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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Montaigne and Shakspere, by John M. Robertson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Montaigne and Shakspere
+
+Author: John M. Robertson
+
+Release Date: May 20, 2008 [EBook #25535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
++-----------------------------------------+
+| Transcribers note: Old spellings of the |
+| words have been retained as well as the |
+| doubtful use of colons instead of       |
+| semicolons in many places for the sake  |
+| of fidelity to the original text.       |
++-----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE
+
+BY
+
+JOHN M. ROBERTSON
+
+LONDON
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED
+16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C.
+1897
+
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE
+
+
+For a good many years past the anatomic study of Shakspere, of which a
+revival seems now on foot, has been somewhat 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 iconoclasts 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 psychology 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
+history was verily being made. Our sensations, it seemed, might be as
+those of our elders had been over Mr. Collier's emendated folio, and
+the 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."[1] 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 interesting of all problems
+concerning Shakspere. Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi--a host
+of peculiarly modern problem-makers have been exorcising 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 the French only, not having compared the
+translation. The first thought of students was to connect the passage
+with Ben Johnson's allusion in VOLPONE[2] to frequent "stealings from
+Montaigne" 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 question. 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 celebrated
+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 nearly a
+Montaigne, lifted to a higher eminence, and agitated by more striking
+circumstances and a severer destiny, and altogether a somewhat more
+passionate structure of man."[3] In 1846, again, Philarète Chasles, an
+acute and original critic, citing the 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 CORIOLANUS.
+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 Montaigne."[4] 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 propositions of M.
+Chasles, so far as I am aware, have never been supported by evidence.
+Nevertheless, the general fact of a frequent reproduction 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 of the Essays of Montaigne from which Shakspere had
+apparently received suggestions, and instanced one or two cases in which
+actual peculiarities of phrase in Florio's translation of the Essays are
+adopted by him, in addition to a peculiar 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 translation, 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
+development. 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 Shakspere 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 greatest of
+critical problems--comes within the general disregard for serious
+criticism, noticeable among us of late years. And the 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 Montaigne. Not only does he undertake to show
+in dead earnest what Sterling had vaguely suggested as conceivable, that
+Shakspere meant Hamlet to represent Montaigne, but he strenuously 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 converts, 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, seeing how much
+intelligent study has been given of late by French critics to both
+Shakspere and Montaigne. The influence is recognised; but here again it
+is only cursorily traced. The latest study of Montaigne is that of M.
+Paul Stapfer, 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. Shakspere appreciated him (_le
+  goûtait_); 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, marvellously vain, various and changeful, were
+  perhaps not unconnected with (_peut être pas étrangères à_)
+  the conception of HAMLET. The author of the scene of the
+  grave-diggers must have felt the savour and retained the
+  impression 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 translation 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."[5]
+
+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 work[6] compared Shakspere with a French
+classic critically enough, 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 supposition, quite unjustified by the few
+traces in his writings of his having read the Essays."[7] But that
+verdict was passed without due scrutiny. The influence of Montaigne on
+Shakspere was both wider and deeper than M. Stapfer has suggested; 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 ignorantly adored is a mere dubious mystery; Shakspere
+followed up and comprehended, step by step, albeit never wholly
+revealed, becomes more remarkable, more profoundly interesting, as he
+becomes more intelligible. We are embarked, not on a quest for
+plagiarisms, but on a study of the growth of a wonderful mind. And in
+the 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 sociological truth
+that such contacts of cultures are the very life of civilisation.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+The first requirement in the study, obviously, is an exact statement of
+the coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. 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 gainsaying 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 number 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 paraphrase in the TEMPEST, from the essay OF
+CANNIBALS; and left absolutely unsupported his assertion as to HAMLET,
+OTHELLO, and CORIOLANUS. It is necessary to produce proofs, and to look
+narrowly to dates. Florio's translation, though licensed in 1601, was
+not published till 1603, 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 doubt was, we cannot
+suppose him to have at this stage completed his refashioning of the
+older play, which is undoubtedly the substratum of his.[8] We must
+therefore keep closely in view the divergencies between this text and
+that of the Second Quarto, printed in 1604, in which the transmuting
+touch of Shakspere 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 Montaigne
+in the original. But as his possession of the translation is made
+certain by the preservation 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 dispute, it is on Florio's translation that we must
+proceed.
+
+
+I. In order to keep all the evidence in view, we may first of all
+collate once more the passage in the TEMPEST with that in the Essays
+which it unquestionably follows. In Florio's translation, 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:
+
+ "I' the commonwealth 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 the direct transcription here, where the
+dramatist is but incidentally playing with Montaigne's idea, proceeding
+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 coincidences of phrase.
+Correspondences of thought which in themselves do not establish their
+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."[9]
+
+I pointed out in 1885 that this expression, which does not occur in the
+First Quarto HAMLET, corresponds very closely with the theme of
+Montaigne's essay, THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES MET WITHALL IN PURSUIT OF
+REASON,[10] in which occurs the phrase, "Fortune has more judgment[11]
+than we," a translation from Menander. But Professor 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 identification. Reading 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 passage in the
+Essays:--[12] "My consultation 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
+coincidence than is presented in the passage cited by Mr. Feis from the
+essay OF PHYSIOGNOMY:--[13] "Therefore do our designs so often
+miscarry.... The heavens are angry, and I may say envious of the
+extension and large privilege we ascribe to human wisdom, 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,[14] 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
+  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 _Dæmon_ of Socrates were peradventure a certain
+  impulsion or will which without the advice of his discourse
+  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 himself 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."[15]
+
+  "Even in our counsels and deliberations, some chance or good
+  luck must needs be joined to them; for whatsoever our
+  wisdom can effect is no great matter."[16]
+
+  "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 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."[17] 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,[18]
+  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 commonplace, 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 found justified by the
+evidence, and the idea in that passage being exactly coincident with
+Montaigne's, while the above lines are only partially parallel in
+meaning, we are forced to admit that Shakspere may have been influenced
+by Montaigne 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,[19] 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;[20] while "discourse of thought" appears in
+OTHELLO;[21] and "discourse," in the sense of reasoning faculty, is used
+in Hamlet's last soliloquy.[22] In English literature this use of the
+word seems to be special in Shakspere's period,[23] and it has been
+noted by an admirer as a finely Shaksperean expression. But the
+expression "discourse of reason" occurs at least four times in
+Montaigne's Essays, and in Florio's translation of them: in the
+essay[24] THAT TO PHILOSOPHISE IS TO LEARN HOW TO DIE; again at the
+close of the essay[25] _A demain les affaires_; again in the first
+paragraph of the APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE[26]; and yet again in the
+chapter on THE HISTORY OF SPURINA;[27] and though it seems to be
+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 process of ratiocination.
+
+
+IV. Then again there is the clue of Shakspere's use of the word
+"consummation" in the revised form of the "To be" soliloquy. This, as
+Mr. Feis pointed out,[28] is the word used by Florio as a rendering of
+_anéantissement_ in the speech of Socrates as given by Montaigne in the
+essay[29] OF PHYSIOGNOMY. Shakspere makes Hamlet speak of annihilation
+as "a consummation devoutly to be wished." Florio has: "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 correspondences of phrase so precise
+as to prove reminiscence beyond possibility of dispute; but it is not
+difficult to trace striking correspondences which, though falling short
+of explicit reproduction, inevitably suggest a relation; and these it
+now behoves us to consider. The remarkable 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 Rosencrantz on sedition[30]
+with a passage in Montaigne's essay, OF CUSTOM,[31] we find a somewhat
+close coincidence. In the play Rosencrantz says:
+
+                  "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 ruin."
+
+Florio has:
+
+  "Those who attempt to shake an Estate are commonly 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 like
+  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.
+
+
+VI. The speech of Hamlet,[32] "There is nothing either good or bad but
+thinking makes it so"; and Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or
+thus,"[33] are expressions of a favourite thesis of Montaigne's, to
+which he devotes an entire essay.[34] 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 which we term evil is not so
+  of itself." ... "Every man is either well or ill according as
+  he finds himself."
+
+And in the essay[35] OF DEMOCRITUS AND HERACLITUS there is another close
+parallel:--
+
+  "Therefore let us take no more excuses from external
+  qualities of things. To us it belongeth to give ourselves
+  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
+essay[36] OF CUSTOM, AND NOT TO CHANGE 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 excellent 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 precepts." "The laws of conscience,
+  which we say are born of nature, are born of custom."
+
+Again, in the essay OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL[37] 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 VERONA[38] 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.
+
+
+VIII. A less close but still a noteworthy resemblance is that between
+the passage in which Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
+the veering of his mood from joy in things to disgust with them, and the
+paragraph in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE in which Montaigne 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 altering 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 promontory: 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 like 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 heaven's vaults, that the
+  eternal light of these lamps so fiercely rolling over his
+  head ... were established ... 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 Emperor 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 inclinations, 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 disdainfullest. 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 contrasted ideas of
+human greatness and smallness, and of the splendour of the midnight
+firmament.[39]
+
+
+IX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to Horatio on the point of the
+national vice of drunkenness,[40] 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 essay[41] on THE
+HISTORY OF SPURINA, which discusses at great length a matter of special
+interest to Shakspere--the character of Julius Cæsar. In the course of
+the examination Montaigne takes trouble to show that Cato's use of the
+epithet "drunkard" to Cæsar could not have been meant literally; that
+the same Cato admitted Cæsar's sobriety in the matter of drinking. It is
+after making light of Cæsar's faults in other matters of personal
+conduct that the essayist comes 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 only vice
+  (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him the fairest
+  natural and richest ingenuity that ever was, and hath made
+  his memory abominable to all honest minds."
+
+Compare the exquisitely high-strung lines, so congruous in their excited
+rapidity with Hamlet's intensity of expectation, which follow on his
+notable outburst on the subject of drunkenness:
+
+ "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 choose 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 manners; 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 Montaigne.[42] Shakspere's estimate of Cæsar, of course,
+diverged from that of the essay.
+
+
+X. I find a certain singularity of coincidence between the words of King
+Claudius on kingship:
+
+ "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[43] OF THE INCOMMODITY 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 but 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 Montaigne.
+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 cannot stand.
+
+
+XI. In Hamlet's soliloquy on the passage of the army of Fortinbras--one
+of the many passages added in the Second Quarto--there is a strong
+general resemblance to a passage in the essay OF DIVERSION.[44] 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
+  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 the 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 pretend 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 trumpets, 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,
+  without substance, overswayeth it up and down."
+
+The thought recurs in the essay, OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL.[45]
+
+  "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-skins?... 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 the idea in Hamlet's lines "rightly to be great," etc., is suggested
+in the essay OF REPENTING,[46] 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 EXPERIENCE[47] there is a sentence 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 there;
+and again, in the essay OF SOLITARINESS[48] we have the picture of the
+soldier fighting furiously 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
+unprofitable, vain, and counterfeit coin that is in use with us."
+
+And yet again the thought crops up in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE:
+
+  "This horror-causing array of so many thousands of armed
+  men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and undaunted 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 peculiar to the revised form of
+the play seems to be an echo of a thought of Montaigne's. At the outset
+of the soliloquy last quoted from, Hamlet says:--
+
+                   "What is a man
+  If his chief good and market of his time,
+  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[49] his small approbation of
+revenge; but the thought itself is there, in the essay[50] 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 commodity?"
+
+Again, there is a passage in the essay OF THE AFFECTION OF FATHERS TO
+THEIR CHILDREN,[51] 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 contrast
+between man and beast is drawn, though not to the same purpose as in the
+speech of Hamlet:--
+
+  "Since it hath pleased God to endow us with some capacity of
+  discourse, that as beasts we should not servilely be
+  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 have a third parallel, with a slight coincidence of terms, in
+the essay[52] 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 instance, there is a classic original, or at
+least a familiar source, in Cicero,[53] where the commonplace of the
+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;[54] 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 easy besides to push the theory of any
+influence too far; and when for instance we find Hamlet saying he fares
+"Of the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed," it would be
+as idle to assume a reminiscence of a passage of Montaigne on the
+chameleon[55] as it would be to derive Hamlet's phrase "A king of shreds
+and patches" from Florio's rendering in the essay[56] OF THE INCONSTANCY
+OF OUR 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."
+
+In the latter case we have a mere coincidence of idiom; in the former a
+proverbial allusion.[57] An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of
+resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities as the assertion that
+Shakspere's contemporaries 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 play there are several
+reproductions of ideas in the essays, some of them 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,
+Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own
+assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of
+surface 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 reflection. Some cause there must have been for this
+marked species of development in the dramatist at that particular time:
+and if we find pervading signs of one remarkable new influence, with 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 continues 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 Montaigne's
+sayings on the power of imagination and the possible equivalence of
+dream life and waking life. In his first dialogue with Rosencrantz 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."
+
+The first sentence may be compared with a number in Montaigne,[58] of
+which the following[59] 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 Guildenstern 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:[60] "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.
+
+
+XV. As regards HAMLET, I can find no further parallelisms so direct as
+any of the foregoing, except some to be considered later, in connection
+with the "To be" soliloquy. I do not think it can be made out that, as
+M. Chasles affirmed, Hamlet's words on his friendship for Horatio can be
+traced directly to any of Montaigne's passages on that theme. "It would
+be easy," says M. Chasles, "to show in Shakspere the _branloire
+perenne_[61] of Montaigne, and the whole magnificent passage on
+friendship, which is found reproduced (_se trouve reporté_) in HAMLET."
+The idea of the world as a perpetual mutation 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
+Boëtie 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 independently 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 quem
+nihil fortuna possit_--"to be something unconquered, something 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
+Montaigne'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 to this
+  advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign 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,[62] we have this:
+
+  "We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and
+  dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply
+  ourselves 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 unequal, 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 fortune 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 Boëtie is panegyrised by Montaigne for his rare poise and
+firmness of character;[63] and elsewhere in the essays we find many
+allusions to the ideal of the imperturbable man, which Montaigne has in
+the above cited passages brought into connection with his ideal of
+friendship. 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 resemblance between the "To be or not
+to be" soliloquy and the general tone of Montaigne on the subject 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 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 MEASURE. What really seems to subsist in
+the "To be" soliloquy, after a careful scrutiny, is a series of echoes
+of single thoughts; but there is the difficulty that some of these occur
+in the earlier form of the soliloquy in the First Quarto, a circumstance
+which tends--though not necessarily[64]--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
+_anéantissement_ in the essay OF PHYSIOGNOMY, as above noted. Secondly,
+there is a curious resemblance between the phrase "take arms against a
+sea of troubles" and a passage in Florio's version of the same essay,
+which has somehow been overlooked in the 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."
+
+There arises here the difficulty that Shakspere's line had been
+satisfactorily traced to Ælian's[65] story of the Celtic practice of
+rushing into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons; and the matter
+must, I think, be left open until it can he ascertained whether the
+statement concerning the Celts was available to Shakspere in any
+translation or citation.[66]
+
+Again, the phrase "Conscience doth make cowards of us all" is very like
+the echo of two passages in the essay[67] OF CONSCIENCE: "Of such
+marvellous working power is the sting of conscience: which often
+induceth us to bewray, to accuse, and to combat ourselves"; "which as it
+doth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it 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, makes 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[68] on A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA, which contains a
+passage 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 "Conscience makes cowards of us
+all" existed in the soliloquy as it stood in the First Quarto, while the
+gist of the idea is actually found twice in a previous play, where it
+has a proverbial ring.[69] And "the _hope_ of something after death"
+figures in the First Quarto also.
+
+Finally, there are other sources than Montaigne for parts of the
+soliloquy, sources nearer, too, than those which have been pointed to in
+the Senecan tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr. Cunliffe has pointed
+out,[70] 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 put:
+
+ "Verum est? an timidos fabula decepit,
+  Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?"
+
+It is true that the choristers in Seneca pronounce definitely against
+the future life:
+
+ "Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil....
+  Rumores vacui verbaque inania,
+  Et par sollicito 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 undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller
+returns." In the HERCULES FURENS[71] we have:
+
+ "Nemo ad id sero venit, unde nunquam
+  Quum semel venit potuit reverti;"
+
+and in the HERCULES OETÆUS[72] there is the same thought:
+
+               "regnum canis inquieti
+  Unde 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 tenebricosum
+  Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam."[73]
+
+And though there was in Shakspere's day no English translation of
+Catullus, the commentators long ago noted[74] that in Sandford's
+translation 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 anything cited from the
+classics.
+
+Finally, in Marlowe's EDWARD II.,[75] written before 1593, we have:
+
+               "Weep not for Mortimer,
+  That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
+  Goes to discover countries yet unknown."[76]
+
+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 translations 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 consider it unlikely, were it
+only because the Montaigne 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 the MERCHANT OF
+VENICE[77] recalls the passage on the subject in Montaigne's essay of
+CUSTOM;[78] but then the original source is Cicero, IN SOMNIUM
+SCIPIONIS, which had been translated into English in 1577. (2)
+Falstaff's rhapsody on the virtues of sherris[79] recalls a passage in
+the essay OF DRUNKENNESS,[80] but then Montaigne avows that what he says
+is the common doctrine of wine-drinkers. (3) Montaigne cites[81] 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 HAMLET, we are bound
+to concede the doubtfulness of any apparent influence before the Second
+Quarto. At most we may say that both of Hamlet's soliloquies which touch
+on suicide evidently owe something to the discussions set up by
+Montaigne's essays.[82]
+
+
+XVII. In the case of the Duke's exhortation to Claudio in MEASURE FOR
+MEASURE, on the contrary, the whole speech may be said to be a synthesis
+of favourite propositions of Montaigne. 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 him 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 dangerous 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
+  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 unavoidable?... 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?...
+
+  " ... 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 RAYMOND
+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 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 the 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 valiant,
+  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,
+  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, affection, limbs, 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."[83]
+
+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
+  offences, 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...."[84]
+
+  "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...."[85]
+
+  "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 whatever is before
+  and behind this moment, and also a good part of this moment,
+  "[86]
+
+  "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."[87]
+
+Compare finally the 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 Montaigne's favourites. And the
+view that Shakspere 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
+likewise an echo 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 superstition 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,[88] of the punishment of the offending dæmons, who
+were whirled between earth and air and sun and sea; but there is no
+suggestion in that passage that 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,[89] and of traitors punished by
+freezing in the ninth,[90] 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,[91] whence (rather than from Dante) Milton drew his idea
+of an alternate torture.[92] But there again, the correspondence is only
+partial; whereas in Montaigne's APOLOGY OF RAIMOND 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 Pythagoras is
+  made author ... which is that souls at their departure from
+  us did but pass and roll from one to another body, from a
+  lion to a horse, from a horse 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 themselves unto their first
+  bodies.... Behold her (the soul's) progress elsewhere: He
+  that hath lived well reconjoineth 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
+  customs, and shall never see an end of his punishments until
+  ... by virtue of reason he have deprived himself of those
+  gross, stupid, and elementary qualities that were in him....
+  They (the Epicureans) demand, what order 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 staved 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...."[93]
+
+It is at a short distance from this passage that we find the suggestion
+of a frozen purgatory:
+
+  "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."[94]
+
+And over and above this peculiar correspondence between the 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, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
+  Herself the glory of a creditor,
+  Both thanks and use...."
+
+Here we have once more a characteristically Shaksperean transmutation
+and development of the idea rather than a reproduction; and the same
+appears when we compare the admirable lines of the poet with a homiletic
+sentence from the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND 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[95]:
+
+ "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 conclusive as to the time of
+composition of the plays, there is so much of identity between the
+thought in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and a notable passage in
+TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, 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[96]:
+
+                  "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
+BENEFICIIS[97] throws out the germ 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."[98] 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; nec 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 foregone
+  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 Montaigne that sent him to Seneca,
+to whom Montaigne[99] avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot
+tell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we
+have here another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on
+which Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point
+or initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the
+point of contact with Montaigne in HAMLET, where the saying that reason
+is implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many
+correspondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is
+more subtly and deeply developed in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and still more
+subtly and philosophically in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. The fact of the
+process of development 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,[100] when VOLPONE 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 contemporary 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 Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are
+thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase--
+
+ "I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me....
+  He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen,
+  Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."
+
+--a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in
+the Fortieth Essay.
+
+(b) In LEAR (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]--
+
+ "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
+SOBERLY TO MEDDLE WITH THE JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,[102] where
+Montaigne 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
+  incomprehensible motives of its works."
+
+This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; 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 coincidence between a passage in
+the essay[103] of JUDGING OF OTHERS' DEATH and the speech of Edmund[104]
+on the subject of stellar influences. In the 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 protest
+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 followeth 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 Cæsar'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 our own interests
+  disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least
+  actions. 'There is no such society between 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; drunkards, 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[105]:
+
+ "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 essay[106] OF SADNESS, in which
+Montaigne 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 Lord Raisciac looked on his
+  dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having
+  suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark
+  dead to the ground."
+
+The parallel here, such as it is, is at least much more vivid than that
+drawn between Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:
+
+  Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent[107]--"Light
+  troubles 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 question. 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 Montaigne 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 prepossessed--as even
+Mr. Fleay still seems to be--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"[108] 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 Montaigne as we have seen; and it remains to consider what the
+reproduction signifies, as regards Shakspere's mental development.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+But first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne
+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[109] 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 confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,[110]
+that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:
+
+  "Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"
+
+has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his
+most formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here 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 exhaustive 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.
