the whole body 
 of dogma. When fanatical Protestants, un- 
 critical of their own creed, afEected to doubt the 
 sincerity of any man who held by Catholicism, 
 he was naturally piqued. But he was more 
 deeply piqued, as Naigeon has suggested, when 
 the few but keen freethinkers of the time treated 
 the Theologia N.4lTukalis of Sebonde, which 
 Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, 
 as a feeble and inconclusive piece of argumenta- 
 tion ; and it was primarily to retaliate on such 
 critics — ^who on their part no doubt exhibited 
 
 * Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he added many safe- 
 guarding clauses in the later editions. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 147 
 
 some ill-founded convictions wMle attacking 
 others — tliat lie penned tlie Apology, whicli as- 
 sails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, 
 but with a most unfamiliar energy and splen- 
 dour of style, as a manifestation of the foolish 
 pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. 
 For himself, he was, as we have said, a classic 
 theist, of the school of Cicero and Seneca ; and 
 as regards that side of his own thought he is not 
 at all sceptical, save in so far as he nominally 
 protested against all attempts to bring deity 
 down to human conceptions, while himself doing 
 that very thing, as every theist needs must. 
 
 Shakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the 
 traditional deism of the pagan and Christian 
 world, without any colour of specifically Chris- 
 tian faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in 
 a future state. But, whether we suppose 
 Shakspere to have been already led, as he 
 might be by the initiative of his colleague Mar- 
 lowe, an avowed atheist, to agnostic views on 
 immortality, or whether we suppose him to have 
 had his first serious lead to such thought from 
 Montaigne, we find him to all appearance carry- 
 ing further the initial impetus, and proceeding 
 
143 Montaigne and Shahspere. 
 
 from tlie serene semi-Stoicism of tlie essayist to 
 a deeper and sterner conceptioin of things. It 
 lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psycho- 
 sis, so abnormally alive to all impressions, that 
 when he fully faced the darker sides of universal 
 drama, with his reflective powers at work, he 
 must utter a pessimism commensurate with the 
 theme. This is part, if not the whole, of the 
 answer to the question "Why did Shakspere 
 write tragedies?"* The whole answer can 
 hardly be either Mr. Spedding's, that the poet 
 wrote his darkest tragedies in. a state of philo- 
 sophic serenity,t or Dr. Furnivall's, that he 
 " described hell because he had felt hell."t But 
 when we find Shakspere writing a series of 
 tragedies, including an extremely sombre 
 comedy (Meastjee foe Meastjee), after having 
 produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we 
 must conclude that the change was made of his 
 own choice, and that whereas formerly his 
 theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and 
 its tragedies mostly from others, it now took its 
 
 * See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in tlie Cornhill Magazine, August, 
 1880. 
 
 t Art. cited, aid. 
 
 X Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to Leopold Shakspere, p. 
 Ixvxvii. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 149 
 
 comedies mostly from otliers and its tragedies 
 from Hm. Purtlier, we must assume tliat tlie 
 gloom.y cast of tliouglit so pervadingly given to 
 tlie new tragedies is partly a reflex of his own 
 experience, but also in large part an expression 
 of the philosophy to which he had been led by 
 his reading, as well as by his life. For we must 
 finally avow that the pervading thought in the 
 tragedies outgoes the simple artistic needs of the 
 case. In Othello we have indeed a very 
 strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong — 
 weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; 
 but there is already a full suggestion of the over- 
 whelming energy of the element of evil ; and in 
 Leak the conception is worked out with a des- 
 perate insistence which carries us far indeed 
 from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism 
 of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find 
 such a note of gloom as is struck in the lines : 
 
 " As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods : 
 They kill us for their sport." 
 