+
+Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all
+open-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed classical
+knowledge was derived from translations alone;[111] and further
+investigation does but establish his general view.[112] Such is the
+effect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;[113]
+and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as
+against the view suggested, 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 valuable
+research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the
+Elizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its
+technique. 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. Cunliffe 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 difficult
+  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
+  Middleton 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 Shakspere we cannot be
+  absolutely certain either way. Professor 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 turn to the generally accepted model of
+  classical tragedy, either in the original or in the
+  translation."[114]
+
+This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from
+particular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence
+the view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between
+Seneca's tragedies and Shakspere'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. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes,
+points to Æschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:
+
+ "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
+  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:[115]
+
+ "Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica
+  Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox
+  Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
+  Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
+  Mæotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
+  Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
+  Haerebit altum facinus"
+
+and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:[116]
+
+ "Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,
+  Mæotis undis pontico incumbens mari.
+  Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater
+  Tantum expiarit sceleris."
+
+But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from
+Æschylus,[117] 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 mediæval. The phrases used were
+already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:
+
+ "Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys
+  Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."[118]
+
+In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] 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. Marston did his best with it, in a play
+which may have been written before, though published after,
+MACBETH[120]:--
+
+ "Although the waves of all the 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 figure 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,"[121]
+
+which he compares with Seneca's
+
+ "Et ferrum et ignis sæpe medicinæ loco est.
+  Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"[122]
+
+--a passage that may very well be the original
+for the modern oracle about fire and iron--is
+really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates,
+that "Extreme remedies are proper for
+extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be
+more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to
+Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,[123] as translated
+by Florio:
+
+ "To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."
+
+Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's
+
+ "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"
+
+and the sentence of Hercules:
+
+                    "Nemo polluto queat
+  Animo mederi."[124]
+
+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 minister to."[125]
+
+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."[126]
+
+and Macbeth'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."[127]
+
+Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the
+versification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a
+lament had 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;"[128]
+
+and
+
+        "We but teach
+  Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
+  To plague the inventor."[129]
+
+--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 the tragedies of
+Seneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a
+deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold 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 industrious 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 Shakspere 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 IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as
+the essayist does[130] over Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what
+death and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself 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 difference 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
+intellectual influence undergone by Shakspere--the theory of Dr. Benno
+Tschischwitz, 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 writings
+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 IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio,
+"Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litteræ,
+syllabæ, dictio et oratio, partes propinquæ et remotæ," on which Octavio
+again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] 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 with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's
+parallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put
+themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy
+recalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] 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 indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr.
+Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:
+
+ "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"
+
+It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; 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 these passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which 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 annihilation 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."[133]
+
+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 reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on
+the 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
+endless 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,[134] Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence
+in the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of
+drunken practices.[135] 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
+affirmation:
+
+  "We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes,
+  or that Shakspere otherwise went any 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 acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the
+  writings of the Nolan."
+
+All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German
+Shakspere-criticism of the days before Rümelin. It is quite possible
+that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his
+friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have
+profoundly 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,[136] above cited from
+Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the
+verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the
+poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage in Bruno
+as this:--
+
+  "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 philosophers in a certain sense
+  painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the
+  painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and
+  philosophers love and reciprocally 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."[138]
+
+But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which 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 the famous passage in
+HENRY V.,[139] 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 REPUBLICA; yet rational criticism must decide
+with M. Stapfer[140] 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 knowledge concerning Shakspere,
+as well 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 important and the most
+potential for suggestion and provocation.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne 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 æsthetics
+or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who
+became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played
+in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little
+brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and
+refashioning; 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 rigorously 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 absolutely all the archæological facts as to
+theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts
+into vital touch with their æsthetic estimate of his product; they
+remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is
+true, protested at the close of his essay that he "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 psychological solidity in the ordinary
+presentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely
+leaps over the difficulty, into absolute irrelevance. Emerson was
+intellectually 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 conceive 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 picking 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 æsthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where
+Coleridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously 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 Stratford; son of a
+burgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world;
+married at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances, 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 turn for play-acting. To know him as he began
+we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. 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 unaided 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 TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader
+is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections
+that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy
+naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be
+Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable 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 evidence of having been
+refashioned at a later time."[142] These plays, then, with all their
+evidences 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 technical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary
+substance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the
+Warwickshire dialect,[143] are not even challenged, I believe, by the
+adherents 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 conscious, were
+the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE
+RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second
+of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and
+the 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 commercial 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--inexhaustible flow of
+words and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless
+thrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere 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
+contrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct
+themes immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative
+interest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as
+must preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of
+producing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of
+description without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of
+capacity for any real depth of passion. They were simply manufactured
+poems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the
+same time to secure the patronage of the Mæcenas 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
+succeeded 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
+evidence 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 his trade of actor the
+business not merely of playwright 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;[144] 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 accumulations 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
+disappeared. 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 working partner. We are thus dealing with a
+temperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not
+at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness,
+not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for
+acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute
+observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling
+of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by
+commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception
+of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate
+circumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, 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 tragedies and tragic comedies, there must concur
+two kinds of life-conditions with those already noted--the fresh
+conditions of deeply-moving experience and of deep intellectual
+stimulus. Without these, such a mind would no more arrive at the highest
+poetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking 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 Venus 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 actor-manager with a good share in the company'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 PLUTARCH, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his
+literary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject of
+JULIUS CÆSAR may have been suggested 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 bricklayer's apprentice,
+unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately
+all the while to his 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 enthusiastic 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 marriage, with its consequent
+family responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little
+more of youthful 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.[145] 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 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,[146]
+that Shakspere had ever been 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 theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of
+faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and
+impassion 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
+contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as
+then translated, and a psychological training of great though little
+recognised importance to the dramatist. It seems obvious that the
+practice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of
+manifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing 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 frequently
+idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness 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[148] 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 convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of
+a rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the 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 attention turned from the physical to the
+psychical. But 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 Falstaff and his group we have a
+roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature
+thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all,
+remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of
+which, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.
+For it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been
+popularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:[149] and what he
+did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty
+of imagination 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 LABOUR 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 that the greater reality of his earlier male historic 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 assimilated body of culture, the English translation by Sir
+Thomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we
+find Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries 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 ROMEO 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 fundamentally unhappy. But in JULIUS
+CÆSAR 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 of mutually destroying
+energies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration
+dogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching
+out the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the
+reader; to the master of the 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 organism
+and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond;
+culture that came without search, and could be undergone as
+spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge 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 humanity that could possibly have
+reached him; and he responded to the stimulus with all his energy of
+expression because 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 off 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
+æsthetic platitudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man.
+And if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but
+to reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced
+antiquity with greater accuracy 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 of classic reading might
+have constituted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are
+mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the
+expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive
+reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. 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--speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as
+spontaneously as he breathed--these historic data, which happen to be
+among the most perfectly 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 his own tongue to
+make him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth,
+charm, tenderness, 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 singularly 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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+It is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary
+statement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, 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 CÆSAR. 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. Portions 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 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-cultured 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 Rome 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 JULIUS CÆSAR and HAMLET, between CORIOLANUS
+and LEAR.
+
+For what was in its nett significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming
+thus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life
+and into Shakspere's ken? Simply 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 enduring 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 impressionist where Petrarch is a framer
+of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also
+is a framer of artificial compositions 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 modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is
+there too English to be significant for all Europe. The high figure of
+Dante is decisively mediæval: it is the central point in mediæval
+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 _bonne foi_
+is still sophisticated 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 living nerve. And there is no theme
+on which 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 vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at
+Shakspere'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 influence. A writer
+affects 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 Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in
+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 technical 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 essayist the more we shall
+realise its perennial fascination. The culture-content of Montaigne's
+book is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and
+reflective intelligence; it is the living quintessence of all Latin
+criticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh
+and pungent as the essayist's expression of his special individuality.
+For Montaigne stands out among all the 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,[150] 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 European intelligence, in the age
+when the modern languages first decisively asserted their birthright,
+learned his Latin as a living and not as a dead tongue, and knew Greek
+literature almost solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist who of
+all of his 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 regards 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
+éloge that the fashion in which the elder Montaigne 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 exercises were to
+turn bad Latin into good.[151] 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,[152] and, refusing to play the
+apprentice where he was accustomed to be master,[153] he declined 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 undulled 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 influence on Shakspere could be so potent as has been above
+asserted. Among those whom we know him to have acted upon in the highest
+degree--setting aside the disputed case of Bacon--are Pascal,
+Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of
+Pascal, despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy was contrary
+to Montaigne's, the influence went so far that the _Pensées_ 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
+Montaigne, 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 demolish 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 Montaigne's as a
+defence of theism, he could do no more for himself than repeat the
+process, disparaging reason in the very language of the essayist, and
+setting up in his turn his private predilection 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 exhausted convertite instead of a theist of the stately school of
+Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the
+_Pensées_ might never have been written: they represent to-day, for all
+vigilant readers, rather the painful struggles of a wounded intelligence
+to fight down the doubts it has caught from contact with other men's
+thought than any coherent or durable philosophic construction.
+
+It would be little more difficult to show the debt of the _Esprit des
+Lois_ to Montaigne's inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's
+avowal that "In most authors I see the man who writes: in Montaigne, the
+man who thinks."[154] That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in
+sociology as in philosophy. His whole activity is a seeking for causes;
+and in the very act of undertaking to "humble reason" he proceeds to
+instruct and re-edify it by endless corrective comparison of facts. To
+be sure, he departed so far from his normal _bonne foi_ as to affect to
+think there could be no certainties while parading 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
+ecclesiastical law he anticipates the age of tolerance; in discussing
+criminal law, the work of Beccaria; in discussing _à priori_ science,
+the protest 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
+  progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the
+  judgments, the opinions of men, if they have their
+  revolutions, 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 experience nous touchons à la
+  main," _i.e._, nous maintenons, nous prétendons: 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?"[155]
+
+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 for a new inductive system. And in the last essay of
+all he makes a campaign against bad laws, which unsays many of his
+previous sayings on the blessedness of custom.
+
+In tracing his influence elsewhere, it would be hard to point to an
+eminent French prose-writer who has not been affected by him.
+Sainte-Beuve finds[156] that La Bruyère "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 recognised 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 Rousseau 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 emphatic denunciations[157] of laws more criminal than the
+crimes they dealt with, he had a deeper inspiration still; in the essay
+on the training of children he had his starting-points for the
+argumentation of _Emile_; and in the whole unabashed 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 essayist 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 Villemain
+suggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his
+pollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La
+Rochefoucauld is thrown out[158] in the essay[159] _De l'utile et de
+l'honneste_; and the most modern-seeming currents of thought, as M.
+Stapfer 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 whose whole work is coloured by
+Montaigne's influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially developing one
+side of Emerson's gospel, may be said to have found it all where Emerson
+found it, in the Essay on Solitude.[160] 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 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. "I remember," he says, telling how
+in his 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 sincerely 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 for style; and no less
+constantly "found himself" in the self-revelation and analysis of the
+essays.
+
+After all these testimonies to Montaigne's seminal virtue, and after
+what we have seen of the special dependence of Shakspere's genius on
+culture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative, 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 CÆSAR to HAMLET as
+corresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the
+first play exhibits the concrete perception 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 this is the secret of the whole
+transformation 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 perception; 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
+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 circuitous 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 Shakspere, 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, weariness of
+spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable
+evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic
+spirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred
+suggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a
+self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness of the past.
+Hence an involution rather than an elucidation of the play. There can be
+no doubt that Shakspere, in heightening and deepening the theme, has
+obscured 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 praying murderer to
+heaven. There is no solution of these anomalies: the very state of
+Shakspere'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 o'er" in the sense of making it too intellectual for
+dramatic unity and strict dramatic success. Between these undramatic,
+brooding soliloquies which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate
+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 constituents, 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 framing of
+the play was the poet's perusal of Montaigne's essays. And it would be
+easy to overstate that thesis in such a way as to make it untrue.
+Indeed, M. Chasles has, to my thinking, so overstated it. Had I come to
+his main proposition before realising the infusion of Montaigne's ideas
+in HAMLET, I think I should have felt it to be as excessive in the
+opposite direction as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M.
+Chasles:[161]--
+
+  "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 Cæsar and Coriolanus suddenly taken
+  up by the man who has just (tout à l'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, CLEOPATRA, and JULIUS CÆSAR 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 CÆSAR dates, not from 1604 but from 1600 or 1601,
+being referred to in Weever's MIRROR OF MARTYRS, 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 be a straining of the evidence to ascribe its
+production, with that of CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, to the
+influence of Montaigne, when every one of these themes was sufficiently
+obtruded on the Elizabethan theatre by North's translation of Amyot's
+PLUTARCH. Any one who will compare CORIOLANUS with the translation in
+North will see that Shakspere has followed 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
+comparison throws a flood of light on Shakspere's mode of procedure; but
+it tells us nothing of his perusal 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 Shakspere beyond HAMLET, as we have seen, lies
+not in the Roman plays, but in MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
+
+There is a misconception involved, again, in M. Chasles' picture of an
+abrupt transition from Shakspere's fantastic youthful method to that of
+HAMLET and the Roman plays. He overlooks the intermediate stages
+represented by such plays as ROMEO AND JULIET, HENRY IV., KING JOHN, the
+MERCHANT OF VENICE, and AS YOU 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 Shakspere's mind is not that
+presented by CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, which with all their
+intense vitality represent rather his marvellous power of reproducing
+impressions than 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 conception 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 developed 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 then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's
+thought to that of Montaigne? 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-witholding of dramatic writers.
+Conceiving all situations, 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 personages, 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
+utterance found in his plays--even in the portions which analytical
+criticism proves to have come 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
+philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to
+realise how such a hopeless 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.
+
+No human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from HAMLET such a
+criticism of Montaigne 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 detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet'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 conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by
+stifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is outside of
+serious discussion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a
+pitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play;
+but to assume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his
+opinions is merely ridiculous. 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 denunciation. 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 withdrawal
+from public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with
+this. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public 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 anywhere else, and would then have married
+Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162]
+And to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the 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[163]: "Hamlet: a
+Drama-with-a-purpose (TENDENZDRAMA) opposing the sceptical and
+cosmopolitan 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; 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 reproduce portions of
+what he had read. We are not entitled to assume that these portions are
+selected as being in agreement with Shakspere's own views: we are here
+limited to saying 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!
+  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+  Than are dreamt of in our philosophy"--
+
+though this may be said to be a summary of the whole drift of
+Montaigne's essay,[164] THAT IT IS FOLLY TO REFER TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD TO
+OUR SUFFICIENCY; and though we are entitled to believe 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 contain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable of sacrificial
+salvation and sacramental forgiveness, we are entitled to infer from
+such a singular negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere rejected the
+Christian theory of things, at least that it formed no part of his
+habitual thinking. It was the special business of the Duke, playing in
+such a character, to speak to Claudio of sin and salvation, of
+forgiveness and absolution. Such a singular omission must at least imply
+disregard on the part of the dramatist. 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;[165] 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 negatively exhibiting his
+opinions.
+
+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 circumspection than has been shown by most of
+Montaigne's critics. The habit of calling him "sceptic," a habit
+initiated by the Catholic 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 purport of the APOLOGY OF
+RAYMOND SEBONDE appears 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,[166]
+besides repeatedly ignoring 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:[167] "His views, both of life and death,
+are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to
+believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously
+of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are
+such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His
+profession of fidelity 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, uncritical of their own creed, affected 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 NATURALIS of
+Sebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a
+feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to
+retaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some
+ill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the
+APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but
+with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour 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 Christian
+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 Marlowe, 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 carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the
+serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception
+of things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, 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?"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's,
+that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic
+serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he
+had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of
+tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE),
+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 comedies mostly from
+others and its tragedies from him. Further, we must assume that the
+gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the 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 overwhelming energy of the element of
+evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate
+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
+admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than
+Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of
+reacting 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,[172] 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 Iago 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 Montaigne's "sceptical"
+passage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral
+purpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in
+which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions,
+gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very
+influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The
+whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in
+stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the
+mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand,
+declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and
+though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious
+stars," and the Duke describe mankind as "servile to all the skiey
+influences," and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] 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 surmise an actual variation of opinion--the
+vivacious 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 steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit
+as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to assiduity, to constancy";[176]
+and the net result of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset 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 Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors,
+Shakspere applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the
+essayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master
+doctrine that we should live "according 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
+Cannibals,[177] 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 ourselves have
+  altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their
+  common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the
+  true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most
+  lively and vigorous;"[178]
+
+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 the APOLOGY,[179] after citing some as arguing 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 creatures," 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 showing, 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 have been reading or re-reading the 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."[180]
+
+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"--
+
+                          "I'll not put
+  The dibble in earth to set one slip of them."
+
+The mind which could thus easily pierce below the 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 VENUS 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 thought 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 evidence which seems
+to show that Shakspere sought zealously,[181] 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
+essay[182] OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG US. The Frenchman's hardy saying[183]
+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 Shakspere would have endorsed it, with his 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 deliberate 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
+question whether his extravagant idealisation and justification of Henry
+V.--which, though it gives so little pause to some of our English
+critics, entitled M. Guizot to call him a mere John 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 compliment,[184] was any more sincere about it
+than Ben Jonson, who would do as much while privately accepting the
+grossest scandal concerning her.[185] It is certainly a remarkable fact
+that Shakspere abstained from joining in the poetic out-cry over her
+death, incurring reproof by his silence.[186]
+
+However all that may have been, we find Shakspere, after his period of
+pessimism, viewing life in a spirit which could be expressed in terms of
+Montaigne's philosophy. He certainly shaped his latter years in
+accordance with the essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no other man in
+Shakspere's theatrical group deliberately turning his back, as he did,
+on the 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 without him. But
+that retirement, rounding with peace the career of manifold and intense
+experience, 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 nothing specially perplexing
+in the matter. Shakspere's personality was an uncommon combination; but
+was not that what should have been looked for? And where, after all, is
+the evidence that he was "not wise for himself"?[187] 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 marvellous in
+their content, were well worth the writing, where enters the "profanity"
+of having written them, or of having acted in them, "for 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:[188]
+
+ "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 Montaigne might
+have been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of
+the final retirement, the 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 Montaigne's
+very words[189]: "My design is to pass quietly, and not laboriously,
+what remains to me of life; 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 essay[190] on
+SOLITUDE:
+
+  "We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether
+  ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish
+  our true liberty, the principal retreat and solitariness,
+  wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long
+  enough for others, live we the remainder of all 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...."
+
+A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells
+of revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and
+exhorts 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, herein before cited.[192]
+
+In perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and
+contemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of
+Montaigne, 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 a pre-existing
+basis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we
+find him picturing, 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 life unto a dream, have
+  happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. When
+  we dream, our soul liveth, 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 doubt whether our thinking
+  and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some
+  kind of sleeping?"[193]
+
+  "Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination
+  will forge me commodities and afford 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
+  yourself, 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."[194]
+
+  " ... 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 impressions from falsehood,
+  by very frivolous appearances."[195]
+
+Again and 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 themselves
+very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be
+remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them 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 furniture 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 like 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
+  And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
+  Leave not a wrack behind. _We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made on_, and our little life
+  Is rounded with a sleep."
+
+In 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 congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained
+oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, 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 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[196]
+as the real "cannibal," 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:[197]
+
+  "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
+  goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I
+  diverted him to ambition."
+
+And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the
+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 Prospero's society; even the
+cursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] 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 sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide, philosopher, and
+friend," who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of
+his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] "I esteem all
+men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman,
+subordinating this national tie to the common and universal." Here, too,
+was not Montaigne the first of the moderns?
+
+  [1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of
+  Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.
+
+  [2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers,
+      I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
+      Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly
+      Almost as much as from Montaignie;
+      He has so modern and facile a vein,
+      Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.
+
+                                           --Act iii. sc. 2.
+
+  [3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.
+
+  [4] Article in _Journal des Débats_, 7 November, 1846,
+  reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizième Siècle_, ed. 1879, p.
+  136.
+
+  [5] _Montaigne_ (Série des _Grands Ecrivains Français_),
+  1895, p. 105.
+
+  [6] _Molière et Shakspere._
+
+  [7] _Shakspere and Classical Antiquity_, Eng. tr. p. 297.
+
+  [8] See this point discussed in the _Free Review_ of July,
+  1895: and compare the lately published essay of Mr. John
+  Corbin, on _The Elizabethan Hamlet_, (Elkin Matthews, 1895).
+
+  [9] _Hamlet_, Act V, scene 2.
+
+  [10] Book I, Essay 33.
+
+  [11] _Advice_ in Florio.
+
+  [12] B. III, Ch. 8. _Of the art of conferring._
+
+  [13] B. III, Ch. 12.
+
+  [14] Act II, Sc. 1, 144.
+
+  [15] Book I, ch. II, _end_.
+
+  [16] Book I, ch. 23.
+
+  [17] _Ibid._
+
+  [18] Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this
+  confused line. The original _Et male consultis pretium est:
+  prudentia fallax_--is sufficiently close to Shakspere's
+  phrase.
+
+  [19] "O heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason" (Act
+  I, Scene 2.)
+
+  [20] Act II, Sc. 2.
+
+  [21] Act IV, Scene 2.
+
+  [22] Act IV, Scene 4.
+
+  [23] See Furniss's Variorum edition of _Hamlet, in loc._
+
+  [24] B. I, Chap. 19; Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68.