 And since there is no pretence of balancing that 
 mordant saying with any decorous platitude of 
 Christian Deism, we are led finally to the admis- 
 sion that Shakspere sounded a further depth 
 
150 Montaigne and Shakspere- 
 
 of philosophy than Montaigne's unembittered 
 " cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of re- 
 acting against Montaigne's " scepticism," as 
 Herr Stedefeld supposes, he produced yet other 
 tragedies in which the wrongdoers and the 
 wronged alike • exhibit less and not more of 
 Christian faith than Hamlet,* and in which 
 there is no hint of any such faith on the part 
 of the dramatist, but, on the contrary, a sombre 
 persistence in the presentment of unrelieved evil. 
 The utterly wicked lago has as much of religion 
 in his talk as anyone else in Othello, using the 
 phrases " Christian and heathen," " God bless 
 the mark," " Heaven is my judge," " You are 
 one of those that will not serve God, if the devil 
 bid you," " the little godliness I have," " God's 
 will," and so forth ; the utterly wicked Edmund 
 in Lear, as we have seen, is made to echo Mon- 
 taigne's "sceptical" passage on the subject of 
 stellar influences, spoken with a moral purpose, 
 rather than the quite contrary utterance in the 
 AroLOGY, in which the essayist, theistically bent 
 on abasing human pretensions, gives to his 
 scepticism the colour of a belief in those very 
 
 » Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pi-ay; but his religion goes no further. 
 
Montaitjne and Shakspere. 151 
 
 influences.* There is here, clearly, no pro- 
 religious thesis. The whole drift of the play 
 shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in stel- 
 lar control, though he puts the expression of the 
 disbelief in. the mouth of a villain ; though he 
 makes the honest Eeut, on the other hand, de- 
 clare that " it is the stars . . . that govern 
 our conditions ; "t and though he had previ- 
 ously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of in- 
 auspiciotis stars," and the Duke describe man- 
 kind as " servile to all the skiey influences," and 
 was later to make Prospero, in the TempestJ 
 express his belief in " a most auspicious star." 
 In the case of Montaigne, who goes on yet again 
 to contradict himself in the Apology itself, 
 satirising afresh the habit of associating deity 
 with all human concerns, we are driven to sur- 
 mise an actual variation of opinion — ^the viva- 
 cious intelligence springing this way or that 
 according as it is reacting against the atheists 
 or against the dogmatists. Montaigne, of 
 course, is not a coherent philosopher ; the way 
 to systematic philosophic truth is a path too 
 
 * See the passage cited above in section iii in connection with Measure for 
 Measure 
 t .ict iv., Sc. 2. X Act i, Sc. 2. 
 
152 Montaigne and Shakspere- 
 
 steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined 
 spirit as Ms, " sworn enemy to obligation, to 
 assiduity, to constancy " ; * and the net result 
 of bis "Apology " for Raimond Sebonde is to up- 
 set the system of that sober theologian as well 
 as all others. Whether Shakspere, on the other 
 hand, could or did detect all the inconsistencies 
 of Montaigne's reasoning, is a point on which 
 we are not entitled to more than a surmise ; but 
 we do find that on certain issues on which Mon- 
 taigne dogmatises very much as did his predeces- 
 sors, Shakspere applies a more penetrating 
 logic, and explicitly reverses the essayist's ver- 
 dicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by 
 his master doctrine that we should live " accord- 
 ing to nature," is given to talking of " art " 
 and " nature " in the ordinary manner, carrying 
 the primitive commonplace indeed to the length 
 of a paradox. Thus in the essay on the Canni- 
 bals,t speaking of " savages," he protests that 
 
 "They are even savage, as we call those fruits wild 
 which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath 
 produced, whereas indeed they are those which our- 
 selves have altered by our artificial devices, and 
 diverted from their common order, we should rather 
 
 * B. i, Chap. 20. f B. i, Chap. 30. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 153 
 
 call savage. In those are the true and more profitable 
 virtues and natural properties most lively and 
 vigorous ; " * 
 
 deciding with. Plato that 
 
 "all things are produced either by nature, by fortune, 
 or by art; the greatest and fairest by one or other of 
 the two first; the least and imperfect by this last." 
 
 And in. tlie ApoLOGY,t after citing some as argu- 
 ing that 
 
 "Nature by a maternal gentleness accompanies and 
 guides " the lower animals, " as if by the hand, to all 
 the actions and commodities of their life," while, "as 
 for us, she abandons us to hazard and fortune, and to 
 seek by art the things necessary to our conservation," 
 
 though he proceeds to insist on the contrary that 
 " nature has universally embraced all her crea- 
 tures," man as well as the rest, and to argue 
 that man is as much a creature of nature as the 
 rest — since even speech, "if not natural, is 
 necessary" — he never seems to come within 
 sight of the solution that art, on his own show- 
 ing, is just nature in a new phase. But to that 
 point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the 
 Winter's Tale, one of the latest plays ( ? 1611), 
 written about the time when we know him to 
 
 » Edit. Finnin-Didot, i, 202. f ^'l-i PP- 477-478. 
 
154 MontaigTie and Shakspere- 
 
 have been reading or re-reading tlie essay on 
 the Cannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant 
 gillyflowers in her garden, 
 
 " For I have heard it said 
 
 There is an art which in their piedness shares 
 
 With great creating nature," 
 
 the old king answers : 
 
 " Say there be : 
 Yet nature is made better by no mean. 
 But nature makes that mean ; so o'er that art 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we 
 
 marry 
 A gentle scion to the wildest stock 
 And make conceive a bark of baser kind 
 By bud of nobler race : This is an art 
 Which does mend nature — change it rather ; but 
 The art itself is nature."* 
 
 It is an analysis, a criticism, a philosophic 
 demonstration ; and the subtle poet smilingly 
 lets us see immediately that he had tried the 
 argument on the fanatics of " nature," fair or 
 other, and knew them impervious to it. "I'll 
 not put," says Puritan Perdita, after demurely 
 granting that " so it is " — 
 
 * Here, it may be said, there is a trace of the influence of Bruno's philo- 
 sophy ; and it may well be that Shakspere did not spontaneously strike out 
 the thought for himself. But I am not aware that any parallel passage has 
 been cited. 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 155 
 
 " I'll not put 
 The dibble in earth to set one slip of them." 
 
 Tlie mind wMcli could thus easily pierce below 
 tlie inveterate fallacy of three thousand years of 
 conventional speech may well be presumed 
 capable of rounding Montaigne's philosophy 
 wherever it collapses, and of setting it aside 
 wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we 
 can never convict Shakspere of bad reasoning 
 in person ; and in his later plays we never seem 
 to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of 
 "\'^ENUS AND Adonis seems to have deepened 
 beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep- 
 striking intelligence that first stirred him to 
 philosophise. 
 
 And yet, supposing this to be so, there is none 
 the less a lasting community of thviught between 
 the two spirits, a lasting debt from the younger 
 to the elder. Indeed, we cannot say that at all 
 points Shakspere outwent his guide. It is a 
 curious reflection that they had probably one 
 foible in common ; for we know Montaigne's 
 little weakness of desiring his family to be 
 thought ancient, of suppressing the fact of its 
 recent establishment by commerce ; and we have 
 
156 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 evidence wHcli seems to show tliat Shakspere 
 sought zealously,* despite rebuffs, the formal 
 constitution of a coat-of-arms for his family. On 
 the other hand, there is nothing in Shakspere' s 
 work — the nature of the case indeed forbade it 
 — to compare in democratic outspokenness with 
 Montaigne's essayt Of the Inequality among 
 us. The Frenchman's hardy sayingj that 
 " the souls of emperors and cobblers are 
 all cast in one same mould" could not 
 well be echoed in Elizabethan drama; and 
 indeed we cannot well be sure that Shaks- 
 pere would have endorsed it, with hia 
 fixed habit of taking kings and princes and 
 generals and rich ones for his personages. But 
 then, on the other hand, we cannot be sure that 
 this was anything more than a part of his de- 
 liberate life's work of producing for the English 
 multitude what that multitude cared to see, and 
 catching London with that bait of royalty which 
 commonly attracted it. It remains a fine ques- 
 tion whether his extravagant idealisation and 
 justification of Henry V. — which, though it 
 
 » Fleay's Life, pp. 138, &c. f B. i, Chap. 42. 
 
 t B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit, cited, i, 501.) 
 