+
+  [25] B. II, Chap. 4; Ed. cited, p. 382.
+
+  [26] B. II, Chap. 12; _Ibid_, p. 459.
+
+  [27] B. II, Chap. 33.
+
+  [28] _Shakespere and Montaigne_, 1884, p. 88.
+
+  [29] B. III, Chap. 12.
+
+  [30] Act III, Scene 3.
+
+  [31] B. I, ch. 22.
+
+  [32] Act II, Scene 2.
+
+  [33] _Othello_, Act II, Scene 3.
+
+  [34] B. I, ch. 40, "That the taste of goods or evils doth
+  greatly depend on the opinion we have of them."
+
+  [35] B. I, ch. 50.
+
+  [36] B. I, ch. 22.
+
+  [37] B. III, ch. 10.
+
+  [38] Act V, Scene 4.
+
+  [39] 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 observed when writing 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.
+
+  [40] Act I, Scene 4.
+
+  [41] B. II, Chap. 33.
+
+  [42] It is further relevant to note that in the essay _Of
+  Drunkenness_ (ii. 2) Montaigne observes that "drunkenness
+  amongst others appeareth to me a gross and brutish vice,"
+  that "the worst estate of man is where he loseth the
+  knowledge and government of himself," and that "the grossest
+  and rudest nation that liveth amongst us at this day, is
+  only that which keepeth it in credit." The reference is to
+  Germany: but Shakspere in _Othello_ (Act II, Sc. 3) makes
+  Iago 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 course
+  there is nothing peculiar in such a coincidence.
+
+  [43] B. III, Chap. 7.
+
+  [44] B. III, Chap. 4.
+
+  [45] B. III, Chap. 10.
+
+  [46] B. III, Chap. 2.
+
+  [47] B. III, Chap. 13.
+
+  [48] B. I, Chap. 38.
+
+  [49] B. III, Chap. 4.
+
+  [50] B. I, Chap. 40.
+
+  [51] B. II, Chap. 8.
+
+  [52] B. II, Chap. 18.
+
+  [53] _De Officus_ i, 4: _cf._ 30.
+
+  [54] 1534, 1558, 1583, 1600. See also the compilation
+  entitled _A Treatise of Morall Philosophie_ 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.
+
+  [55] Mr. Feis makes this attribution.
+
+  [56] B. II, Chap. 1.
+
+  [57] This may fairly be argued, perhaps, 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 service of the mind and soul
+    Grows wide withal,"
+
+  and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the
+  _Apology_
+
+   "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 of the (then
+  familiar) verb "wax" in both passages could suggest
+  imitation in the case of such a well-worn commonplace.
+
+  [58] See some cited at the close of this essay in another
+  connection.
+
+  [59] B. II, Chap. 12.
+
+  [60] Act IV, Scene 3.
+
+  [61] "_Le monde est un branloire perenne_" (Book III, Essay
+  2). Florio translates that particular sentence: "The world
+  runs all on wheels" a bad rendering.
+
+  [62] B. III, Chap. 3.
+
+  [63] B. II, Chap. 17.
+
+  [64] 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. [65] _Varia
+  Historia_, XII, 23.
+
+  [66] The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in
+  Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of
+  Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii. § 1) gives it further
+  currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.
+
+  [67] B. II, Chap. 5.
+
+  [68] B. II, Chap. 3.
+
+  [69] Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.
+
+  [70] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, 1893,
+  p. 80-5.
+
+  [71] Actus III, 865-866.
+
+  [72] Actus IV, 1526-7.
+
+  [73] This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in
+  Doering's edition.
+
+  [74] See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, _in loc._
+
+  [75] Yet again, in Marston's _Insatiate Countess_, the
+  commentators have noticed the same sentiment.
+
+  "Death, From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path."
+
+  It was in fact a poetic commonplace.
+
+  [76] Act 5, Scene 6.
+
+  [77] Act v, sc. 1.
+
+  [78] I, 22.
+
+  [79] 2 _H. IV_, iv. 3
+
+  [80] ii, 2
+
+  [81] ii, 10.
+
+  [82] So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a
+  desertion of one's post without the deity's permission is
+  first found, in English literature, in Sidney, and he would
+  find it in Montaigne's essay on the _Custom of the Isle of
+  Cea_ (edit. Firmin-Didot, i. 367).
+
+  [83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of
+  similar drift in the anonymous play of _Edward III._ ("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
+  elaboration constitutes a special resemblance between the
+  speech in Shakspere and the passages in Montaigne
+
+  [84] _APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE._
+
+  [85] ii, 6, _Of Exercise or Practice_.
+
+  [86] _Apology._
+
+  [87] _Ibid._, near end.
+
+  [88] _On Isis and Osiris_, c. 26.
+
+  [89] Canto v.
+
+  [90] Canto xxxii.
+
+  [91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends
+  that the mediæval 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 Purgatory_, 1844, p. 18.
+
+  [92] _Paradise Lost_, B. II, 587-603.
+
+  [93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.
+
+  [94] _Ibid._ p. 621.
+
+  [95] Act iv, sc. 5.
+
+  [96] iii, 3.
+
+  [97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. _Cf._ vi, 2, 3.
+
+  [98] B. v, cc. 22-25.
+
+  [99] ii, 32.
+
+  [100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his _Essays on
+  Shakspere_ (Eng. 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
+  Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the
+  Earl of Stirling's _Darius_ must have been written
+  immediately after the publication of that work. The argument
+  is (1) that Shakspere must have seen _Darius_ when it came
+  out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or
+  never.
+
+  [101] Act v, sc. 3.
+
+  [102] i, 31.
+
+  [103] ii, 13.
+
+  [104] Act i, sc. 2.
+
+  [105] Act iv, sc. 3.
+
+  [106] i, 2.
+
+  [107] _Hippolytus_, 615 (607).
+
+  [108] See the Prologue to _Every Man in His Humour_, first
+  ed., preserved by Gifford.
+
+  [109] The 29th.
+
+  [110] See his _Characteristics of English Poets_, 2nd. ed.
+  p. 222.
+
+  [111] The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove
+  Shakspere classically learned is that made in the _Critital
+  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 congenially criticised. To a reader of
+  to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax
+  are peculiarly unconvincing.
+
+  [112] 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 pertinence of his
+  remarks, proceeds to say (_Shakspere and Classical
+  Antiquity_, Eng. trans, p. 83) 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 unjust as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has
+  misunderstood Farmer's tone, which is one of banter against,
+  not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly ascribed
+  to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. Towards
+  Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative--and in the
+  preface to the second edition of his essay he wrote:
+  "Shakspere wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him
+  above all other men."
+
+  [113] Ch. iv, of vol. cited.
+
+  [114] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, pp.
+  66-67.
+
+  [115] _Hercules Furens_, ad fin. (1324-1329.).
+
+  [116] _Hippolytus_, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)
+
+  [117] _Choephori_, 63-65.
+
+  [118] Carm. lxxxviii, _In Gellium_. See the note in
+  Doering's edition.
+
+  [119] _Gerusalemme_, xviii, 8.
+
+  [120] _The Insatiate Countess_, published in 1613.
+
+  [121] _Hamlet_, Act iv, sc. 3.
+
+  [122] _Agamemnon_, 152-153.
+
+  [123] ii, 3 (near beginning.)
+
+  [124] _Hercules Furens_, Act. V. 1261-2.
+
+  [125] Act iv, Sc. 3.
+
+  [126] _Hercules Furens_, 1258-61.
+
+  [127] _Macbeth_, Act v, Sc. 2.
+
+  [128] _Ibid._ Act iv, Sc. 2.
+
+  [129] _Ibid._ Act i, sc. 7.
+
+  [130] B. ii, ch. 10.
+
+  [131] Tschischwitz, _Shakspere-Forschungen_, i. 1868, S. 52.
+
+  [132] "Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere
+  Brunos Komodie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie
+  enthält so masslose Obscönitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen
+  stärksten Stellen daneben fast jungfräulich erscheint" (Work
+  cited, S. 52).
+
+  [133] Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's
+  translation, so far as syntax permits.
+
+  [134] Act i, Sc. 4.
+
+  [135] Work cited, Sc. 59.
+
+  [136] See Frith's _Life of Giordano Bruno_, 1889, pp.
+  121-128.
+
+  [137] Act v. Sc. 1.
+
+  [138] Cited by Noack, art. _Bruno_, in
+  _Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon_.
+
+  [139] Act i, Sc. 2.
+
+  [140] Work cited, p. 90.
+
+  [141] 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 necessary
+  steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President
+  of the New York Shakspere Society, 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 ourselves, whose moods and veins
+  were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings,
+  employments, 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 conception of Shakspere as
+  an organism in an environment was first closely approached
+  in the present century by French critics, as Guizot 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 German Rümelin (_Shakspere
+  Studien_); and that the structural anomalies of _Hamlet_ as
+  an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix
+  (_Die Shakspereomanie_) these two critics thus making amends
+  for much vain discussion of _Hamlet_ by their countrymen
+  before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the
+  man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America.
+  The admirable 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.
+
+  [142] _Life of Shakspere_, 1886, p. 128.
+
+  [143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's _Shakspere's Venus and
+  Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect_.
+
+  [144] Professor Dowden notes in his _Shakspere Primer_ (p.
+  12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe,
+  the theatrical lessee, vary from £4 to £8, and not till
+  later did it rise as high as £20 for a play by a popular
+  dramatist.
+
+  [145] Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;--
+
+    But thou art all my art, and dost advance
+    As high as learning my rude ignorance.
+
+  [146] _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 29, 128.
+
+  [147] See it in his _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 120-124. Mr.
+  Fleay's theory, though perhaps the best "documented" of all,
+  has received little attention in comparison with Mr.
+  Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.
+
+  [148] Only in Chaucer (_e.g._, _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.
+
+  [149] See Fleay's _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 130-1.
+
+  [150] Cp. the _Essays_, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol.
+  ii, pp. 40, 231.)
+
+  [151] _Essays_, i, 25; _cf._ i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i,
+  pp. 304, 429.)
+
+  [152] ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)
+
+  [153] ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)
+
+  [154] _Pensées Diverses._ Less satisfying is the further
+  _pensée_ in the same collection:--"Les quatre grand poëtes,
+  Platon, _Malebranche_, _Shaftesbury_, Montaigne."
+
+  [155] Edition cited, i, 622-623.
+
+  [156] _Port Royal_, 4ième édit., ii. 400, _note_.
+
+  [157] B. iii, Chap. 13.
+
+  [158] "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 Rochefoucauld, _Pensée_ 104.)
+
+  [159] B. iii, Chap. 1.
+
+  [160] i, Chap. 38.
+
+  [161] _L'Angleterre au Seizième Siècle_, p. 133.
+
+  [162] This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms
+  even of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Dowden.
+
+  [163] _Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's_ [_sic_
+  throughout book] _gegen die skeptische und cosmopolitische
+  Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne_, von G. F.
+  Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.
+
+  [164] B. i, Chap. 26.
+
+  [165] It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in
+  Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_; and there was probably
+  an intermediate drama.
+
+  [166] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.
+
+  [167] _Oxford Essays_, p. 279. Sterling, from his
+  Christian-Carlylese point of view, declared of Montaigne
+  that "All that we find in him of Christianity would be
+  suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral
+  beings" (_London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p.
+  340.)
+
+  [168] Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he
+  added many safeguarding clauses in the later editions.
+
+  [169] See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the
+  _Cornhill Magazine_, August, 1880.
+
+  [170] Art. cited, _end_.
+
+  [171] Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to _Leopold_
+  Shakspere p. lxxxvii.
+
+  [172] Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion
+  goes no further.
+
+  [173] See the passage cited above in section iii in
+  connection with _Measure for Measure_.
+
+  [174] Act iv, Sc. 2.
+
+  [175] Act i, Sc. 2.
+
+  [176] B. i, Chap. 20.
+
+  [177] B. i, Chap. 30.
+
+  [178] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.
+
+  [179] _Ibid._, pp. 477-478.
+
+  [180] _Here_, it may be said, there is a trace of the
+  influence of Bruno's philosophy; 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.
+
+  [181] Fleay's _Life_, pp. 138, &c.
+
+  [182] B. i, Chap. 42.
+
+  [183] B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i. 501.)
+
+  [184] _Midsummer Nights Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.
+
+  [185] See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden
+
+  [186] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of
+  Shakspere_, 5th ed., p. 175.
+
+  [187] I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless
+  difficulty on this head. In his _Shakspere in Fact and
+  Criticism_, 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 single 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 published
+  as _his_ the existing mass, so largely made up of other
+  men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after
+  his death, being simply bent on making money.
+
+  [188] Sonnet 110. Compare the next.
+
+  [189] B. ii, Chap. 10.
+
+  [190] B. i, Chap. 38.
+
+  [191] 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
+  first 126 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take
+  those remaining as of later date.
+
+  [192] 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 subjection and
+  constraint." "No man did ever prepare himself to quit the
+  world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I
+  shall do. The deadest deaths are the best"
+
+  [193] ii, 12.
+
+  [194] iii, 11.
+
+  [195] iii, 4.
+
+  [196] 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."
+
+  [197] iii, 4.
+
+  [198] Act ii, Sc. 2.
+
+  [199] iii, 9.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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+_Weekly Times and Echo_, MAY 30, 1897:
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+its main purpose. That is to show that the Celtic race has been
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+incapable of self-government; and to prove, by inference, its fitness
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+on the assumption of permanent distinctions among races; and therefore
+Mr. Robertson applies himself, with a large measure of success, to the
+task of showing that the theory of innate persistent qualities marking
+off one people from another has no ethnological justification.... Mr.
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+
+_The Sun_, MARCH 31, 1897:
+
+The author of "Pseudo-Philosophy" handles his weapons well, and seems to
+us in many instances to occupy positions which, with our present human
+intelligence, are almost unassailable. On the other hand, of course,
+champions of orthodoxy, as a rule, frankly admit that some of their
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+may have been opposed to social progress, as he says. To contend that
+the same charge will stand against the latter is only to ignore the
+fact, if not indeed the law, that the great social awakenings have
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+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Montaigne and Shakspere, by John M. Robertson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Montaigne and Shakspere
+
+Author: John M. Robertson
+
+Release Date: May 20, 2008 [EBook #25535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<table width="60%" border="1" summary="Transcriber's note">
+<tr>
+<td>Transcribers note: Old spellings of the
+words have been retained as well as the
+doubtful use of colons instead of
+semicolons in many places for the sake
+of fidelity to the original text.</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<h1>&nbsp;</h1>
+<h1>MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE</h1>
+
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h3>JOHN M. ROBERTSON</h3>
+
+<h5>LONDON<br />
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED<br />
+16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C.<br />
+1897</h5>
+
+<h5>THE UNIVERSITY PRESS</h5>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+<hr class="hr" />
+<h4>MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE</h4>
+
+
+<p>For a good many years past the anatomic
+study of Shakspere, of which a revival seems
+now on foot, has been somewhat 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 iconoclasts
+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 psychology
+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 history
+was verily being made. Our sensations, it
+seemed, might be as those of our elders had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>
+been over Mr. Collier's emendated folio, and the
+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."<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">1</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 interesting
+of all problems concerning Shakspere.
+Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi&mdash;a
+host of peculiarly modern problem-makers
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>have been exorcising 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&mdash;the
+subject, namely, of the influence which the plays
+show their author to have undergone from the
+Essays of Montaigne.</p>
+
+<p>As to the bare fact of the influence, there can
+be little question. That Shakspere in one
+scene in the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span> versifies a passage from the
+prose of Florio's translation of Montaigne's
+chapter <span class="smcap">Of the Cannibals</span> has been recognised
+by all the commentators since Capell (1767), who
+detected the transcript from a reading of the
+French only, not having compared the translation.
+The first thought of students was to
+connect the passage with Ben Johnson's allusion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+in <span class="smcap">Volpone</span><a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">2</a> to frequent "stealings from Montaigne"
+by contemporary writers; and though
+<span class="smcap">Volpone</span> dates from 1605, and the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span> 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 question.
+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 celebrated
+soliloquy in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> 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 nearly a Montaigne,
+lifted to a higher eminence, and agitated by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>more striking circumstances and a severer
+destiny, and altogether a somewhat more passionate
+structure of man."<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">3</a> In 1846, again,
+Philar&egrave;te Chasles, an acute and original critic,
+citing the passage in the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span>, went on to
+declare that "once on the track of the studies
+and tastes of Shakspere, we find Montaigne at
+every corner, in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, in <span class="smcap">Othello</span>, in <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span>.
+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
+Montaigne."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">4</a> 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 propositions
+of M. Chasles, so far as I am aware,
+have never been supported by evidence. Nevertheless,
+the general fact of a frequent reproduction
+or manipulation of Montaigne's ideas in
+some of Shakspere's later plays has, I think,
+since been established.</p>
+
+<p>Twelve years ago I incidentally cited, in an
+essay on the composition of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, some dozen
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>of the Essays of Montaigne from which Shakspere
+had apparently received suggestions, and
+instanced one or two cases in which actual peculiarities
+of phrase in Florio's translation of the
+Essays are adopted by him, in addition to a peculiar
+coincidence which has been pointed out by
+Mr. Jacob Feis in his work entitled <span class="smcap">Shakspere
+and Montaigne</span>; and since then the late Mr.
+Henry Morley, in his edition of the Florio translation,
+has pointed to a still more remarkable
+coincidence of phrase, in a passage of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>
+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 development.
+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 Shakspere
+as owing much to foreign influences, or
+as a case of intelligible mental growth, or else
+the whole critical problem which Shakspere
+represents&mdash;and he may be regarded as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>
+greatest of critical problems&mdash;comes within the
+general disregard for serious criticism, noticeable
+among us of late years. And the 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 Montaigne.
+Not only does he undertake to show in
+dead earnest what Sterling had vaguely suggested
+as conceivable, that Shakspere meant
+Hamlet to represent Montaigne, but he strenuously
+argues that the poet framed the play in
+order to discredit Montaigne's opinions&mdash;a thesis
+which almost makes the Bacon theory specious
+by comparison. Naturally it has made no converts,
+even in Germany, where, as it happens, it
+had been anticipated.</p>
+
+<p>In France, however, the neglect of the special
+problem of Montaigne's influence on Shakspere
+is less easily to be explained, seeing how much
+intelligent study has been given of late by
+French critics to both Shakspere and Montaigne.
+The influence is recognised; but here
+again it is only cursorily traced. The latest
+study of Montaigne is that of M. Paul Stapfer,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>
+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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Montaigne is perhaps too purely French to have
+exercised much influence abroad. Nevertheless his
+influence on England is not to be disdained. Shakspere
+appreciated him (<i>le go&ucirc;tait</i>); he has inserted in
+the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span> a passage of the chapter <span class="smcap">Des Cannibales</span>;
+and the strong expressions of the <span class="smcap">Essays</span> on man, the
+inconstant, irresolute being, contrary to himself, marvellously
+vain, various and changeful, were perhaps not
+unconnected with (<i>peut &ecirc;tre pas &eacute;trang&egrave;res &agrave;</i>) the conception
+of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>. The author of the scene of the grave-diggers
+must have felt the savour and retained the impression
+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 translation
+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."<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">5</a></p></div>
+
+<p>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 work<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">6</a> com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>pared
+Shakspere with a French classic
+critically enough, 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 supposition,
+quite unjustified by the few traces in his
+writings of his having read the Essays."<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">7</a> But
+that verdict was passed without due scrutiny.
+The influence of Montaigne on Shakspere was
+both wider and deeper than M. Stapfer has suggested;
+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 ignorantly
+adored is a mere dubious mystery; Shaks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>pere
+followed up and comprehended, step by
+step, albeit never wholly revealed, becomes more
+remarkable, more profoundly interesting, as he
+becomes more intelligible. We are embarked,
+not on a quest for plagiarisms, but on a study of
+the growth of a wonderful mind. And in the
+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 sociological
+truth that such contacts of cultures are
+the very life of civilisation.
+<br /><br /></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The first requirement in the study, obviously,
+is an exact statement of the coincidences of
+phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne.
+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 gainsaying
+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 number
+of coincidences. M. Chasles, while avowing
+that "the comparison of texts is indispensable&mdash;we
+must undergo this fatigue in order to know
+to what extent Shakspere, between 1603 and
+1615, became familiar with Montaigne"&mdash;strangely
+enough made no comparison of texts
+whatever beyond reproducing the familiar paraphrase
+in the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span>, from the essay <span class="smcap">Of
+Cannibals</span>; and left absolutely unsupported his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
+assertion as to <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, <span class="smcap">Othello</span>, and <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span>.
+It is necessary to produce proofs, and to
+look narrowly to dates. Florio's translation,
+though licensed in 1601, was not published till
+1603, the year of the piratical publication of the
+First Quarto of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, 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 doubt was, we cannot suppose him to
+have at this stage completed his refashioning
+of the older play, which is undoubtedly the substratum
+of his.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">8</a> We must therefore keep
+closely in view the divergencies between this
+text and that of the Second Quarto, printed in
+1604, in which the transmuting touch of Shakspere
+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 Montaigne
+in the original. But as his possession of
+the translation is made certain by the preserva<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>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 dispute,
+it is on Florio's translation that we must
+proceed.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>I. In order to keep all the evidence in view,
+we may first of all collate once more the passage
+in the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span> with that in the Essays which it
+unquestionably follows. In Florio's translation,
+Montaigne's words run:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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?"</p></div>
+
+<p>Compare the speech in which the kind old
+Gonzalo seeks to divert the troubled mind of the
+shipwrecked King Alonso:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"I' the commonwealth I would by contraries</span>
+<span class="i0">Execute all things: for no kind of traffic</span>
+<span class="i0">Would I admit; no name of magistrate;</span>
+<span class="i0">Letters should not be known; no use of service,</span>
+<span class="i0">Of riches, or of poverty; no contracts,</span>
+<span class="i0">Succession; bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none:</span>
+<span class="i0">No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:</span>
+<span class="i0">No occupation, all men idle, all;</span>
+<span class="i0">And women too: but innocent and pure:</span>
+<span class="i0">No sovereignty...."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>There can be no dispute as to the direct transcription
+here, where the dramatist is but incidentally
+playing with Montaigne's idea, proceeding
+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.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>II. Let us take first the more decisive coincidences
+of phrase. Correspondences of thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
+which in themselves do not establish their 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,</span>
+<span class="i0">Rough-hew them how we will."<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">9</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>I pointed out in 1885 that this expression, which
+does not occur in the First Quarto <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, corresponds
+very closely with the theme of Montaigne's
+essay, <span class="smcap">THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES MET
+WITHALL IN PURSUIT OF REASON</span>,<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">10</a> in which occurs
+the phrase, "Fortune has more judgment<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">11</a> than
+we," a translation from Menander. But Professor
+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 identification.
+Reading 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>sage
+in the Essays:&mdash;<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">12</a> "My consultation 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 coincidence
+than is presented in the passage cited by
+Mr. Feis from the essay <span class="smcap">Of Physiognomy</span>:&mdash;<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">13</a>
+"Therefore do our designs so often miscarry....
+The heavens are angry, and
+I may say envious of the extension and
+large privilege we ascribe to human wisdom,
+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 <span class="smcap">Agamemnon</span>,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">14</a> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i16">"Rashly,</span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;And praised be rashness for it&mdash;Let us know</span>
+<span class="i0">Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well</span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>
+<span class="i0">When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us</span>
+<span class="i0">There's a divinity" etc.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Compare the following extracts from Florio's
+translation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The <i>D&aelig;mon</i> of Socrates were peradventure a certain
+inpulsion or will which without the advice of his discourse
+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 himself 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."<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">15</a></p>
+
+<p>"Even in our counsels and deliberations, some chance
+or good luck must needs be joined to them; for whatsoever
+our wisdom can effect is no great matter."<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">16</a></p>
+
+<p>"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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>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."<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">17</a> etc.</p></div>
+
+<p>Compare finally Florio's translation of the
+lines of Manilius cited by Montaigne at the end
+of the 47th Essay of the First Book:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"'Tis best for ill-advis'd, wisdom may fail,<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">18</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Fortune proves not the cause that should prevail,</span>
+<span class="i0">But here and there without respect doth sail:</span>
+<span class="i0">A higher power forsooth us overdraws,</span>
+<span class="i0">And mortal states guides with immortal laws."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Our wills, our fates do so contrary run</span>
+<span class="i0">That our devices still are overthrown;</span>
+<span class="i0">Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Such a passage, reiterating a familiar commonplace,
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>found justified by the evidence, and the idea in
+that passage being exactly coincident with Montaigne's,
+while the above lines are only partially
+parallel in meaning, we are forced to admit that
+Shakspere may have been influenced by Montaigne
+even where a partial precedent might be
+found in his own or other English work.</p>
+
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>III. The phrase "discourse of reason," which
+is spoken by Hamlet in his first soliloquy,<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">19</a> and
+which first appears in the Second Quarto, is not
+used by Shakspere in any play before <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>;
+and he uses it again in <span class="smcap">Troilus and Cressida</span>;<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">20</a>
+while "discourse of thought" appears in
+<span class="smcap">Othello</span>;<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">21</a> and "discourse," in the sense of
+reasoning faculty, is used in Hamlet's last soliloquy.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">22</a>
+In English literature this use of the
+word seems to be special in Shakspere's period,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">23</a>
+and it has been noted by an admirer as a finely
+Shaksperean expression. But the expression
+"discourse of reason" occurs at least four times
+in Montaigne's Essays, and in Florio's translation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span>
+of them: in the essay<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">24</a> <span class="smcap">That to philosophise
+is to learn how to die</span>; again at the close
+of the essay<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">25</a> <i>A demain les affaires</i>; again in the
+first paragraph of the <span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond
+Sebonde</span><a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">26</a>; and yet again in the chapter on <span class="smcap">The
+History of Spurina</span>;<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">27</a> and though it seems to
+be 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 <i>discours</i> is a hundred times used
+singly by Montaigne, as by Shakspere in the
+phrase "of such large discourse," for the process
+of ratiocination.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>IV. Then again there is the clue of Skakspere's
+use of the word "consummation" in the
+revised form of the "To be" soliloquy. This,
+as Mr. Feis pointed out,<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">28</a> is the word used by
+Florio as a rendering of <i>an&eacute;antissement</i> in the
+speech of Socrates as given by Montaigne in the
+essay<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">29</a> <span class="smcap">Of Physiognomy</span>. Shakspere makes
+Hamlet speak of annihilation as "a consumma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>tion
+devoutly to be wished." Florio has: "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.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond these, I have not noted any correspondences
+of phrase so precise as to prove
+reminiscence beyond possibility of dispute; but
+it is not difficult to trace striking correspondences
+which, though falling short of explicit reproduction,
+inevitably suggest a relation; and
+these it now behoves us to consider. The remarkable
+thing is, as regards <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, that they
+almost all occur in passages not present in the
+First Quarto.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>V. When we compare part of the speech of
+Rosencrantz on sedition<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">30</a> with a passage in Montaigne's
+essay, <span class="smcap">Of Custom</span>,<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">31</a> we find a somewhat
+close coincidence. In the play Rosencrantz
+says:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span></p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"The cease of Majesty,</span>
+<span class="i_0">Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw</span>
+<span class="i_0">What's near with it: it is a massy wheel</span>
+<span class="i_0">Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,</span>
+<span class="i_0">To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things</span>
+<span class="i_0">Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls,</span>
+<span class="i_0">Each small annexment, petty consequence,</span>
+<span class="i_0">Attends the boisterous ruin."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Florio has:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Those who attempt to shake an Estate are commonly
+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 like injuries. Royal <i>majesty</i>
+doth more hardly fall from the top to the middle, than
+it tumbleth down from the middle to the bottom."</p></div>
+
+<p>The verbal correspondence here is only less
+decisive&mdash;as regards the use of the word
+"majesty"&mdash;than in the passages collated by
+Mr. Morley; while the thought corresponds as
+closely.</p>
+
+<p>VI. The speech of Hamlet,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">32</a> "There is
+nothing either good or bad but thinking makes
+it so"; and Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are
+thus or thus,"<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">33</a> are expressions of a favourite
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>thesis of Montaigne's, to which he devotes an
+entire essay.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">34</a> The Shaksperean phrases echo
+closely such sentences as:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 which
+we term evil is not so of itself."... "Every man
+is either well or ill according as he finds himself."</p></div>
+
+<p>And in the essay<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">35</a> <span class="smcap">Of Democritus and Heraclitus</span>
+there is another close parallel:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Therefore let us take no more excuses from external
+qualities of things. To us it belongeth to give ourselves
+account of it. Our good and our evil hath no
+dependency but from ourselves."</p></div>
+
+<p>VII. Hamlet's apostrophe to his mother on
+the power of custom&mdash;a passage which, like the
+others above cited, first appears in the Second
+Quarto&mdash;is similarly an echo of a favourite
+proposition of Montaigne, who devotes to it the
+essay<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">36</a> <span class="smcap">Of Custom, and not to change readily a
+received law</span>. In that there occur the typical
+passages:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Custom doth so blear us that we cannot distinguish
+the usage of things.... Certes, chastity is an ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>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 precepts."
+"The laws of conscience, which we say are
+born of nature, are born of custom."</p></div>
+
+<p>Again, in the essay <span class="smcap">Of Controlling one's Will</span><a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">37</a>
+we have: "Custom is a second nature, and not
+less potent."</p>
+
+<p>Hamlet's words are:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat</span>
+<span class="i0">Of habits devil, is angel yet in this</span>
+<span class="i0">That to the use of actions fair and good</span>
+<span class="i0">He likewise gives a frock or livery</span>
+<span class="i0">That aptly is put on....</span>
+<span class="i0">For use can almost change the stamp of nature."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>No doubt the idea is a classic commonplace; and
+in the early <span class="smcap">Two Gentlemen of Verona</span><a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">38</a> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span></p>
+<p>VIII. A less close but still a noteworthy resemblance
+is that between the passage in which
+Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
+the veering of his mood from joy in things
+to disgust with them, and the paragraph in the
+<span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond Sebonde</span> in which Montaigne
+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 altering its aim;
+but the language is curiously similar. Hamlet
+says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"It goes so heavily with my disposition that this
+goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory:
+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 like 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Montaigne, as translated by Florio, has:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>heaven's vaults, that the eternal light of these lamps
+so fiercely rolling over his head ... were established
+... 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
+Emperor 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 inclinations,
+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 disdainfullest. 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>The passage in brackets is left here in its place,
+not as suggesting anything in Hamlet's speech,
+but as paralleling a line in <span class="smcap">Measure for
+Measure</span>, 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 contrasted
+ideas of human greatness and smallness,
+and of the splendour of the midnight firmament.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">39</a></p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
+IX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to
+Horatio on the point of the national vice of
+drunkenness,<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">40</a> 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 essay<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">41</a> on <span class="smcap">The
+History of Spurina</span>, which discusses at great
+length a matter of special interest to Shakspere&mdash;the
+character of Julius C&aelig;sar. In the course
+of the examination Montaigne takes trouble to
+show that Cato's use of the epithet "drunkard"
+to C&aelig;sar could not have been meant literally;
+that the same Cato admitted C&aelig;sar's sobriety in
+the matter of drinking. It is after making light
+of C&aelig;sar's faults in other matters of personal
+conduct that the essayist comes to this decision:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy
+qualities, were altered, smothered, and eclipsed by this
+furious passion of ambition.... To conclude, this
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span>only vice (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him
+the fairest natural and richest ingenuity that ever was,
+and hath made his memory abominable to all honest
+minds."</p></div>
+
+<p>Compare the exquisitely high-strung lines, so
+congruous in their excited rapidity with Hamlet's
+intensity of expectation, which follow on
+his notable outburst on the subject of drunkenness:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"So oft it chances in particular men,</span>
+<span class="i0">That for some vicious mode of nature in them,</span>
+<span class="i0">As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,</span>
+<span class="i0">Since nature cannot choose its origin),</span>
+<span class="i0">By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,</span>
+<span class="i0">Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason;</span>
+<span class="i0">Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens</span>
+<span class="i0">The form of plausive manners; that these men,&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect;</span>
+<span class="i0">Being nature's livery, or fortune's star,&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,</span>
+<span class="i0">As infinite as man may undergo)</span>
+<span class="i0">Shall in the general censure take corruption</span>
+<span class="i0">From that particular fault...."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Even the idea that "nature cannot choose its
+origin" is suggested by the context in Montaigne.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">42</a>
+Shakspere's estimate of C&aelig;sar, of
+course, diverged from that of the essay.</p>
+
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>X. I find a certain singularity of coincidence
+between the words of King Claudius on kingship:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,</span>
+<span class="i0">That treason can but peep to what it would,</span>
+<span class="i0">Acts little of his will,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>and a passage in the essay<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">43</a> <span class="smcap">Of the Incommodity
+of Greatness</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>The working out of the metaphor here gives at
+once to Shakspere's terms "divinity" and "can
+but 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 Montaigne.
+Here, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>however, it has to be noted that
+in the First Quarto we have the lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"There's such divinity doth wall a king</span>
+<span class="i0">That treason dares not look on."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>And if Shakspere had not seen or heard the
+passage in Montaigne before the publication of
+Florio's folio&mdash;which, however, he may very well
+have done&mdash;the theory of reminiscence here cannot
+stand.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XI. In Hamlet's soliloquy on the passage of
+the army of Fortinbras&mdash;one of the many passages
+added in the Second Quarto&mdash;there is a
+strong general resemblance to a passage in the
+essay <span class="smcap">Of Diversion</span>.<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">44</a> Hamlet first remarks to
+the Captain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats</span>
+<span class="i0">Will not debate the question of this straw:</span>
+<span class="i0">This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace;"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>and afterwards soliloquises:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">"Examples gross as earth exhort me:</span>
+<span class="i0">Witness, this army of such mass and charge,</span>
+<span class="i0">Led by a delicate and tender prince,</span>
+<span class="i0">Whose spirit, by divine ambition puff'd,</span>
+<span class="i0">Makes mouths at the invisible event;</span>
+<span class="i0">Exposing what is mortal and unsure</span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>
+<span class="i0">To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,</span>
+<span class="i0">Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great,</span>
+<span class="i0">Is not to stir without great argument,</span>
+<span class="i0">But greatly to find quarrel in a straw.</span>
+<span class="i0">When honour is at stake....</span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7_5">....to my shame I see</span>
+<span class="i0">The imminent death of twenty thousand men,</span>
+<span class="i0">That for a fantasy and trick of fame,</span>
+<span class="i0">Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot</span>
+<span class="i0">Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause...."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Montaigne has the same general idea in the
+essay <span class="smcap">Of Diversion</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 pretend
+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 trumpets, 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, without
+substance, overswayeth it up and down."</p></div>
+
+<p>The thought recurs in the essay, <span class="smcap">Of Controlling
+one's Will</span>.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">45</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span>"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-skins?... 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>And the idea in Hamlet's lines "rightly to be
+great," etc., is suggested in the essay <span class="smcap">Of Repenting</span>,<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">46</a>
+where we have:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>In the essay <span class="smcap">Of Experience</span><a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">47</a> there is a sentence
+partially expressing the same thought,
+which is cited by Mr. Feis as a reproduction:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Here, certainly, as in the previous citation, the
+idea is not identical with that expressed by
+Hamlet. But the elements he combines are
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span>there; and again, in the essay <span class="smcap">Of Solitariness</span><a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">48</a>
+we have the picture of the soldier fighting furiously
+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 unprofitable,
+vain, and counterfeit coin that is in
+use with us."</p>
+
+<p>And yet again the thought crops up in the
+<span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond Sebonde</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"This horror-causing array of so many thousands of
+armed men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and undaunted
+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."</p></div>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XII. Yet one more of Hamlet's sayings peculiar
+to the revised form of the play seems to be an
+echo of a thought of Montaigne's. At the outset
+of the soliloquy last quoted from, Hamlet
+says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"What is a man</span>
+<span class="i0">If his chief good and market of his time,</span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.</span>
+<span class="i0">Sure He that made us with such large discourse,</span>
+<span class="i0">Looking before and after, gave us not</span>
+<span class="i0">That capability and godlike reason</span>
+<span class="i0">To fust in us unused."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>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<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">49</a> his small approbation of revenge; but
+the thought itself is there, in the essay<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">50</a>
+<span class="smcap">On Goods and Evils</span>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 commodity?"</p></div>
+
+<p>Again, there is a passage in the essay <span class="smcap">Of the
+Affection of Fathers to their Children</span>,<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">51</a>
+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 contrast
+between man and beast is drawn, though
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>not to the same purpose as in the speech of
+Hamlet:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Since it hath pleased God to endow us with some
+capacity of discourse, that as beasts we should not servilely
+be 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Finally we have a third parallel, with a slight
+coincidence of terms, in the essay<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">52</a> <span class="smcap">Of Giving
+the lie</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>instance, there is a classic original, or at least a
+familiar source, in Cicero,<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">53</a> where the commonplace
+of the 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;<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">54</a> 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 easy besides to push
+the theory of any influence too far; and when
+for instance we find Hamlet saying he fares "Of
+the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed,"
+it would be as idle to assume a reminiscence
+of a passage of Montaigne on the chameleon<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">55</a>
+as it would be to derive Hamlet's phrase
+"A king of shreds and patches" from Florio's
+rendering in the essay<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">56</a> <span class="smcap">Of the Inconstancy of
+our Actions</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span></p>
+<p>In the latter case we have a mere coincidence
+of idiom; in the former a proverbial allusion.<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">57</a>
+An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of
+resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities
+as the assertion that Shakspere's contemporaries
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>play there are several reproductions of ideas in
+the essays, some of them 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, Shakspere's
+absorption of Montaigne being as vital
+as Montaigne's own assimilation of the thought
+of his classics. The process is one not of surface
+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 reflection.
+Some cause there must have been for this
+marked species of development in the dramatist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span>
+at that particular time; and if we find pervading
+signs of one remarkable new influence, with 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>; and, on the other
+hand, that the influence to some extent continues
+beyond that play. Indeed, there are still
+further minute signs of it there, which should be
+noted before we pass on.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XIII. Among parallelisms of thought of a
+less direct kind, one may be traced between an
+utterance of Hamlet's and a number of Montaigne's
+sayings on the power of imagination
+and the possible equivalence of dream life and
+waking life. In his first dialogue with Rosencrantz
+and Guildenstern, where we have already
+noted an echo of Montaigne, Hamlet cries:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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;"</p></div>
+
+<p>and Guildenstern answers:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very
+substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a
+dream."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The first sentence may be compared with a
+number in Montaigne,<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">58</a> of which the following<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">59</a>
+is a type:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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;"</p></div>
+
+<p>while the reply of Guildenstern further recalls
+several of the passages already cited.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XIV. Another apparent parallel of no great
+importance, but of more verbal closeness, is that
+between Hamlet's jeering phrase:<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">60</a> "Your worm
+is your only emperor for diet," and a sentence
+in the <span class="smcap">Apology</span>: "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.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XV. As regards <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, I can find no
+further parallelisms so direct as any of the foregoing,
+except some to be considered later, in con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>nection
+with the "To be" soliloquy. I do not
+think it can be made out that, as M. Chasles
+affirmed, Hamlet's words on his friendship for
+Horatio can be traced directly to any of Montaigne's
+passages on that theme. "It would be
+easy," says M. Chasles, "to show in Shakspere
+the <i>branloire perenne</i><a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">61</a> of Montaigne, and the
+whole magnificent passage on friendship, which
+is found reproduced (<i>se trouve report&eacute;</i>) in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>."
+The idea of the world as a perpetual mutation
+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 Bo&euml;tie 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 independently
+suggested by such a treatise as
+Seneca's <span class="smcap">De Constantia Sapientis</span>, which is a
+monody on the theme with which it closes: <i>esse
+aliquem invictum, esse aliquem in quem nihil
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>fortuna possit</i>&mdash;"to be something unconquered,
+something 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>,
+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 Montaigne's
+nineteenth chapter (which, as we have
+already seen, impressed Shakspere), and by
+various other sayings in the Essays. After the
+quotation from Horace (<i>Non vultus instantis
+tyranni</i>), in the Nineteenth Essay, Florio's
+translation runs:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>to this advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign
+liberty, that affords us means wherewith to jest
+and make a scorn of force and injustice, and to deride
+imprisonment, gyves, or fetters."</p></div>
+
+<p>Again, in the essay <span class="smcap">Of Three Commerces or
+Societies</span>,<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">62</a> we have this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and
+dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply ourselves
+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 unequal,
+irregular, and multiform....</p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"... 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....</p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I should commend a high-raised mind that could
+both bend and discharge itself; that wherever her fortune
+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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Again, la Bo&euml;tie is panegyrised by Montaigne
+for his rare poise and firmness of character;<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">63</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span>and elsewhere in the essays we find many allusions
+to the ideal of the imperturbable man,
+which Montaigne has in the above cited passages
+brought into connection with his ideal of friendship.
+It could well be, then&mdash;though here we
+cannot argue the point with confidence&mdash;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.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XVI. We now come to the suggested resemblance
+between the "To be or not to be" soliloquy
+and the general tone of Montaigne on the subject
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
+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 <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span>. What really
+seems to subsist in the "To be" soliloquy, after
+a careful scrutiny, is a series of echoes of single
+thoughts; but there is the difficulty that some
+of these occur in the earlier form of the soliloquy
+in the First Quarto, a circumstance which tends&mdash;though
+not necessarily<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">64</a>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>First, there is the striking coincidence of the
+word "consummation" (which appears only in
+the Second Quarto), with Florio's translation of
+<i>an&eacute;antissement</i> in the essay <span class="smcap">Of Physiognomy</span>, as
+above noted. Secondly, there is a curious resemblance
+between the phrase "take arms against
+a sea of troubles" and a passage in Florio's version
+of the same essay, which has somehow been
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>overlooked in the disputes over Shakspere's
+line. It runs:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>There arises here the difficulty that Shakspere's
+line had been satisfactorily traced to
+&AElig;lian's<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">65</a> story of the Celtic practice of rushing
+into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons;
+and the matter must, I think, be left open until
+it can he ascertained whether the statement concerning
+the Celts was available to Shakspere in
+any translation or citation.<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">66</a></p>
+
+<p>Again, the phrase "Conscience doth make
+cowards of us all" is very like the echo of two
+passages in the essay<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">67</a> <span class="smcap">Of Conscience</span>: "Of such
+marvellous working power is the sting of conscience:
+which often induceth us to bewray, to
+accuse, and to combat ourselves"; "which as
+it doth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>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, makes death to be evil" (<i>malam mortem
+non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem</i>) cited by
+Montaigne in order to dispute it. The same
+thought, too, is dealt with in the essay<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">68</a> on <span class="smcap">A
+Custom of the Isle of Cea</span>, which contains a passage
+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 "Conscience
+makes cowards of us all" existed in the
+soliloquy as it stood in the First Quarto, while
+the gist of the idea is actually found twice in a
+previous play, where it has a proverbial ring.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">69</a>
+And "the <i>hope</i> of something after death"
+figures in the First Quarto also.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, there are other sources than Montaigne
+for parts of the soliloquy, sources nearer,
+too, than those which have been pointed to in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>the Senecan tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr.