Montaigne and Shalcspere. 157 
 
 gives so little pause to some of our English, 
 critics, entitled M. Guizot to call liim a mere 
 Jolm Bull in his ideas of international politics 
 • — ^it remains disputable whether this was 
 exactly an expression of his own thought. It is 
 notable that he never again strikes the note of 
 blatant patriotism. And the poets of that time, 
 further, seem to have had their tongues very- 
 much in their cheeks with regard to their 
 Virgin Queen; so that we cannot be sure that 
 Shakspere, paying her his fanciful compli- 
 ment,* was any more sincere about it than Ben 
 Jonson, who would do as mucb while privately 
 accepting the grossest scandal concerning her.t 
 It is certainly a remarkable fact that Shaks- 
 pere abstained from joining in the poetic out- 
 crj- over her death, incurring reproof by his 
 silence.+ 
 
 However all that may have been, we find 
 Shakspere, after his period of pessimism, view- 
 ing life in a spirit which could be expressed in 
 terms of Montaigne's philosophy. He certainly 
 shaped his latter years in accordance with the 
 
 ^ Midsummer Nighfs Dream, Act ii, Sc. 2. 
 
 f See his Conversations witli Drummond of Hawthornden. 
 
 X Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakspere, 5th ed., p. 175. 
 
 L 
 
158 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no otlier 
 man in Shakspere's theatrical group deliber- 
 ately turning Ms back, as lie did, on tlie many- 
 coloured London life when he had means to 
 enjoy it at leisure, and seeking to possess his 
 own soul in Stratford-on-Avon, in the circle of 
 a family which had already lived so long with- 
 out him. But that retirement, rounding with 
 peace the career of manifold and intense experi- 
 ence, is a main fact in Shakspere's life, and 
 one of our main clues to his innermost character. 
 Emerson, never quite delivered from Puritan 
 prepossessions, avowed his perplexity over the 
 fact " that this man of men, he who gave to the 
 science of mind a new and larger subject than 
 had ever existed, and planted the standard of 
 humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos-- 
 that he should not be wise for himself : it must 
 even go into the world's history that the best 
 poet led an obscure ( !) and profane life, using 
 his genius for the public amusement." If this 
 were fundamentally so strange a thing, one 
 might have supposed that the transcendentalist 
 would therefore " as a stranger give it welcome." 
 Approaching it on another plane, one finds 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 159 
 
 nothing specially perplexing in the matter. 
 Shakspere's personality was an Tincommon 
 combination; but was not that what should 
 have been looked for? And where, after all, is 
 the evidence that he was "not wise for him- 
 self " ?* Did he not make his fortune where 
 most of his rivals failed? If he was " obscure," 
 how otherwise could he have been less so ? How 
 could the bankrupt tradesman's son otherwise 
 rise to fame? Should he have sought, at all 
 costs, to become a lawyer, and rise perchance to 
 the seat of Bacon, and the opportunity of eking 
 out his stipend by bribes? If it be conceded 
 that he must needs try literature, and such 
 literature as a man could live by ; and if it be 
 further conceded that his plays, being so mar- 
 vellous in their content, were well worth the 
 writing, where enters the " profanity" of having 
 written them, or of having acted in them, " for 
 
 * I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless difficulty on this 
 head. In his Sliakspere in Fact and Criiicism, already cited, he writes (p. 
 316) : " I find him . . . living and dying so utterly unsuspicious that he 
 had done anything of which his children might care to hear, that he never 
 even troubled himself to preserve the manuscript of or the literary property 
 in a sirigle one of the plays which had raised him to affluence." As I have 
 already pointed out, there is no reason to suppose that Shakspere could 
 retain the ownership of his plays any more than did the other writers who 
 supplied his theatre. They belonged to the partnership. Besides, he could 
 not possibly have pubUshed as his the existing mass, so largely made up of 
 other men's work. His fellow-playeis did so without scruple after his 
 death, being simply bent on making money. 
 