+Cunliffe has pointed out,<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">70</a> a broad correspondence
+between the whole soliloquy and the chorus of
+women at the end of the second Act of the
+<span class="smcap">Troades</span>, where the question of a life beyond is
+pointedly put:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Verum est? an timidos fabula decepit,</span>
+<span class="i0">Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>It is true that the choristers in Seneca pronounce
+definitely against the future life:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil....</span>
+<span class="i0">Rumores vacui verbaque inania,</span>
+<span class="i0">Et par sollicito fabula somnio."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 undiscovered
+country from whose bourn no traveller
+returns." In the <span class="smcap">Hercules Furens</span><a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">71</a> we have:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Nemo ad id sero venit, unde nunquam</span>
+<span class="i0">Quum semel venit potuit reverti;"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span></p>
+<p>and in the <span class="smcap">Hercules &OElig;t&aelig;us</span><a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">72</a> there is the same
+thought:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6_5">"regnum canis inquieti</span>
+<span class="i0">Unde non unquam remeavit ullus."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>But here, as elsewhere, Seneca himself was
+employing a standing sentiment, for in the best
+known poem of Catullus we have:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum</span>
+<span class="i0">Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam."<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">73</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>And though there was in Shakspere's day no
+English translation of Catullus, the commentators
+long ago noted<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">74</a> that in Sandford's translation
+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 anything
+cited from the classics.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, in Marlowe's <span class="smcap">Edward II.</span>,<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">75</a> written
+before 1593, we have:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6_5">"Weep not for Mortimer,</span>
+<span class="i0">That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,</span>
+<span class="i0">Goes to discover countries yet unknown."<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">76</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span></p>
+<p>So that, without going to the Latin, we have
+obvious English sources for notable parts of the
+soliloquy.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, though Shakspere may (1) have seen
+part of the Florio translation, or separate translations
+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 consider
+it unlikely, were it only because the Montaigne
+influence in his work begins, as aforesaid,
+in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>
+the <span class="smcap">Merchant of Venice</span><a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">77</a> recalls the passage on
+the subject in Montaigne's essay of <span class="smcap">Custom</span>;<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">78</a>
+but then the original source is Cicero, <span class="smcap">In Somnium
+Scipionis</span>, which had been translated into
+English in 1577. (2) Falstaff's rhapsody on the
+virtues of sherris<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">79</a> recalls a passage in the essay
+<span class="smcap">of Drunkenness</span>,<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">80</a> but then Montaigne avows
+that what he says is the common doctrine of wine-drinkers.
+(3) Montaigne cites<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">81</a> the old saying
+of Petronius, that "all the world's a stage,"
+which occurs in <span class="smcap">As You Like It</span>; 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>,
+we are bound to concede the doubtfulness
+of any apparent influence before the Second
+Quarto. At most we may say that both of Hamlet's
+soliloquies which touch on suicide evidently
+owe something to the discussions set up by Montaigne's
+essays.<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">82</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>XVII. In the case of the Duke's exhortation
+to Claudio in <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span>, on the
+contrary, the whole speech may be said to be a
+synthesis of favourite propositions of Montaigne.
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"What hath an aged man left him 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 dangerous
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>bear and undergo a heavy burden: So hath our soul."</p>
+
+<p>"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 unavoidable?... 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>The same line of expostulation occurs in other
+essays. In the Fortieth we have:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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>
+
+<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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Then take a passage occurring near the end of
+the <span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond Sebonde</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Now compare textually the Duke's speech:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Be absolute for death: either death or life</span>
+<span class="i0">Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing</span>
+<span class="i0">That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,</span>
+<span class="i0">(Servile to all the skiey influences)</span>
+<span class="i0">That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,</span>
+<span class="i0">Hourly afflict: merely, thou are death's fool;</span>
+<span class="i0">For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,</span>
+<span class="i0">And yet run'st towards him still: Thou art not noble;</span>
+<span class="i0">For all the accommodations that thou bear'st</span>
+<span class="i0">Are nursed by baseness: Thou art by no means valiant,</span>
+<span class="i0">For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork</span>
+<span class="i0">Of a poor worm: Thy best of rest is sleep,</span>
+<span class="i0">And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st</span>
+<span class="i0">Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;</span>
+<span class="i0">For thou exist'st on many thousand grains</span>
+<span class="i0">Which issue out of dust: Happy thou art not;</span>
+<span class="i0">For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,</span>
+<span class="i0">And what thou hast forget'st: Thou art not certain,</span>
+<span class="i0">For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,</span>
+<span class="i0">After the moon: If thou art rich, thou art poor;</span>
+<span class="i0">For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,</span>
+<span class="i0">Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,</span>
+<span class="i0">And death unloads thee: Friend hast thou none;</span>
+<span class="i0">For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,</span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,</span>
+<span class="i0">For ending thee no sooner: Thou hast no youth nor age,</span>
+<span class="i0">But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,</span>
+<span class="i0">Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth</span>
+<span class="i0">Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms</span>
+<span class="i0">Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,</span>
+<span class="i0">Thou hast neither heat, affection, limbs, nor beauty,</span>
+<span class="i0">To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this,</span>
+<span class="i0">That bears the name of life? Yet in this life</span>
+<span class="i0">Lie hid more thousand deaths: yet death we fear,</span>
+<span class="i0">That makes these odds all even."<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">83</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Then collate yet further some more passages
+from the Essays:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 offences, 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...."<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">84</a></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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...."<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">85</a></p>
+
+<p>"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 whatever
+is before and behind this moment, and also a good
+part of this moment, "<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">86</a></p>
+
+<p>"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."<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">87</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Compare finally the 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.</p>
+<p class="two">&nbsp;</p>
+<p>XVIII. The theme, in fine, is one of Montaigne's
+favourites. And the view that Shakspere
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>likewise an echo of a whole series of passages in
+Montaigne. Shakspere's lines run:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,</span>
+<span class="i0">To lie in cold obstruction and to rot:</span>
+<span class="i0">This sensible warm motion to become</span>
+<span class="i0">A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit</span>
+<span class="i0">To bathe in fiery floods or to reside</span>
+<span class="i0">In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,</span>
+<span class="i0">To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,</span>
+<span class="i0">And blown with restless violence round about</span>
+<span class="i0">The pendent world; or to be worse than worst</span>
+<span class="i0">Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts</span>
+<span class="i0">Imagine howling!&mdash;'tis too horrible!..."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>So far as I know, the only idea in this passage
+which belongs to the current English superstition
+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,<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">88</a> of the punishment
+of the offending d&aelig;mons, who were whirled
+between earth and air and sun and sea; but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>there is no suggestion in that passage that human
+souls were so treated. Dante's <span class="smcap">Inferno</span>, with its
+pictures of carnal sinners tossed about by the
+winds in the dark air of the second circle,<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">89</a> and
+of traitors punished by freezing in the ninth,<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">90</a>
+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,<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">91</a>
+whence (rather than from Dante) Milton drew
+his idea of an alternate torture.<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">92</a> But there
+again, the correspondence is only partial;
+whereas in Montaigne's <span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond
+Sebonde</span> we find, poetry apart, nearly every
+notion that enters into Claudio's speech:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The most universal and received fantasy, and which
+endureth to this day, hath been that whereof Pythagoras
+is made author ... which is that souls at
+their departure from us did but pass and roll from one
+to another body, from a lion to a horse, from a horse
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>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 themselves
+unto their first bodies.... Behold her (the
+soul's) progress elsewhere: He that hath lived well reconjoineth
+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 customs,
+and shall never see an end of his punishments
+until ... by virtue of reason he have deprived himself
+of those gross, stupid, and elementary qualities that
+were in him.... They (the Epicureans) demand,
+what order 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 staved
+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...."<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">93</a></p></div>
+
+<p>It is at a short distance from this passage that
+we find the suggestion of a frozen purgatory:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">94</a></p></div>
+
+<p>And over and above this peculiar correspondence
+between the 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">"Thyself and thy belongings</span>
+<span class="i0">Are not thine own so proper as to waste</span>
+<span class="i0">Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee.</span>
+<span class="i0">Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,</span>
+<span class="i0">Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues</span>
+<span class="i0">Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike</span>
+<span class="i0">As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched</span>
+<span class="i0">But to fine issues: nor nature never lends</span>
+<span class="i0">The smallest scruple of her excellence,</span>
+<span class="i0">But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines</span>
+<span class="i0">Herself the glory of a creditor,</span>
+<span class="i0">Both thanks and use...."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Here we have once more a characteristically
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>Shaksperean transmutation and development of
+the idea rather than a reproduction; and the
+same appears when we compare the admirable
+lines of the poet with a homiletic sentence from
+the <span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond Sebonde</span>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a
+stimulation not limited to one play, but
+affecting other plays written about the same
+time. Another point of connection between
+<span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> and <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span> is seen
+when we compare the above passage, "Spirits
+are not finely touched but to fine issues," with
+Laertes' lines<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">95</a>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Nature is fine in love, and when 'tis fine</span>
+<span class="i0">It sends some precious instance of itself</span>
+<span class="i0">After the thing it loves."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>And though such data are of course not conclusive
+as to the time of composition of the
+plays, there is so much of identity between the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>thought in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and
+a notable passage in <span class="smcap">Troilus and Cressida</span>, as
+to strengthen greatly the surmise that the latter
+play was also written, or rather worked-over, by
+Shakspere about 1604. The phrase:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"if our virtues</span>
+<span class="i0">Did not go forth of us, 'twere all the same</span>
+<span class="i0">As if we had them not,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>is developed in the speech of Ulysses to
+Achilles<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">96</a>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"A strange fellow here</span>
+<span class="i0">Writes me that man&mdash;how dearly ever parted</span>
+<span class="i0">How much in having, or without, or in&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,</span>
+<span class="i0">Nor feels not what he knows, but by reflection;</span>
+<span class="i0">As when his virtues shining upon others</span>
+<span class="i0">Heat them, and they retort their heat again</span>
+<span class="i0">To the first giver."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">De Beneficiis</span><a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">97</a> throws out the germ
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>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."<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">98</a> 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; nec 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The nature of a thing cannot be said to have foregone
+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;"</p></div>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Some things though they be honest, very goodly
+and right excellently vertuous, yet have they not their
+effect but in a co-partner."</p></div>
+
+<p>Whether it was Shakspere's reading of Montaigne
+that sent him to Seneca, to whom Montaigne<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">99</a>
+avows so much indebtedness, we of
+course cannot tell; but it is enough for the
+purpose of our argument to say that we have
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span>here another point or stage in a line of analytical
+thought on which Shakspere was
+embarked about 1603, and of which the starting
+point or initial stimulus was the perusal of
+Florio's Montaigne. We have the point of contact
+with Montaigne in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, where the
+saying that reason is implanted in us to be
+used, is seen to be one of the many correspondences
+of thought between the play and the
+Essays. The idea is more subtly and deeply
+developed in <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span>, and still
+more subtly and philosophically in <span class="smcap">Troilus and
+Cressida</span>. The fact of the process of development
+is all that is here affirmed, over and above
+the actual phenomena of reproduction before set
+forth.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">Tempest</span>,
+since not only is that play not known to have
+existed in its present form in 1605,<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">100</a> when <span class="smcap">Vol<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>pone</span>
+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 contemporary
+dramatists. But here in two plays
+of Shakspere, then fresh in memory&mdash;the
+Second Quarto having been published in 1604
+and <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span> produced in the
+same year&mdash;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 <span class="smcap">Tempest</span>, we do not again find in any
+one play such a cluster of reminiscences as we
+have seen in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> and <span class="smcap">Measure for
+Measure</span>, though the spirit of Montaigne's
+thought, turned to a deepening pessimism, may
+be said to tinge all the later tragedies.</p>
+
+<p>(a) In <span class="smcap">Othello</span> (? 1604) we have Iago's "'tis
+in ourselves that we are thus or thus," already
+considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me....</span>
+<span class="i0">He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen,</span>
+<span class="i0">Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>&mdash;a philosophical commonplace which compares
+with various passages in the Fortieth Essay.</p>
+
+<p>(b) In <span class="smcap">Lear</span> (1606) we have such a touch as
+the king's lines<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">101</a>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"And take upon's the mystery of things</span>
+<span class="i0">As if we were God's spies;"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>&mdash;which recalls the vigorous protest of the
+essays, <span class="smcap">that a man ought soberly to meddle
+with the judging of the divine laws</span>,<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">102</a> where Montaigne
+avows that if he dared he would put in
+the category of imposters the</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 incomprehensible
+motives of its works."</p></div>
+
+<p>This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne;
+and much of the argument of the
+<span class="smcap">Apology</span> is typified in the sentence:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"What greater vanity can there be than to go about
+by our proportions and conjectures to guess at God?"</p></div>
+
+<p>(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence
+between a passage in the essay<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">103</a> of <span class="smcap">Judg<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>ing
+of Others' Death</span> and the speech of
+Edmund<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">104</a> on the subject of stellar influences. In
+the essay Montaigne sharply derides the habit of
+ascribing human occurrences to the interference
+of the stars&mdash;which very superstition he was
+later to support by his own authority in the
+<span class="smcap">Apology</span>, 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 protest
+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 followeth 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 C&aelig;sar's sayings as to his star, and
+the "common foppery" as to the sun mourning
+his death a year.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers
+itself to be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our
+own interests disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved
+at our least actions. 'There is no such society between
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>heaven and us that by our destiny the shining of the
+stars should be as mortal as we are.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence
+of this passage in Edmund's speech, where the
+word "foppery" is a special clue:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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; drunkards,
+liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of
+planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by
+divine thrusting on...."</p></div>
+
+<p>(d) Again, in <span class="smcap">Macbeth</span> (1606), the words of
+Malcolm to Macduff<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">105</a>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak,</span>
+<span class="i0">Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>&mdash;an idea which also underlies Macbeth's "this
+perilous stuff, which weighs upon the heart"&mdash;recalls
+the essay<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">106</a> <span class="smcap">Of Sadness</span>, in which Montaigne
+remarks on the</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span>Lord Raisciac looked on his dead son "till the vehemency
+of his sad sorrow, having suppressed and choked
+his vital spirits, felled him stark dead to the ground."</p></div>
+
+<p>The parallel here, such as it is, is at least
+much more vivid than that drawn between
+Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">107</a>&mdash;"Light
+troubles speak: the great ones are dumb."</p></div>
+
+<p>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 question.
+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 Montaigne
+in the plays between 1605 and 1610 would
+be a very natural result of Jonson's gibe in
+<span class="smcap">Volpone</span>. 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 prepossessed&mdash;as
+even Mr. Fleay still seems to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span>&mdash;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"<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">108</a> in the matter of plots&mdash;a
+faculty which he knew Shakspere to lack&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>However that might be, the fact stands that
+Shakspere did about 1604 reproduce Montaigne
+as we have seen; and it remains to consider
+what the reproduction signifies, as regards
+Shakspere's mental development.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span></p>
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+
+<p>But first there has to be asked the question
+whether the Montaigne 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> was hardly less a critic than
+a poet; and the sonnet<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">110</a> which speaks of its
+author as</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,"<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>is one of the least uncertain revelations that
+these enigmatic poems yield us. We may confidently
+decide, too, with Professor Minto,<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">109</a> that
+the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+"Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere
+might well see one of his most formidable competitors
+in poetry. But we are here 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?</p>
+
+<p>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
+exhaustive 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere
+(1767) proved for all open-minded readers that
+much of Shakspere's supposed classical knowledge
+was derived from translations alone;<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">111</a> and
+further investigation does but establish his
+general view.<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">112</a> Such is the effect of M. Stapfer's
+chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">113</a>
+and the pervading argument of that chapter will
+be found to hold good as against the view suggested,
+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 valuable
+research has shown, did much to colour the
+style and thought of the Elizabethan drama, as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>well as to suggest its themes and shape its technique.
+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. Cunliffe 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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 difficult
+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 Middleton
+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 Shakspere
+we cannot be absolutely certain either way. Professor
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>turn to the generally accepted model of classical
+tragedy, either in the original or in the translation."<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">114</a></p></div>
+
+<p>This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far
+as the evidence from particular parallels goes,
+we are not led to take with any confidence the
+view put in the last sentence. The above-noted
+parallels between Seneca's tragedies and Shakspere'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. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes, points to
+&AElig;schylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of
+Macbeth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood</span>
+<span class="i0">Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather</span>
+<span class="i0">The multitudinous seas incarnadine,</span>
+<span class="i0">Making the green one red:"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>certainly corresponds closely with that of
+Seneca's Hercules:<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">115</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica</span>
+<span class="i0">Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox</span>
+<span class="i0">Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens,</span>
+<span class="i0">Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet</span>
+<span class="i0">M&aelig;otis in me gelida transfundat mare,</span>
+<span class="i0">Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,</span>
+<span class="i0">Haerebit altum facinus"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span></p>
+<p>and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">116</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,</span>
+<span class="i0">M&aelig;otis undis pontico incumbens mari.</span>
+<span class="i0">Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater</span>
+<span class="i0">Tantum expiarit sceleris."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But these declamations, deriving as they do, to
+begin with, from &AElig;schylus,<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">117</a> 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
+medi&aelig;val. The phrases used were already
+classic when Catullus employed them before
+Seneca:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys</span>
+<span class="i0">Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">118</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced
+by Tasso;<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">119</a> 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. Marston
+did his best with it, in a play which may
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>have been written before, though published
+after, <span class="smcap">Macbeth</span><a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">120</a>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Although the waves of all the Northern sea</span>
+<span class="i0">Should flow for ever through those guilty hands,</span>
+<span class="i0">Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>&mdash;a sad foil to Shakspere's</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The multitudinous seas incarnadine."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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 figure 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</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6_5">"Diseases desperate grown</span>
+<span class="i0">By desperate appliance are relieved,</span>
+<span class="i0">Or not at all,"<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">121</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>which he compares with Seneca's</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Et ferrum et ignis s&aelig;pe medicin&aelig; loco est.</span>
+<span class="i0">Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">122</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>&mdash;a passage that may very well be the original
+for the modern oracle about fire and iron&mdash;is
+really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span>tes,
+that "Extreme remedies are proper for
+extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be
+more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to
+Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">123</a> as translated
+by Florio:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Equally inconclusive is the equally close
+parallel between Macbeth's</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>and the sentence of Hercules:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">"Nemo polluto queat</span>
+<span class="i0">Animo mederi."<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">124</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Such a reflection was sure to secure a proverbial
+vogue, and in <span class="smcap">The Two Noble Kinsmen</span> (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 minister
+to."<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">125</a></p>
+
+<p>And so, again, with the notable resemblance
+between Hercules' cry:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius,</span>
+<span class="i0">Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona,</span>
+<span class="i0">Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus,</span>
+<span class="i0">Etiam furorem."<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">126</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span></p>
+<p>and Macbeth's:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"I have lived long enough: my way of life</span>
+<span class="i0">Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;</span>
+<span class="i0">And that which should accompany old age,</span>
+<span class="i0">As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,</span>
+<span class="i0">I must not look to have."<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">127</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation;
+but, though the versification in Macbeth's
+speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a
+lament had doubtless been made in other
+English plays, in direct reproduction of Seneca;
+and Shakspere, in all probability, was again
+only perfecting some previous declamation.</p>
+
+<p>There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in
+such phrases as:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward</span>
+<span class="i0">To that they were before;"<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">128</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">"We but teach</span>
+<span class="i0">Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return</span>
+<span class="i0">To plague the inventor."<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">129</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>&mdash;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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>the tragedies of Seneca to catch Shakspere's
+eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a deep
+philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold
+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 industrious
+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 Shakspere
+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 <span class="smcap">De Beneficiis</span> and the <span class="smcap">De Ira</span> one is
+sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">130</a> over
+Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what death
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself
+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 difference
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Even before that is made clear, however, there
+can be little hesitation about dismissing the
+only other outstanding theory of a special intellectual
+influence undergone by Shakspere&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>
+theory of Dr. Benno Tschischwitz, 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 writings
+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 <span class="smcap">Il
+Candelajo</span>, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio,
+"Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the
+pedant replies, "Litter&aelig;, syllab&aelig;, dictio et
+oratio, partes propinqu&aelig; et remot&aelig;," on which
+Octavio again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto
+et il proposito."<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">131</a> 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> which clearly belong to the
+pre-Shaksperean play, the fooling of Hamlet
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>with Polonius is one of them. And beyond
+this, Dr. Tschischwitz's parallels are flatly unconvincing,
+or rather they promptly put themselves
+out of court. He admits that nothing else
+in Bruno's comedy recalls anything else in
+Shakspere;<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">132</a> but he goes on to find analogies
+between other passages in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> and some of
+Bruno's philosophic doctrines. Quoting Bruno's
+theorem that all things are made up of indestructible
+atoms, and that death is but a transformation,
+Dr. Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction
+of it Hamlet's soliloquy:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>It is difficult to be serious over such a contention;
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>these passages he finds the source or suggestion
+in one which he translates from Bruno's <span class="smcap">Cena
+de le Ceneri</span>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"For to this matter, of which our planet is formed,
+death and dissolution do not come; and the annihilation
+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."<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">133</a></p></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, 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 reproduction
+of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>on the contrary the "leave not a wrack behind,"
+in the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span>, is an expression which sets aside,
+as if it were unknown, the conception of an endless
+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,<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">134</a> Dr.
+Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence
+in the <span class="smcap">Bestia Trionfante</span>, which gives a merely
+Rabelaisian picture of drunken practices.<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">135</a> 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&mdash;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
+affirmation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes,
+or that Shakspere otherwise went any
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>deeper into Bruno's system than suited his purpose, but
+that such passages show Shakspere, at the time of his
+writing of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> are now cleared up by the poet's acquaintance
+with the atomic philosophy and the writings of the
+Nolan."</p></div>
+
+<p>All this belongs to the uncritical method of
+the German Shakspere-criticism of the days
+before R&uuml;melin. It is quite possible that Shakspere
+may have heard something of Bruno's
+theories from his friends; and we may be sure
+that much of Bruno's teaching would have profoundly
+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,<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">136</a> above cited from Montaigne. We
+might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace
+the verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the
+lunatic, the lover, and the poet," in the <span class="smcap">Midsummer
+Night's Dream</span>,<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">137</a> to such a passage in
+Bruno as this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 philosophers
+in a certain sense painters; the poets, painters
+and philosophers; the painters, philosophers and poets:
+true poets, painters, and philosophers love and reciprocally
+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."<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">138</a></p></div>
+
+<p>But since Shakspere does not recognisably
+echo a passage which 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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>the famous passage in <span class="smcap">Henry V.</span>,<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">139</a> in which the
+Archbishop figures the State as a divinely
+framed harmony of differing functions, is clearly
+traceable to Plato's <span class="smcap">Republic</span> and Cicero's <span class="smcap">De
+Republica</span>; yet rational criticism must decide
+with M. Stapfer<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">140</a> that Shakspere knew neither
+of these treatises, but got his suggestion from
+some English translation or citation.</p>
+
+<p>In fine, we are constrained by all our knowledge
+concerning Shakspere, as well 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 important
+and the most potential for suggestion and
+provocation.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span></p>
+<h3>IV.</h3>
+
+
+<p>To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne
+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&mdash;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 &aelig;sthetics
+or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of
+the man Shakspere, who became an actor for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>
+livelihood in an age when the best actors played
+in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate
+and not a little brutal; then added to his craft
+of acting the craft of play-patching and refashioning;
+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 rigorously
+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 absolutely all the
+arch&aelig;ological facts as to theatrical life in Shakspere's
+time, do not seem to bring those facts
+into vital touch with their &aelig;sthetic estimate of
+his product; they remain under the spell of
+Coleridge and Gervinus.<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">141</a> Emerson, it is true,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>protested at the close of his essay that he "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 psychological
+solidity in the ordinary presentment
+of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of
+course, merely leaps over the difficulty, into
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>absolute irrelevance. Emerson was intellectually
+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 conceive
+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 picking
+the locks where the transcendentalist has
+dreamily turned away.</p>
+
+<p>It is imperative that we should recommence
+vigilantly with the concrete facts, ignoring all
+the merely &aelig;sthetic and metaphysic syntheses.
+Where Coleridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously
+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 Stratford;
+son of a burgess once prosperous, but
+destined to sink steadily in the world; married
+at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>
+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
+turn for play-acting. To know him as he began
+we must measure him narrowly by his first performances.
+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 unaided
+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 <span class="smcap">Love's
+Labour Lost</span> and <span class="smcap">The Two Gentlemen of
+Verona</span>, the critical reader is apt to be left
+pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections
+that the wit and the versification have indeed
+at times a certain happy naturalness of
+their own, and that nevertheless, if they really<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
+be Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable
+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 evidence
+of having been refashioned at a later
+time."<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">142</a> These plays, then, with all their evidences
+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.</p>
+
+<p>But it happens that we have such a measure
+in performances which, since they imply no technical
+arrangement, are of a homogenous literary
+substance, and can be shown to be the work of a
+man brought up in the Warwickshire dialect,<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">143</a>
+are not even challenged, I believe, by the adherents
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>conscious, were the uninspired and pitilessly
+prolix poems of <span class="smcap">Venus and Adonis</span> and <span class="smcap">The
+Rape of Lucrece</span>, the first consisting of some
+1,200 lines and the second of more than 1,800;
+one a calculated picture of female concupiscence
+and the 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 commercial
+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&mdash;inexhaustible
+flow of words and endless observation
+of concrete detail. Of the countless thrilling
+felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere
+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 contrary, the wearisome succession
+of stanzas, stretching the succinct themes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
+immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all
+narrative interest, might seem to signalise such
+a lack of artistic judgment as must preclude all
+great performance; while the apparent plan of
+producing an effect by mere multiplication of
+words, mere extension of description without intension
+of idea, might seem to prove a lack of
+capacity for any real depth of passion. They
+were simply manufactured poems, consciously
+constructed for the market, the first designed at
+the same time to secure the patronage of the
+M&aelig;cenas 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 succeeded
+as saleable literature, and they gained
+the Earl's favour.</p>
+
+<p>And the rest of the poet's literary career, from
+this point forward, seems to have been no less
+prudently calculated. Having plenty of evidence
+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 his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
+trade of actor the business not merely of playwright
+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;<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">144</a> 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 accumulations
+with which he bought land and house and
+tithes at Stratford, must have been his share in
+the takings of the theatre&mdash;a share which would
+doubtless increase as the earlier partners disappeared.
+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 working partner.
+We are thus dealing with a temperament or
+mentality not at all obviously original or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>masterly, not at all conspicuous at the outset for
+intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all
+obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting
+simply a gift for acting, an abundant faculty of
+rhythmical speech, and a power of minute observation,
+joined with a thoroughly practical or
+commercial handling of the problem of life, in a
+calling not usually taken-to by commercially-minded
+men. What emerges for us thus far is
+the conception of a very plastic intelligence, a
+good deal led and swayed by immediate circumstances;
+but at bottom very sanely related to life,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In order, then, that such a man as this should
+develop into the Shakspere of the great tragedies
+and tragic comedies, there must concur two
+kinds of life-conditions with those already noted&mdash;the
+fresh conditions of deeply-moving experience
+and of deep intellectual stimulus. Without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
+these, such a mind would no more arrive at the
+highest poetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking
+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 Venus 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 <span class="smcap">Lear</span> and <span class="smcap">Macbeth</span>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>
+actor-manager with a good share in the company'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 <span class="smcap">Plutarch</span>, published in 1579,
+does not seem to have affected his literary
+activity till about the year 1600: and even then
+the subject of <span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span> may have been suggested
+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 bricklayer's
+apprentice, unwillingly following the
+craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately all
+the while to his 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 enthusiastic
+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&mdash;who
+knows&mdash;that but for that peculiarly early<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span>
+marriage, with its consequent family responsibilities,
+Shakspere would have allowed himself
+a little more of youthful 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 <span class="smcap">Love's Labour
+Lost</span>&mdash;that the truly effective culture is that of
+life in the world rather than that of secluded
+study&mdash;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.<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">145</a> But
+then he certainly made more than was needed to
+keep the Stratford household going; and the
+clear shallow flood of <span class="smcap">Venus and Adonis</span> and
+the <span class="smcap">Rape of Lucrece</span> stands for ever to show
+how far from tragic consciousness was the young
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>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,<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">146</a> that Shakspere had ever been there
+in the interval between his departure in 1587
+and the child's funeral.</p>
+
+<p>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 theory<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">147</a> as to surmise that the
+central episode of faithless love occurred about
+1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and impassion
+the plastic personality of the rhymer of
+<span class="smcap">Venus and Adonis</span>; 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&mdash;a culture involving a good deal of contact
+with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance,
+so far as then translated, and a psychological
+training of great though little recognised
+importance to the dramatist. It seems
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>obvious that the practice of acting, by a plastic
+and receptive temperament, capable of manifold
+appreciation, must have counted for much in developing
+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 frequently
+idealistic method of portraiture, the
+verbalism and factitiousness 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<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">148</a> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span>vincing
+and stimulating. We are here in
+presence at once of a rare receptive faculty and
+a rare expressive faculty: the 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 attention
+turned from the physical to the psychical.
+But 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 Falstaff and his
+group we have a roundness of comic reality to
+which nothing else in modern literature thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>
+far could be compared. But still this, the most
+remarkable of all, remains comic reality; and,
+what is more, it is a comic reality of which, as
+in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.
+For it is clear that the figure of
+Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been popularly successful
+before Shakspere took hold of it:<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">149</a> and
+what he did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive
+mind, in which the faculty of imagination
+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 <span class="smcap">Love's Labour Lost</span>, 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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>that the greater reality of his earlier male historic
+figures, as compared with those of most of
+his rivals, is largely a matter of saner and more
+felicitous declamation&mdash;the play of his great and
+growing faculty of expression&mdash;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 assimilated
+body of culture, the English translation by
+Sir Thomas North of Amyot's French translation
+of Plutarch's Lives, that we find Shakspere
+incontestably superior to his contemporaries
+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 <span class="smcap">Romeo and Juliet</span>,
+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 fundamentally
+unhappy. But in <span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>
+of mutually destroying energies, of grievously
+miscalculating men, of failure and frustration
+dogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise,
+of destiny searching out the fatal weakness of
+the strong. To the poet has now been added the
+reader; to the master of the pathos of passion the
+student of the tragedy of universal life. It is
+thus by culture and experience&mdash;culture limited
+but concentrated, and experience limited but
+intense&mdash;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 organism
+and the special culture to which it was so
+uniquely fitted to respond; culture that came
+without search, and could be undergone as spontaneously
+as the experience of life itself; knowledge
+that needed no more wooing than Ann
+Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets.
+In the English version of Plutarch's <span class="smcap">Lives</span>,
+pressed upon him doubtless by the play-making
+plans of other men, Shakspere found the most
+effectively concentrated history of ancient humanity
+that could possibly have reached him;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>
+and he responded to the stimulus with all his
+energy of expression because 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 off 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 &aelig;sthetic platitudes:
+they are capital items in our knowledge
+of the man. And if even the idolator feels perturbed
+by their obtrusion, he has but to reflect
+that where the trained scholars around Shakspere
+reproduced antiquity with greater accuracy
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span>
+of classic reading might have constituted him
+a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are
+mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's
+moderns, because they are the expression of a
+psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive
+reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive.
+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&mdash;speaking
+in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration,
+as spontaneously as he breathed&mdash;these historic
+data, which happen to be among the most perfectly
+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 his own
+tongue to make him successively the greatest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span>
+dramatic master of eloquence, mirth, charm,
+tenderness, 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 singularly
+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.<br /><br /></p>
+
+<h3>V.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>It is to Montaigne, then, that we now come,
+in terms of our preliminary statement of evidence.
+When Florio's translation was published,
+in 1603, Shakspere was thirty-seven
+years old, and he had written or refashioned
+<span class="smcap">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</span>, and <span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span>. 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. Portions
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Having inductively proved the reading, and
+at the same time the fact of the impression it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
+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-cultured
+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
+Rome 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
+<span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span> and <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, between <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span>
+and <span class="smcap">Lear</span>.</p>
+
+<p>For what was in its nett significance Montaigne's
+manifold book, coming thus suddenly,
+in a complete and vigorous translation, into
+English life and into Shakspere's ken? Simply<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>
+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 enduring
+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&mdash;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 impressionist
+where Petrarch is a framer of studied
+compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because
+Erasmus also is a framer of artificial compositions
+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 modern before Montaigne;
+and Chaucer is there too English to be significant
+for all Europe. The high figure of Dante<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+is decisively medi&aelig;val: it is the central point in
+medi&aelig;val 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 <i>bonne foi</i> is still sophisticated
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>
+living nerve. And there is no theme on which
+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 vascular
+and alive." Such a voice, speaking at Shakspere's
+ear in an English nearly as racy and
+nervous as the incomparable old-new French of
+the original, was in itself a revelation.</p>
+
+<p>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
+influence. A writer affects 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 Shakspere
+as they have done so many others; and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>
+point of fact his work, from <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How all occasions do inform against me,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>and you will gather that there has been a technical
+change wrought, no less than a moral and an
+intellectual. The poet's nerves have caught a
+new vibration.</p>
+
+<p>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 essayist
+the more we shall realise its perennial fascination.
+The culture-content of Montaigne's book
+is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely
+vivacious and reflective intelligence; it
+is the living quintessence of all Latin criticism
+of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence
+as fresh and pungent as the essay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>ist's expression
+of his special individuality.
+For Montaigne stands out among all the
+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,<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">150</a> 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 European
+intelligence, in the age when the modern
+languages first decisively asserted their birthright,
+learned his Latin as a living and not as
+a dead tongue, and knew Greek literature almost
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist
+who of all of his 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&mdash;I mean Keats&mdash;read his
+Homer only in an English translation. As regards
+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
+&eacute;loge that the fashion in which the elder Montaigne
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span>
+exercises were to turn bad Latin into good.<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">151</a> 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,<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">152</a> and, refusing to play the apprentice
+where he was accustomed to be master,<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">153</a> he declined
+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 undulled 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.</p>
+
+<p>This fact of Montaigne's peculiar influence on
+other spirits, comparatively considered, may
+make it easier for some to conceive that his influence
+on Shakspere could be so potent as has
+been above asserted. Among those whom we
+know him to have acted upon in the highest
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>degree&mdash;setting aside the disputed case of Bacon&mdash;are
+Pascal, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert,
+Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of Pascal,
+despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy
+was contrary to Montaigne's, the influence
+went so far that the <i>Pens&eacute;es</i> again and again
+set forth Pascal's doctrine in passages taken
+almost literally from the <span class="smcap">Essays</span>. Stung by the
+lack of all positive Christian credence in Montaigne,
+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 demolish
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>taigne's
+as a defence of theism, he could do no
+more for himself than repeat the process, disparaging
+reason in the very language of the essayist,
+and setting up in his turn his private predilection
+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&mdash;to the purposes of a chagrined and exhausted
+convertite instead of a theist of the
+stately school of Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch.
+Without Montaigne, one feels, the <i>Pens&eacute;es</i>
+might never have been written: they represent
+to-day, for all vigilant readers, rather the
+painful struggles of a wounded intelligence to
+fight down the doubts it has caught from contact
+with other men's thought than any coherent
+or durable philosophic construction.</p>
+
+<p>It would be little more difficult to show the
+debt of the <i>Esprit des Lois</i> to Montaigne's
+inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's
+avowal that "In most authors I see the man who
+writes: in Montaigne, the man who thinks."<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">154</a>
+That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>sociology as in philosophy. His whole activity
+is a seeking for causes; and in the very act of
+undertaking to "humble reason" he proceeds
+to instruct and re-edify it by endless corrective
+comparison of facts. To be sure, he departed so
+far from his normal <i>bonne foi</i> as to affect to
+think there could be no certainties while parading
+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 ecclesiastical
+law he anticipates the age of tolerance;
+in discussing criminal law, the work of Beccaria;
+in discussing <i>&agrave; priori</i> science, the protest
+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 <span class="smcap">Apology</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"If nature enclose within the limits of her ordinary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the judgments,
+the opinions of men, if they have their revolutions,
+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 experience
+nous touchons &agrave; la main," <i>i.e.</i>, nous maintenons, nous
+pr&eacute;tendons: 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?"<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">155</a></p></div>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>for a new inductive system. And in the last
+essay of all he makes a campaign against bad
+laws, which unsays many of his previous sayings
+on the blessedness of custom.</p>
+
+<p>In tracing his influence elsewhere, it would be
+hard to point to an eminent French prose-writer
+who has not been affected by him. Sainte-Beuve
+finds<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">156</a> that La Bruy&egrave;re "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 recognised
+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 Rousseau
+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 emphatic
+denunciations<a name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">157</a> of laws more criminal
+than the crimes they dealt with, he had a deeper
+inspiration still; in the essay on the training
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>of children he had his starting-points for the
+argumentation of <i>Emile</i>; and in the whole unabashed
+self-portraiture of the <span class="smcap">Essays</span> he had his
+great exemplar for the <i>Confessions</i>. Even in
+the very different case of Voltaire, we may go at
+least as far as Villemain and say that the essayist
+must have helped to shape the thought of the
+great freethinker; whose <i>Philosophe Ignorant</i>
+may indeed be connected with the <span class="smcap">Apology</span>
+without any of the hesitation with which Villemain
+suggests his general parallel. In fine,
+Montaigne has scattered his pollen over all the
+literature of France. The most typical thought
+of La Rochefoucauld is thrown out<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">158</a> in the
+essay<a name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">159</a> <i>De l'utile et de l'honneste</i>; and the most
+modern-seeming currents of thought, as M. Stapfer
+remarks, can be detected in the passages of
+the all-discussing Gascon.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>whose whole work is coloured by Montaigne's
+influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially developing
+one side of Emerson's gospel, may be
+said to have found it all where Emerson found it,
+in the Essay on Solitude.<a name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">160</a> 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 <span class="smcap">Representative
+Men</span>. "I remember," he says, telling how in
+his 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 sincerely
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span>for style; and no less constantly "found himself"
+in the self-revelation and analysis of the
+essays.</p>
+
+<p>After all these testimonies to Montaigne's
+seminal virtue, and after what we have seen of
+the special dependence of Shakspere's genius
+on culture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative,
+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&mdash;already a
+master of the whole range of passional emotion,
+of the comedy of mirth and the comedy and
+tragedy of sex&mdash;the great master of the tragedy
+of the moral intelligence. Taking the step from
+<span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span> to <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> as corresponding to
+this movement in his mind, we may say that
+where the first play exhibits the concrete perception
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
+this is the secret of the whole transformation
+which the old play of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> 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 <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, 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 perception;
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+the moral void left by the initial crime and its
+concomitants, not to be filled by any hecatomb of
+slain wrongdoers&mdash;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 circuitous
+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 Shakspere,
+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, weariness
+of spirit in presence of over-mastering fate,
+recoil from the immeasurable evil of the world.
+Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic
+spirit which has put itself in his place,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>
+as it had done with a hundred suggested types
+before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension,
+a self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided
+consciousness of the past. Hence an involution
+rather than an elucidation of the play.
+There can be no doubt that Shakspere, in
+heightening and deepening the theme, has obscured
+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 praying
+murderer to heaven. There is no solution
+of these anomalies: the very state of Shakspere'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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>
+o'er" in the sense of making it too intellectual
+for dramatic unity and strict dramatic success.
+Between these undramatic, brooding soliloquies
+which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate
+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&mdash;between these constituents,
+<span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> remains the most familiar
+Shaksperean play.</p>
+
+<p>This very pre-eminence and permanence, no
+doubt, will make many students still demur to
+the notion that a determining factor in the framing
+of the play was the poet's perusal of Montaigne's
+essays. And it would be easy to overstate
+that thesis in such a way as to make it
+untrue. Indeed, M. Chasles has, to my thinking,
+so overstated it. Had I come to his main
+proposition before realising the infusion of Montaigne's
+ideas in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, I think I should have
+felt it to be as excessive in the opposite direction
+as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M.
+Chasles:<a name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">161</a>&mdash;</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 C&aelig;sar and Coriolanus suddenly
+taken up by the man who has just (tout &agrave; l'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 <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span>, <span class="smcap">Cleopatra</span>,
+and <span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span> are incontestable. These
+dramas follow on from 1606 to 1608, with a rapidity
+which proves the fecund heat of an imagination still
+moved."</p></div>
+
+<p>All this must be revised in the light of a more
+correct chronology. Shakspere's <span class="smcap">Julius C&aelig;sar</span>
+dates, not from 1604 but from 1600 or 1601,
+being referred to in Weever's <span class="smcap">Mirror of Martyrs</span>,
+published in 1601, to say nothing of the
+reference in the third Act of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> itself,
+where Polonius speaks of such a play. And,
+even if it had been written in 1604, it would still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
+be a straining of the evidence to ascribe its production,
+with that of <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span> and <span class="smcap">Antony
+and Cleopatra</span>, to the influence of Montaigne,
+when every one of these themes was sufficiently
+obtruded on the Elizabethan theatre by North's
+translation of Amyot's <span class="smcap">Plutarch</span>. Any one
+who will compare <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span> with the translation
+in North will see that Shakspere has followed
+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 comparison
+throws a flood of light on Shakspere's mode
+of procedure; but it tells us nothing of his perusal
+of Montaigne. Rather it suggests a return
+from the method of the revised <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, 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 Shakspere
+beyond <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, as we have seen, lies not
+in the Roman plays, but in <span class="smcap">Measure for
+Measure</span>.</p>
+
+<p>There is a misconception involved, again, in
+M. Chasles' picture of an abrupt transition from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
+Shakspere's fantastic youthful method to that
+of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> and the Roman plays. He overlooks
+the intermediate stages represented by such
+plays as <span class="smcap">Romeo and Juliet</span>, <span class="smcap">Henry IV.</span>, <span class="smcap">King
+John</span>, the <span class="smcap">Merchant of Venice</span>, and <span class="smcap">As You
+Like It</span>, all of which exhibit a great advance on
+the methods of <span class="smcap">Love's Labour Lost</span>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Shakspere's
+mind is not that presented by <span class="smcap">Coriolanus</span>
+and <span class="smcap">Antony and Cleopatra</span>, which with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>
+all their intense vitality represent rather his
+marvellous power of reproducing impressions
+than 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 <span class="smcap">Lear</span>, and thereafter in the subsiding
+movement of the later serious plays. There it
+is that we learn to give exactitude to our conception
+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 developed
+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.<br /><br /></p>
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span>What then is the general, and what the final
+relation of Shakspere's thought to that of Montaigne?