160 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 the public amusement " ? Even wise men seem 
 to run special risks when they discourse on 
 Shakspere: Emerson's essay has its own 
 anomaly. 
 
 It is indeed fair to say that Shakspere must 
 have drunk a bitter cup in his life as an actor. 
 It is true that that calling is apt to be more 
 humiliating than another to a man's self- 
 respect, if his judgment remain sane and 
 sensitive. "We have the expression of it all in 
 the Sonnets : * 
 
 " Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, 
 And made myself a motley to the view, 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, 
 Made old offences of affections new.'' 
 
 It is impossible to put into fewer and fuller 
 words the story, many a year long, of sordid 
 compulsion laid on an artistic nature to turn 
 its own inner life into matter for the stage. But 
 he who can read Shakspere might be expected 
 to divine that it needed, among other things, 
 even some such discipline as that to give his 
 spirit its strange universality of outlook. And 
 he who could esteem both Shakspere and Mon- 
 
 * Sonnet no. Compare the next. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 161 
 
 taigne miglit Lave been expected, to note liow 
 they drew togetlier at tliat very point of tlie final 
 retirement, tke dramatic caterer finally winning, 
 out of his earnings, the peace and self-possession 
 that the essayist had inherited without toil. He 
 must, one thinks, have repeated to himself Mon- 
 taigne's very words* : " My design is to pass 
 quietly, and not laboriously, what remains to 
 me of Hfe; there is nothing for which I am 
 minded to make a strain: not knowledge, of 
 whatever great price it be." And when he at 
 length took himself away to the quiet village of 
 his birth, it could hardly be that he had not 
 in mind those words of the essayt on 
 Solitude : 
 
 "We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves . . . 
 altogether ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard 
 up and establish cur true liberty, the principal retreat 
 and solitariness, wherein we must go alone to ourselves. 
 . . . We have lived long enough for ethers, hve we 
 the remainder of aU life unto ourselves. . . Shake 
 we off these violent hold-fasts which elsewhere 
 engage us, and estrange us from ourselves. 
 The greatest thing of the world is for a man 
 to know how to be his own. It is high time to shake 
 off society, since we can bring nothing to it. . ." 
 
 » B. ii, Chap. lo. t B. i, Chap. 38. 
 
162 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 A kindred note is actually struck in the 146tli 
 Sonnet,* wkLck tells of revolt at the expenditure 
 of inner life on the outward garniture, and ex- 
 horts the soul to live aright : 
 
 "Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss, 
 And let that live to aggravate thy store ; 
 
 Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross ; 
 Within be fed ; without be rich no more : 
 So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men. 
 And death once dead, there's no more dying then " — 
 
 an echo of much of Montaigne's discourse, 
 hereinbefore cited.t 
 
 In perfect keeping with all this movement 
 towards peace and contemplation, and in final 
 keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of Mon- 
 taigne, is the musing philosophy which lights, 
 as with a wondrous sunset, the play which one 
 would fain believe the last of all. At the end, 
 as at the beginning, we find the poet working on 
 
 * This may be presumed to have been written between 1603 and 1609, the 
 date of the publication of the Sonnets. As Mr. Minto argues, "the only 
 sonnet of really indisputable date is the 107th, containing the reference to 
 the death of Elizabeth " (Characteristics, as cited, p. 220). As the fii*st 126 
 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take those remaining as of later 
 date. 
 
 t It more particularly echoes, however, two passages in the nineteenth 
 essay ; — "There is no evil in life for him that hath well conceived, how the 
 privation of life is no evil. To know how to die, doth free us from all sub- 
 jection and constraint." " No man did ever prepare himself to quit the 
 world more simply and fully . than I am fully assured 1 shall do. The 
 
 deadest deaths are the best." 
 
Montaigne and Shahspere. 163 
 
 a pre-existing basis, re-making an old play ; and 
 at tlie end, as at the beginning, we find him pic- 
 turing, with an incomparable delicacy, new ideal 
 types of womanhood, who stand out with a 
 fugitive radiance from the surroundings of mere 
 humanity; but over all alike, in the Tempest, 
 there is the fusing spell of philosophic reverie. 
 Years before, in Hamlet, he had dramatically 
 caught the force of Montaigne's frequent 
 thought that daylight life might be taken as a 
 nightmare, and the dream life as the real. It 
 was the kind of thought to recur to the dramatist 
 above all men, even were it not pressed upon him 
 by the essayist's reiterations : 
 
 "Those which have compared our hfe unto a dream, 
 have happily had more reason so to do than they were 
 aware. When we dream, our soul hveth, worketh, and 
 exerciseth all her faculties, even and as much as when it 
 waketh. . . We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. 
 In my sleep I see not so clear, yet can I never find my 
 waking clear enough, or without dimness. . . Why 
 make we not a douht whether our thinking and our 
 working be another dreaming, and our waking some 
 kind of sleeping ? "* 
 
 "Let me think of building castles in Spain, my 
 imagination will forge me commodities and afford me 
 
164 Montaigne and Sliakspere. 
 
 means and delights wherewith my mind is really tickled 
 and essentially gladded. How often do we pester 
 our spirits with anger or sadness by such shadows, and 
 entangle ourselves into fantastical passions which alter 
 both our mind and body? . . . Enquire of your- 
 self, where is the object of this alteration? Is there 
 anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity ? 
 over whom it hath any power? . . . Aristodemus, 
 king of the Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he 
 took of some ill presage by I know not what howling 
 of dogs. . . It is the right way to prize one's life at 
 the right worth of it, to forego it for a dream."* 
 
 ". . . Our reasons do often anticipate the effect 
 and have the extension of their jurisdiction so infinite, 
 that they judge and exercise themselves in inanity, and 
 to a not being. Besides the flexibility of our invention, 
 to frame reasons unto all manner of dreams ; our 
 imagination is likewise found easy to receive impres- 
 sions from falsehood, by very frivolous appearances. "f 
 
 Again aud again does the essayist return to this 
 
 note of mysticism, so distinct from the daylight 
 
 practicality of his normal utterance. And it 
 
 was surely with these musings in his mind that 
 
 the poet makes Prospero pronounce upon the 
 
 phantasmagoria that the spirits have performed 
 
 at his behest. We know, indeed, that the speech 
 
 proceeds upon a reminiscence of four lines in the 
 
 Earl of Stirling's Darius (1604), lines in them- 
 
 » iii, II. t "'i 4' 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 165 
 
 selves very tolerable, alike in cadence and 
 sonority, but destined to be remembered by 
 reason of tbe way in wbicL. tbe master, casting 
 tbem into his all-transmuting alembic, has 
 remade them in the fine gold of his subtler 
 measure. The Earl's lines run: 
 
 " Let greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt ; 
 
 Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruised, soon 
 
 [broken ; 
 And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant ; 
 
 All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token. 
 Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls, 
 
 With furnittire superfluously fair; 
 Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls, 
 
 Evanish all like vapours in the air." 
 