+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-witholding
+of dramatic writers. Conceiving all situations,
+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 personages,
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
+utterance found in his plays&mdash;even in the portions
+which analytical criticism proves to have
+come 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.</p>
+
+<p>At the very outset, we must make a clean
+sweep of the strange proposition of Mr. Jacob
+Feis&mdash;that Shakspere deeply disliked the philosophy
+of Montaigne, and wrote <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> to discredit
+it. It is hard to realise how such a hopeless
+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
+<span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No human being in Shakspere's day could have
+gathered from <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> such a criticism of Montaigne
+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 detested
+such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's,
+and made him die by poison in order to
+show his abhorrence of them&mdash;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 conviction
+that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona
+by stifling as a fitting punishment for
+adultery. The idea is outside of serious discus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span>sion.
+Barely to assume that Shakspere held
+Hamlet for a pitiable weakling is a sufficiently
+shallow interpretation of the play; but to assume
+that he made him die by way of condign
+punishment for his opinions is merely ridiculous.
+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 denunciation.
+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 withdrawal
+from public broils. But Shakspere's
+own practice was on all fours with this. He
+sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public
+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 anywhere
+else, and would then have married
+Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived
+happily ever after.<a name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">162</a> And to that edifying
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span>assumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that
+Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne
+as a deterrent from the retributive slaughter of
+guilty uncles by wronged nephews.</p>
+
+<p>In the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871
+anticipated Mr. Feis's view of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> as a
+sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a
+whit more plausible. Herr Stedefeld entitles
+his book<a name="FNanchor_163_163" id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">163</a>: "Hamlet: a Drama-with-a-purpose
+(<span class="smcap">Tendenzdrama</span>) opposing the sceptical and cosmopolitan
+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;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>We are entitled to say at the outset, then, only
+this, that Shakspere at the time of working
+over <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span> and <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span> 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 reproduce
+portions of what he had read. We are not
+entitled to assume that these portions are
+selected as being in agreement with Shakspere's
+own views: we are here limited to saying
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"And therefore as a stranger give it welcome!</span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>
+<span class="i0">There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,</span>
+<span class="i0">Than are dreamt of in our philosophy"&mdash;</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>though this may be said to be a summary of the
+whole drift of Montaigne's essay,<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">164</a> <span class="smcap">That it is
+folly to refer truth or falsehood to our
+sufficiency</span>; and though we are entitled to believe
+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 <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span>, playing the
+part of a friar preparing a criminal for death,
+gives Claudio a consolation which does not contain
+a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable
+of sacrificial salvation and sacramental forgiveness,
+we are entitled to infer from such a singular
+negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere
+rejected the Christian theory of things, at
+least that it formed no part of his habitual
+thinking. It was the special business of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>Duke, playing in such a character, to speak to
+Claudio of sin and salvation, of forgiveness and
+absolution. Such a singular omission must at
+least imply disregard on the part of the dramatist.
+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;<a name="FNanchor_165_165" id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">165</a> 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&mdash;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 negatively
+exhibiting his opinions.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span></p>
+<p>In the same way, the express withdrawal of
+the religious note at the close of <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 circumspection
+than has been shown by most of Montaigne's
+critics. The habit of calling him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>
+"sceptic," a habit initiated by the Catholic
+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 purport
+of the <span class="smcap">Apology of Raimond Sebonde</span> appears
+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,<a name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">166</a> besides repeatedly ignoring
+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:<a name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">167</a> "His views, both
+of life and death, are absolutely and entirely un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span>affected
+by the fact of his profession to believe
+the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes
+rather obviously of the nature of his other
+formal salutes<a name="FNanchor_168_168" id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">168</a> to the Church, which are such as
+Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later
+generation. His profession of fidelity 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, uncritical
+of their own creed, affected 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 <span class="smcap">Theologia Naturalis</span> of Sebonde, which
+Montaigne had translated at his father's wish,
+as a feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation;
+and it was primarily to retaliate on such
+critics&mdash;who on their part no doubt exhibited
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span>some ill-founded convictions while attacking
+others&mdash;that he penned the <span class="smcap">Apology</span>, which assails
+atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion,
+but with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Shakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the
+traditional deism of the pagan and Christian
+world, without any colour of specifically Christian
+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 Marlowe,
+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 carrying
+further the initial impetus, and proceeding<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>
+from the serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to
+a deeper and sterner conception of things. It
+lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis,
+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?"<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">169</a> The whole answer can
+hardly be either Mr. Spedding's, that the poet
+wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic
+serenity,<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">170</a> or Dr. Furnivall's, that he
+"described hell because he had felt hell."<a name="FNanchor_171_171" id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">171</a> But
+when we find Shakspere writing a series of
+tragedies, including an extremely sombre
+comedy (<span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span>), 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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>comedies mostly from others and its tragedies
+from him. Further, we must assume that the
+gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to
+the 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 <span class="smcap">Othello</span> we have indeed a very
+strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong&mdash;weakness,
+blind passion, and pitiless egoism;
+but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming
+energy of the element of evil; and in
+<span class="smcap">Lear</span> the conception is worked out with a desperate
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods:</span>
+<span class="i0">They kill us for their sport."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>And since there is no pretence of balancing that
+mordant saying with any decorous platitude of
+Christian Deism, we are led finally to the admission
+that Shakspere sounded a further depth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>
+of philosophy than Montaigne's unembittered
+"cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of reacting
+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,<a name="FNanchor_172_172" id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">172</a> 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 Iago has as much of religion
+in his talk as anyone else in <span class="smcap">Othello</span>, 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 <span class="smcap">Lear</span>, as we have seen, is made to echo Montaigne's
+"sceptical" passage on the subject of
+stellar influences, spoken with a moral purpose,
+rather than the quite contrary utterance in the
+<span class="smcap">Apology</span>, in which the essayist, theistically bent
+on abasing human pretensions, gives to his
+scepticism the colour of a belief in those very
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>influences.<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">173</a> There is here, clearly, no pro-religious
+thesis. The whole drift of the play
+shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in stellar
+control, though he puts the expression of the
+disbelief in the mouth of a villain; though he
+makes the honest Kent, on the other hand, declare
+that "it is the stars ... that govern
+our conditions;"<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">174</a> and though he had previously
+made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious
+stars," and the Duke describe mankind
+as "servile to all the skiey influences," and
+was later to make Prospero, in the <span class="smcap">Tempest</span><a name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">175</a>
+express his belief in "a most auspicious star."
+In the case of Montaigne, who goes on yet again
+to contradict himself in the <span class="smcap">Apology</span> itself,
+satirising afresh the habit of associating deity
+with all human concerns, we are driven to surmise
+an actual variation of opinion&mdash;the vivacious
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span>steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined
+spirit as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to
+assiduity, to constancy";<a name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">176</a> and the net result
+of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset
+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 Montaigne
+dogmatises very much as did his predecessors,
+Shakspere applies a more penetrating
+logic, and explicitly reverses the essayist's verdicts.
+Montaigne, for instance, carried away by
+his master doctrine that we should live "according
+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 Cannibals,<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">177</a>
+speaking of "savages," he protests that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 ourselves
+have altered by our artificial devices, and
+diverted from their common order, we should rather
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>call savage. In those are the true and more profitable
+virtues and natural properties most lively and
+vigorous;"<a name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">178</a></p></div>
+
+<p>deciding with Plato that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>And in the <span class="smcap">Apology</span>,<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">179</a> after citing some as arguing
+that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,"</p></div>
+
+<p>though he proceeds to insist on the contrary that
+"nature has universally embraced all her creatures,"
+man as well as the rest, and to argue
+that man is as much a creature of nature as the
+rest&mdash;since even speech, "if not natural, is
+necessary"&mdash;he never seems to come within
+sight of the solution that art, on his own showing,
+is just nature in a new phase. But to that
+point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the
+<span class="smcap">Winter's Tale</span>, one of the latest plays (? 1611),
+written about the time when we know him to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span>have been reading or re-reading the essay on
+the Cannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant
+gillyflowers in her garden,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7_5">"For I have heard it said</span>
+<span class="i0">There is an art which in their piedness shares</span>
+<span class="i0">With great creating nature,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>the old king answers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"Say there be:</span>
+<span class="i0">Yet nature is made better by no mean,</span>
+<span class="i0">But nature makes that mean; so o'er that art</span>
+<span class="i0">Which you say adds to nature, is an art</span>
+<span class="i0">That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry</span>
+<span class="i0">A gentle scion to the wildest stock</span>
+<span class="i0">And make conceive a bark of baser kind</span>
+<span class="i0">By bud of nobler race: This is an art</span>
+<span class="i0">Which does mend nature&mdash;change it rather; but</span>
+<span class="i0">The art itself is nature."<a name="FNanchor_180_180" id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">180</a></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span></p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"I'll not put</span>
+<span class="i0">The dibble in earth to set one slip of them."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>The mind which could thus easily pierce below
+the 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
+<span class="smcap">Venus and Adonis</span> seems to have deepened
+beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep-striking
+intelligence that first stirred him to
+philosophise.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, supposing this to be so, there is none
+the less a lasting community of thought 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span>
+evidence which seems to show that Shakspere
+sought zealously,<a name="FNanchor_181_181" id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">181</a> despite rebuffs, the formal
+constitution of a coat-of-arms for his family. On
+the other hand, there is nothing in Shakspere's
+work&mdash;the nature of the case indeed forbade it&mdash;to
+compare in democratic outspokenness with
+Montaigne's essay<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">182</a> <span class="smcap">Of the Inequality among
+us</span>. The Frenchman's hardy saying<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">183</a> 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 Shakspere
+would have endorsed it, with his
+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 deliberate
+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 question
+whether his extravagant idealisation and
+justification of Henry V.&mdash;which, though it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>gives so little pause to some of our English
+critics, entitled M. Guizot to call him a mere
+John Bull in his ideas of international politics&mdash;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 compliment,<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">184</a>
+was any more sincere about it than Ben
+Jonson, who would do as much while privately
+accepting the grossest scandal concerning her.<a name="FNanchor_185_185" id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">185</a>
+It is certainly a remarkable fact that Shakspere
+abstained from joining in the poetic out-cry
+over her death, incurring reproof by his
+silence.<a name="FNanchor_186_186" id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">186</a></p>
+
+<p>However all that may have been, we find
+Shakspere, after his period of pessimism, viewing
+life in a spirit which could be expressed in
+terms of Montaigne's philosophy. He certainly
+shaped his latter years in accordance with the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no other
+man in Shakspere's theatrical group deliberately
+turning his back, as he did, on the 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 without
+him. But that retirement, rounding with
+peace the career of manifold and intense experience,
+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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
+nothing specially perplexing in the matter.
+Shakspere's personality was an uncommon
+combination; but was not that what should
+have been looked for? And where, after all, is
+the evidence that he was "not wise for himself"?<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">187</a>
+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 marvellous
+in their content, were well worth the
+writing, where enters the "profanity" of having
+written them, or of having acted in them, "for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>the public amusement"? Even wise men seem
+to run special risks when they discourse on
+Shakspere: Emerson's essay has its own
+anomaly.</p>
+
+<p>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:<a name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">188</a></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,</span>
+<span class="i0">And made myself a motley to the view,</span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear</i>,</span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Made old offences of affections new</i>."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>taigne
+might have been expected to note how
+they drew together at that very point of the final
+retirement, the 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 Montaigne's
+very words<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">189</a>: "My design is to pass
+quietly, and not laboriously, what remains to
+me of life; 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 essay<a name="FNanchor_190_190" id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">190</a> on
+<span class="smcap">Solitude</span>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ...
+altogether ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard
+up and establish our true liberty, the principal retreat
+and solitariness, wherein we must go alone to ourselves....
+We have lived long enough for others, live we
+the remainder of all 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...."</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span></p>
+<p>A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th
+Sonnet,<a name="FNanchor_191_191" id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">191</a> which tells of revolt at the expenditure
+of inner life on the outward garniture, and exhorts
+the soul to live aright:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss,</span>
+<span class="i0">And let that live to aggravate thy store;</span>
+<span class="i1">Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;</span>
+<span class="i0">Within be fed; without be rich no more:</span>
+<span class="i1">So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men,</span>
+<span class="i1">And death once dead, there's no more dying then"&mdash;</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>an echo of much of Montaigne's discourse,
+herein before cited.<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">192</a></p>
+
+<p>In perfect keeping with all this movement
+towards peace and contemplation, and in final
+keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of Montaigne,
+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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>a pre-existing basis, re-making an old play; and
+at the end, as at the beginning, we find him picturing,
+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 <span class="smcap">Tempest</span>,
+there is the fusing spell of philosophic reverie.
+Years before, in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, 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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Those which have compared our life unto a dream,
+have happily had more reason so to do than they were
+aware. When we dream, our soul liveth, 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 doubt whether our thinking and our
+working be another dreaming, and our waking some
+kind of sleeping?"<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">193</a></p>
+
+<p>"Let me think of building castles in Spain, my
+imagination will forge me commodities and afford means
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span>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 yourself,
+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."<a name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">194</a></p>
+
+<p>"... 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 impressions
+from falsehood, by very frivolous appearances."<a name="FNanchor_195_195" id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">195</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Again and 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 <span class="smcap">Darius</span> (1604), lines in them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>selves
+very tolerable, alike in cadence and
+sonority, but destined to be remembered by
+reason of the way in which the master, casting
+them into his all-transmuting alembic, has
+remade them in the fine gold of his subtler
+measure. The Earl's lines run:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Let greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt;</span>
+<span class="i1">Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruised, soon broken;</span>
+<span class="i0">And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant;</span>
+<span class="i1">All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token.</span>
+<span class="i0">Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls,</span>
+<span class="i1">With furniture superfluously fair;</span>
+<span class="i0">Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls,</span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Evanish all like vapours in the air."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"These our actors,</span>
+<span class="i0">As I foretold you, are all spirits, and</span>
+<span class="i0">Are melted into air, into thin air.</span>
+<span class="i0">And like the baseless fabric of this vision,</span>
+<span class="i0">The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,</span>
+<span class="i0">The solemn temples, the great globe itself,</span>
+<span class="i0">Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve</span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+<span class="i0">And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,</span>
+<span class="i0">Leave not a wrack behind. <i>We are such stuff</i></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>As dreams are made on</i>, and our little life</span>
+<span class="i0">Is rounded with a sleep."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>In 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 congresses,
+Shakspere being the fore-ordained
+oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators,
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>
+he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in
+the mouth of a surly rascal&mdash;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 <span class="smcap">As You Like It</span> 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 <span class="smcap">Cymbeline</span> was hardly
+the man to repugn it, even if he amused himself
+by putting forward Caliban<a name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">196</a> as the real "cannibal,"
+in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given
+his impression of certain aspects of civilisation
+in <span class="smcap">Hamlet</span>, <span class="smcap">Measure for Measure</span>, and <span class="smcap">King
+Lear</span>. 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:<a name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">197</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 goodwill
+he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I
+diverted him to ambition."</p></div>
+
+<p>And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged
+magician in the drama:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,</span>
+<span class="i0">Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury</span>
+<span class="i0">Do I take part; the rarer action is</span>
+<span class="i0">In virtue than in vengeance...."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>The principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's
+society; even the cursed and cursing
+Caliban is recognised<a name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">198</a> as a necessary member of
+it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,</span>
+<span class="i0">Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices</span>
+<span class="i0">That profit us."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span>sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide,
+philosopher, and friend," who in that time of
+universal strife and separateness could of his
+own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and
+say:<a name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">199</a> "I esteem all men my compatriots, and
+embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman, subordinating
+this national tie to the common and
+universal." Here, too, was not Montaigne the
+first of the moderns?</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on <i>The Plots of Shakespere's Plays</i>,
+1850.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">2</span></a>
+<div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Lady Politick Would-be:</i> All our English writers,</span>
+<span class="i2">I mean such as are happy in the Italian,</span>
+<span class="i2">Will deign to steal out of this author [<i>Pastor Fido</i>] mainly</span>
+<span class="i2">Almost as much as from Montaignie;</span>
+<span class="i2">He has so modern and facile a vein,</span>
+<span class="i10">&mdash;Act iii. sc. 2.</span>
+</div>
+</div></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> <i>London and Westminster Review</i>, July, 1838, p. 321.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">4</span></a> Article in <i>Journal des D&eacute;bats</i>, 7 November, 1846, reprinted in <i>L'Angleterre
+au Seizi&egrave;me Si&egrave;cle</i>, ed. 1879, p. 136.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">5</span></a> <i>Montaigne</i> (S&eacute;rie des <i>Grands Ecrivains Fran&ccedil;ais</i>), 1895, p. 105.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">6</span></a> <i>Moli&egrave;re et Shakspere.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">7</span></a> <i>Shakspere and Classical Antiquity</i>, Eng. tr. p. 297.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">8</span></a> See this point discussed in the <i>Free Review</i> of July, 1895: and compare
+the lately published essay of Mr. John Corbin, on <i>The Elizabethan Hamlet</i>,
+(Elkin Matthews, 1895).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">9</span></a> <i>Hamlet</i>, Act V, scene 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">10</span></a> Book I, Essay 33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">11</span></a> <i>Advice</i> in Florio.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">12</span></a> B. III, Ch. 8. <i>Of the art of conferring.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">13</span></a> B. III, Ch. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">14</span></a> Act II, Sc. 1, 144.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">15</span></a> Book I, ch. II, <i>end</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">16</span></a> Book I, ch. 23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">17</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">18</span></a> Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this confused line. The
+original <i>Et male consultis pretium est: prudentia fallax</i>&mdash;is sufficiently
+close to Shakspere's phrase.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">19</span></a> "O heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason" (Act I, Scene 2.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">20</span></a> Act II, Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">21</span></a> Act IV, Scene 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">22</span></a> Act IV, Scene 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">23</span></a> See Furniss's Variorum edition of <i>Hamlet, in loc.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">24</span></a> B. I. Chap. 19; Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">25</span></a> B. II, Chap. 4; Ed. cited, p. 382.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">26</span></a> B. II. Chap. 12; <i>Ibid</i>, p. 459.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">27</span></a> B. II. Chap. 33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">28</span></a> <i>Shakespere and Montaigne</i>, 1884, p. 88.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">29</span></a> B. III, Chap. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">30</span></a> Act III, Scene 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">31</span></a> B. I, ch. 22.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">32</span></a> Act II, Scene 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">33</span></a> <i>Othello</i>, Act II, Scene 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">34</span></a> B. I, ch. 40, "That the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the
+opinion we have of them."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">35</span></a> B. I, ch. 50.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">36</span></a> B. I, ch. 22.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">37</span></a> B. III, ch. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">38</span></a> Act V, Scene 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">39</span></a> 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 observed when writing
+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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">40</span></a> Act I, Scene 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">41</span></a> B. II, Chap. 33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">42</span></a> It is further relevant to note that in the essay <i>Of Drunkenness</i> (ii. 2)
+Montaigne observes that "drunkenness amongst others appeareth to me a
+gross and brutish vice," that "the worst estate of man is where he loseth
+the knowledge and government of himself," and that "the grossest and
+rudest nation that liveth amongst us at this day, is only that which keepeth
+it in credit." The reference is to Germany: but Shakspere in <i>Othello</i> (Act
+II, Sc. 3) makes Iago pronounce the English harder drinkers than either
+the Danes or the Hollanders; and the lines:
+</p>
+<div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"This heavy-headed revel, east and west,</span>
+<span class="i0">Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations;</span>
+<span class="i0">They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase,</span>
+<span class="i0">Soil our addition."</span>
+</div>
+</div><p>
+might also be reminiscent of Montaigne, though of course there is nothing
+peculiar in such a coincidence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">43</span></a> B. III, Chap. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">44</span></a> B. III, Chap. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">45</span></a> B. III, Chap. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">46</span></a> B. III, Chap. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">47</span></a> B. III, Chap. 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">48</span></a> B. I, Chap. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">49</span></a> B. III, Chap. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">50</span></a> B. I, Chap. 40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">51</span></a> B. II, Chap. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">52</span></a> B. II, Chap. 18.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">53</span></a> <i>De Officus</i> i, 4: <i>cf.</i> 30.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">54</span></a> 1534, 1558, 1583, 1600. See also the compilation entitled <i>A Treatise of
+Morall Philosophie</i> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">55</span></a> Mr. Feis makes this attribution.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">56</span></a> B. II, Chap. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">57</span></a> This may fairly be argued, perhaps, even of the somewhat close parallel,
+noted by Mr. Feis, between Laertes' lines (I, 3):
+</p>
+<div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"For nature, crescent, does not grow alone</span>
+<span class="i0">In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes</span>
+<span class="i0">The inward service of the mind and soul</span>
+<span class="i0">Grows wide withal,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the <i>Apology</i>
+</p>
+<div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i01">"The mind is with the body bred, we do behold.</span>
+<span class="i0">It jointly grows with it, it waxeth old."</span>
+</div>
+</div><p>
+Only the slight coincidence of the use of the (then familiar) verb "wax" in
+both passages could suggest imitation in the case of such a well-worn
+commonplace.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">58</span></a> See some cited at the close of this essay in another connection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">59</span></a> B. II, Chap. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">60</span></a> Act IV, Scene 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">61</span></a> "<i>Le monde est un branloire perenne</i>" (Book III, Essay 2). Florio translates
+that particular sentence: "The world runs all on wheels" a bad
+rendering.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">62</span></a> B. III, Chap. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">63</span></a> B. II, Chap. 17.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">64</span></a> 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.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">65</span></a> <i>Varia Historia</i>, XII, 23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">66</span></a> The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in Aristotle,
+<i>Eudemian Ethics</i>, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii.