 The sonorities of the rhymed verse seem to have 
 vibrated in the poet's brain amid the memories 
 of the prose which had suggested to him so 
 much ; and the verse and prose alike are raised 
 to an immortal movement in the great lines of 
 
 Prospero : 
 
 "These our actors, 
 As I foretold you, are all spirits, and 
 Are melted into air, into thin air. 
 And hke the baseless fabric of this vision, 
 The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces. 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve 
 
166 Montaigne and Shakspere. 
 
 And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, 
 Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on, and our little Ufe 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 lu the face of that vast philosophy, it seems an 
 irrelevance to reason, as some do, that in the 
 earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his 
 Utopia of incivilisation, Shakspere so arranges 
 the dialogue as to express his own ridicule of the 
 conception. The interlocutors, it will be 
 remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, two of 
 the villains of the piece, and Alonso, the 
 wrecked usurper. The kind Gonzalo talks of 
 the ideal community to distract Alonso's 
 troubled thoughts ; Sebastian and Antonio jeer 
 at him ; and Alonso finally cries, " Pr'ythee, no 
 more, thou dost talk nothing to me." Herr 
 Gervinus is quite sure that this was meant to 
 state Shakspere' s prophetic derision for all 
 communisms and socialisms and peace con- 
 gresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained 
 oracle of the political gospel of his German com- 
 mentators, on the principle of " Gott mit uns." 
 And it may well have been that Shakspere, 
 looking on the society of his age, had no faith in 
 any Utopia, and that he humorously put what 
 
Montaigne, and Shakspere. 167 
 
 he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in 
 the mouth of a surly rascal — he has done as much 
 elsewhere. But he was surely the last man to 
 have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was 
 no more Montaigne's personal political counsel 
 to his age than As You Like It was his own ; 
 and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's 
 essay, which was to show that civilisation was no 
 unmixed gain as contrasted with some forms of 
 barbarism, the author of Cymbeline was hardly 
 the man to repugn it, even if he amused himself 
 by putting forward Caliban* as the real " canni- 
 bal," in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given 
 his impression of certain aspects of civilisation 
 in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and King 
 Lear. As his closing plays show, however, he 
 had reached the knowledge that for the general 
 as for the private wrong, the sane man must 
 cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, 
 which he could not didactically impose, for such 
 a world as his, on the old tragedy of revenge 
 which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, 
 he found didactically enough set down in the 
 essay on Diversion : t 
 
 * In all probability this character existed in the previous play, the name 
 being originally, as was suggested last century by Dr. Farmer, a mere 
 variant of " Canibal." 
 
 t iii. 4- 
 
168 Montaigne and Shakspere- 
 
 " Revenge is a sweet pleasing passion, of a great 
 and natural impression : I perceive it well, albeit I have 
 made no trial of it. To divert of late a young prince 
 from it, I told him not he was to offer the one side of 
 his cheek to him who had struck him on the other in 
 regard of charity ; nor displayed I unto him the tragical 
 events poesy bestoweth upon that passion. There I 
 left him and strove to make him taste the beauty of a 
 contrary image ; the honour, the favour, and the good- 
 will he should acquire by gentleness and goodness ; I 
 diverted him to ambition." 
 
 And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged 
 magician in tlie drama: — 
 
 "Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the 
 quick, 
 Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury 
 Do I take part ; the rarer action is 
 In virtue than in vengeance. . . ." 
 
 The principle now pervades the whole of Pros- 
 pero's society; even the cursed and cursing 
 Caliban is recognised* as a necessary member of 
 it: — 
 
 " We cannot miss him ; he does make our fire. 
 
 Fetch in our wood ; and serves in offices 
 
 That profit us.'' 
 
 It is surely not unwarrantable to pronounce, 
 then, finally, that the poet who thus watchfully 
 lit his action from the two sides of passion and 
 
 » Act ii, Sc. J. 
 
Montaigne and Shakspere. 169 
 
 sympatliy was in tlie end at one witli his " guide, 
 philosoplier, and friend," who in that time of 
 universal strife and separateness could of his 
 own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and 
 say : * " I esteem all men my compatriots, and 
 embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman, sub- 
 ordinating this national tie to the common and 
 universal." Here, too, was not Montaigne the 
 first of the moderns ? 
 
 ' III. 9. 
 
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