+&sect; 1) gives it further currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">67</span></a> B. II, Chap. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">68</span></a> B. II, Chap. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">69</span></a> Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">70</span></a> <i>The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy</i>, 1893, p. 80-5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">71</span></a> Actus III, 865-866.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">72</span></a> Actus IV, 1526-7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">73</span></a> This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in Doering's edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">74</span></a> See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, <i>in loc.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">75</span></a> Yet again, in Marston's <i>Insatiate Countess</i>, the commentators have
+noticed the same sentiment.
+</p>
+<div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i16">"Death,</span>
+<span class="i0">From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>
+It was in fact a poetic commonplace.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">76</span></a> Act 5, Scene 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">77</span></a> Act v, sc. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">78</span></a> I, 22.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">79</span></a> 2 <i>H. IV.</i>, iv. 3</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">80</span></a> ii. 2</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">81</span></a> ii. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">82</span></a> So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a desertion of one's post
+without the deity's permission is first found, in English literature, in
+Sidney, and he would find it in Montaigne's essay on the <i>Custom of the Isle
+of Cea</i> (edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 367).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">83</span></a> When this is compared with the shorter speech of similar drift in the
+anonymous play of <i>Edward III</i>. ("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 elaboration
+constitutes a special resemblance between the speech in Shakspere and
+the passages in Montaigne</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">84</span></a> <i>Apology of Raimond Sebonde.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">85</span></a> ii, 6, <i>Of Exercise or Practice</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">86</span></a> <i>Apology</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">87</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, near end.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">88</span></a> <i>On Isis and Osiris</i>, c. 26.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">89</span></a> Canto v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">90</span></a> Canto xxxii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">91</span></a> It would seem to be from those early monkish legends that the medi&aelig;val
+Inferno was built up. The torture of cold was the northern contribution to
+the scheme. Compare Warton, <i>History of English Poetry</i>, sec. 49, and
+Wright's <i>Saint Patrick's Purgatory</i>, 1844, p. 18.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">92</span></a> <i>Paradise Lost</i>, B. II., 587-603.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">93</span></a> Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">94</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> p. 621.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">95</span></a> Act iv., sc. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">96</span></a> iii. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">97</span></a> B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. <i>Cf.</i> vi. 2, 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">98</span></a> B. v, cc. 22-25.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">99</span></a> ii. 32.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">100</span></a> The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his <i>Essays on Shakspere</i> (Eng. tr.,
+p. 15), to show that the <i>Tempest</i> was written about 1604, seem to me to possess
+no weight whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of Prospero
+in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the Earl of Stirling's
+<i>Darius</i> must have been written immediately after the publication of that
+work. The argument is (1) that Shakspere must have seen <i>Darius</i> when it
+came out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or never.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">101</span></a> Act v, sc. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">102</span></a> i, 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">103</span></a> ii, 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">104</span></a> Act i, sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">105</span></a> Act iv. sc. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">106</span></a> i, 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">107</span></a> <i>Hippolytus</i>, 615 (607).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">108</span></a> See the Prologue to <i>Every Man in His Humour</i>, first ed., preserved by
+Gifford.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">109</span></a> The 29th.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">110</span></a> See his <i>Characteristics of English Poets</i>, 2nd. ed. p. 222.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">111</span></a> The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove Shakspere classically
+learned is that made in the <i>Critital Observations on Shakspere</i> (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 congenially
+criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction
+and syntax are peculiarly unconvincing.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">112</span></a> 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 pertinence
+of his remarks, proceeds to say (<i>Shakspere and Classical Antiquity</i>,
+Eng. trans, p. 83) 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&mdash;was eaten up with vanity." This is in its way as unjust
+as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has misunderstood Farmer's tone,
+which is one of banter against, not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly
+ascribed to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics.
+Towards Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative&mdash;and in the preface
+to the second edition of his essay he wrote: "Shakspere wanted not
+the stilts of languages to raise him above all other men."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">113</span></a> Ch. iv. of vol. cited.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">114</span></a> <i>The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy</i>, pp. 66-67.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">115</span></a> <i>Hercules Furens</i>, ad fin. (1324-1329.).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">116</span></a> <i>Hippolytus</i>, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">117</span></a> <i>Choephori</i>, 63-65.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">118</span></a> Carm. lxxxviii, <i>In Gellium</i>. See the note in D&oelig;ring's edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">119</span></a> <i>Gerusalemme</i>, xviii, 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">120</span></a> <i>The Insatiate Countess</i>, published in 1613.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">121</span></a> <i>Hamlet</i>, Act iv. sc. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">122</span></a> <i>Agamemnon</i>, 152-153.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">123</span></a> ii, 3 (near beginning.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">124</span></a> <i>Hercules Furens</i>, Act. V. 1261-2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">125</span></a> Act iv, Sc. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">126</span></a> <i>Hercules Furens</i>, 1258-61.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">127</span></a> <i>Macbeth</i>, Act v, Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">128</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> Act iv, Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">129</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i> Act i, sc. 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">130</span></a> B. ii. ch. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">131</span></a> Tschischwitz, <i>Shakspere-Forschungen</i>, i, 1868, S. 52.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">132</span></a> "Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere Brunos Komodie
+nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie enth&auml;lt so masslose Obsc&ouml;nitaten,
+dass Shakspere an seinen st&auml;rksten Stellen daneben fast jungfr&auml;ulich
+erscheint" (Work cited, S. 52).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">133</span></a> Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's translation, so far as
+syntax permits.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">134</span></a> Act i, Sc. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">135</span></a> Work cited, Sc. 59.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">136</span></a> See Frith's <i>Life of Giordano Bruno</i>, 1889, pp. 121-128.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">137</span></a> Act v, Sc. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">138</span></a> Cited by Noack, art. <i>Bruno</i>, in <i>Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">139</span></a> Act i, Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">140</span></a> Work cited, p. 90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">141</span></a> 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 necessary steps; and that the work of
+Mr. Appleton Morgan, President of the New York Shakspere Society,
+entitled <i>Shakspere in Fact and Criticism</i> (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 ourselves, whose
+moods and veins were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings, employments,
+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 conception
+of Shakspere as an organism in an environment was first closely
+approached in the present century by French critics, as Guizot 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
+<i>Hamlet</i>, as an incoherent whole resulting from the putting of new cloth
+into an old garment, was first reached by the German R&uuml;melin (<i>Shakspere
+Studien</i>); and that the structural anomalies of <i>Hamlet</i> as an acting play
+were first clearly put by the German Benedix (<i>Die Shakspereomanie</i>) these
+two critics thus making amends for much vain discussion of <i>Hamlet</i> by
+their countrymen before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the
+man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America. The admirable
+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 <i>William Shakspere: a Study in Elizabethan Literature</i>
+(New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook and appreciation, points to
+decided progress in rational Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the
+<i>Shakspere Primer</i> of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently scientific
+throughout.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">142</span></a> <i>Life of Shakspere</i>, 1886, p. 128.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">143</span></a> See Mr. Appleton Morgan's <i>Shakspere's Venus and Adonis: a Study in
+Warwickshire Dialect</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">144</span></a> Professor Dowden notes in his <i>Shakspere Primer</i> (p. 12) that before
+1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe, the theatrical lessee, vary from
+&pound;4 to &pound;8, and not till later did it rise as high as &pound;20 for a play by a popular
+dramatist.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">145</span></a><p>Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;&mdash;
+</p><div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But thou art all my art, and dost advance</span>
+<span class="i0">As high as learning my rude ignorance.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">146</span></a> <i>Life of Shakspere</i>, pp. 29, 128.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">147</span></a> See it in his <i>Life of Shakspere</i>, pp. 120-124. Mr. Fleay's theory, though
+perhaps the best "documented" of all, has received little attention in comparison
+with Mr. Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">148</span></a> Only in Chaucer (<i>e.g.</i>, <i>The Book of the Duchess</i>) do we find before his
+time the successful expression of the same perception; and Chaucer counted
+for almost nothing in Elizabethan letters.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">149</span></a> See Fleay's <i>Life of Shakspere</i>, pp. 130-1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">150</span></a> Cp. the <i>Essays</i>, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol. ii, pp. 40, 231.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">151</span></a> <i>Essays</i>, i, 25; <i>cf.</i> i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i, pp. 304, 429.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">152</span></a> ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">153</span></a> ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">154</span></a> <i>Pens&eacute;es Diverses.</i> Less satisfying is the further <i>pens&eacute;e</i> in the same collection:&mdash;"Les
+quatre grand po&euml;tes, Platon, <i>Malebranche</i>, <i>Shaftesbury</i>, Montaigne."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">155</span></a> Edition cited, i, 622-623.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">156</span></a> <i>Port Royal</i>, 4i&egrave;me &eacute;dit., ii. 400, <i>note</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">157</span></a> B. iii, Chap. 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">158</span></a> "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 Rochefoucauld,
+<i>Pens&eacute;e</i> 104.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">159</span></a> B. iii, Chap. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">160</span></a> i, Chap. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">161</span></a> <i>L'Angleterre au Seizi&egrave;me Si&egrave;cle</i>, p. 133.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">162</span></a> This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms even of Mr. Lowell
+and Mr. Dowden.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">163</span></a> <i>Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's</i> [<i>sic</i> throughout book] <i>gegen
+die skeptische und cosmopolitische Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne</i>,
+von G. F. Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">164</span></a> B. i, Chap. 26.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">165</span></a> It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in Whetstone's
+<i>Promos and Cassandra</i>; and there was probably an intermediate drama.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">166</span></a> Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">167</span></a> <i>Oxford Essays</i>, p. 279. Sterling, from his Christian-Carlylese point of
+view, declared of Montaigne that "All that we find in him of Christianity
+would be suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral
+beings" (<i>London and Westminster Review</i>, July, 1838, p. 340.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">168</span></a> Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he added many safeguarding
+clauses in the later editions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">169</span></a> See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, August,
+1880.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">170</span></a> Art. cited, <i>end</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">171</span></a> Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to <i>Leopold</i> Shakspere p.
+lxxxvii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">172</span></a> Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion goes no further.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">173</span></a> See the passage cited above in section iii in connection with <i>Measure for
+Measure</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">174</span></a> Act iv., Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">175</span></a> Act i, Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">176</span></a> B. i, Chap. 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">177</span></a> B. i, Chap. 30.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">178</span></a> Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">179</span></a> <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 477-478.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">180</span></a> <i>Here</i>, it may be said, there is a trace of the influence of Bruno's philosophy;
+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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">181</span></a> Fleay's <i>Life</i>, pp. 138, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">182</span></a> B. i, Chap. 42.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">183</span></a> B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i, 501.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">184</span></a> <i>Midsummer Nights Dream</i>, Act ii. Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">185</span></a> See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">186</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps, <i>Outlines of the Life of Shakspere</i>, 5th ed., p. 175.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">187</span></a> I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless difficulty on this
+head. In his <i>Shakspere in Fact and Criticism</i>, 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 single 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 published as <i>his</i> the existing mass, so largely made up of
+other men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after his
+death, being simply bent on making money.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">188</span></a> Sonnet 110. Compare the next.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">189</span></a> B. ii, Chap. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">190</span></a> B. i, Chap. 38.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">191</span></a> 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" (<i>Characteristics</i>, as cited, p. 220). As the first 126
+sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take those remaining as of later
+date.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">192</span></a> 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 subjection
+and constraint." "No man did ever prepare himself to quit the
+world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I shall do. The
+deadest deaths are the best"</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">193</span></a> ii, 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">194</span></a> iii, 11.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">195</span></a> iii, 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">196</span></a> 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."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">197</span></a> iii, 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">198</span></a> Act ii, Sc. 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">199</span></a> iii, 9.</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>BY THE SAME AUTHOR.</h3>
+
+<p class="three">BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: A Study in Sociology.</p>
+
+<p class="three">THE SAXON AND THE CELT: A Study in Sociology.</p>
+
+<p class="three">ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD: New Series.</p>
+
+<p class="three">MODERN HUMANISTS.</p>
+
+<p class="three">THE FALLACY OF SAVING: A Study in Economics.</p>
+
+<p class="three">THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: A Study in Economics.</p>
+
+<p class="three">CHRIST AND KRISHNA: A Study in Mythology. Etc. Etc.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h2>THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED,</h2>
+
+<h4>16, John Street, Bedford Row, London, W.C.</h4>
+
+<hr style='width: 20%;' />
+
+<h5>Now Ready&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2s. 6d. net.</h5>
+
+<h4><b>THE BLIGHT OF RESPECTABILITY</b>.</h4>
+
+<h4><i>An Anatomy of the Disease and a Theory of Curative
+Treatment.</i></h4>
+
+<h5><span class="smcap">By Geoffrey Mortimer</span>.</h5>
+
+
+<h4><b>PRESS OPINIONS</b>.</h4>
+
+<p><i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, <span class="smcap">May</span> 31, 1897:</p>
+<p>"... That, of a surety, is an unpleasant indictment;
+and, having thus genially introduced himself to
+his reader, the author goes bald-headed for Mrs. Grundy,
+Mr. Podsnap, and public opinion as voiced according to
+the oracles of Mrs. Smith and Brown, of Little Muddleton
+Road, and for all the cherished fetishes of
+Suburbia."</p>
+
+<p><i>Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper</i>, <span class="smcap">May</span> 30, 1897:<br />
+"To persons who like hard hitting, vigorous English
+levelled at the cant of Grundyism, this book will come
+as a great treat."</p>
+
+<p><i>Weekly Times and Echo</i>, <span class="smcap">May</span> 30, 1897:
+
+"'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer,
+is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps,
+than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>where one would least expect to find them."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<h5>Now Ready&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;8s. 6d. net.</h5>
+
+<h4><b>THE SAXON AND THE CELT</b>.</h4>
+
+<h5><span class="smcap">By John M. Robertson</span>.</h5>
+
+
+
+<h4><b>PRESS OPINIONS</b>.</h4>
+
+
+<p><i>Daily Chronicle</i>:</p>
+<p>Although the title of this book defines its scope, it
+does not indicate its main purpose. That is to show
+that the Celtic race has been misrepresented by a number
+of historians, from Mommsen to Froude, as incapable
+of self-government; and to prove, by inference,
+its fitness for Home Rule.... The major argument is
+based by Mommsen and his school on the assumption of
+permanent distinctions among races; and therefore Mr.
+Robertson applies himself, with a large measure of success,
+to the task of showing that the theory of innate
+persistent qualities marking off one people from another
+has no ethnological justification.... Mr. Robertson
+is able to make short and easy work of the loose writing
+which sums up those (imaginary) characters in epithet
+or epigram.... Mr. Robertson's lively style and
+happy allusiveness keep the reader interested to the
+end...</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<h5>Just published, 10s. net,</h5>
+<h4><b>PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHY</b></h4>
+<h4><i>AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.</i></h4>
+
+<h5>By <span class="smcap">Hugh Mortimer Cecil</span>.</h5>
+
+<h4><b>PRESS OPINIONS.</b></h4>
+<p><i>The Sun</i>, <span class="smcap">March</span> 31, 1897:</p>
+<p>The author of "Pseudo-Philosophy" handles his
+weapons well, and seems to us in many instances to
+occupy positions which, with our present human intelligence,
+are almost unassailable. On the other hand, of
+course, champions of orthodoxy, as a rule, frankly
+admit that some of their tenets and the justice of
+certain aspects of the divine policy cannot be comprehended
+by the natural man. But Mr. Cecil's strong
+feelings occasionally carry him too far, as when in the
+preface he seems to use "religious obscurantism" as a
+synonym for religion generally. The former may have
+been opposed to social progress, as he says. To contend
+that the same charge will stand against the latter
+is only to ignore the fact, if not indeed the law, that
+the great social awakenings have almost invariably followed
+hard upon the great religious revivals.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Montaigne and Shakspere, by John M. Robertson
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Montaigne and Shakspere, by John M. Robertson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Montaigne and Shakspere
+
+Author: John M. Robertson
+
+Release Date: May 20, 2008 [EBook #25535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
++-----------------------------------------+
+| Transcribers note: Old spellings of the |
+| words have been retained as well as the |
+| doubtful use of colons instead of       |
+| semicolons in many places for the sake  |
+| of fidelity to the original text.       |
++-----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE
+
+BY
+
+JOHN M. ROBERTSON
+
+LONDON
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED
+16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C.
+1897
+
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+MONTAIGNE AND SHAKSPERE
+
+
+For a good many years past the anatomic study of Shakspere, of which a
+revival seems now on foot, has been somewhat 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 iconoclasts 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 psychology 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
+history was verily being made. Our sensations, it seemed, might be as
+those of our elders had been over Mr. Collier's emendated folio, and
+the 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."[1] 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 interesting of all problems
+concerning Shakspere. Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi--a host
+of peculiarly modern problem-makers have been exorcising 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 the French only, not having compared the
+translation. The first thought of students was to connect the passage
+with Ben Johnson's allusion in VOLPONE[2] to frequent "stealings from
+Montaigne" 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 question. 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 celebrated
+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 nearly a
+Montaigne, lifted to a higher eminence, and agitated by more striking
+circumstances and a severer destiny, and altogether a somewhat more
+passionate structure of man."[3] In 1846, again, Philarete Chasles, an
+acute and original critic, citing the 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 CORIOLANUS.
+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 Montaigne."[4] 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 propositions of M.
+Chasles, so far as I am aware, have never been supported by evidence.
+Nevertheless, the general fact of a frequent reproduction 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 of the Essays of Montaigne from which Shakspere had
+apparently received suggestions, and instanced one or two cases in which
+actual peculiarities of phrase in Florio's translation of the Essays are
+adopted by him, in addition to a peculiar 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 translation, 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
+development. 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 Shakspere 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 greatest of
+critical problems--comes within the general disregard for serious
+criticism, noticeable among us of late years. And the 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 Montaigne. Not only does he undertake to show
+in dead earnest what Sterling had vaguely suggested as conceivable, that
+Shakspere meant Hamlet to represent Montaigne, but he strenuously 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 converts, 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, seeing how much
+intelligent study has been given of late by French critics to both
+Shakspere and Montaigne. The influence is recognised; but here again it
+is only cursorily traced. The latest study of Montaigne is that of M.
+Paul Stapfer, 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. Shakspere appreciated him (_le
+  goutait_); 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, marvellously vain, various and changeful, were
+  perhaps not unconnected with (_peut etre pas etrangeres a_)
+  the conception of HAMLET. The author of the scene of the
+  grave-diggers must have felt the savour and retained the
+  impression 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 translation 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."[5]
+
+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 work[6] compared Shakspere with a French
+classic critically enough, 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 supposition, quite unjustified by the few
+traces in his writings of his having read the Essays."[7] But that
+verdict was passed without due scrutiny. The influence of Montaigne on
+Shakspere was both wider and deeper than M. Stapfer has suggested; 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 ignorantly adored is a mere dubious mystery; Shakspere
+followed up and comprehended, step by step, albeit never wholly
+revealed, becomes more remarkable, more profoundly interesting, as he
+becomes more intelligible. We are embarked, not on a quest for
+plagiarisms, but on a study of the growth of a wonderful mind. And in
+the 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 sociological truth
+that such contacts of cultures are the very life of civilisation.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+The first requirement in the study, obviously, is an exact statement of
+the coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. 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 gainsaying 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 number 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 paraphrase in the TEMPEST, from the essay OF
+CANNIBALS; and left absolutely unsupported his assertion as to HAMLET,
+OTHELLO, and CORIOLANUS. It is necessary to produce proofs, and to look
+narrowly to dates. Florio's translation, though licensed in 1601, was
+not published till 1603, 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 doubt was, we cannot
+suppose him to have at this stage completed his refashioning of the
+older play, which is undoubtedly the substratum of his.[8] We must
+therefore keep closely in view the divergencies between this text and
+that of the Second Quarto, printed in 1604, in which the transmuting
+touch of Shakspere 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 Montaigne
+in the original. But as his possession of the translation is made
+certain by the preservation 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 dispute, it is on Florio's translation that we must
+proceed.
+
+
+I. In order to keep all the evidence in view, we may first of all
+collate once more the passage in the TEMPEST with that in the Essays
+which it unquestionably follows. In Florio's translation, 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:
+
+ "I' the commonwealth 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 the direct transcription here, where the
+dramatist is but incidentally playing with Montaigne's idea, proceeding
+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 coincidences of phrase.
+Correspondences of thought which in themselves do not establish their
+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."[9]
+
+I pointed out in 1885 that this expression, which does not occur in the
+First Quarto HAMLET, corresponds very closely with the theme of
+Montaigne's essay, THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES MET WITHALL IN PURSUIT OF
+REASON,[10] in which occurs the phrase, "Fortune has more judgment[11]
+than we," a translation from Menander. But Professor 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 identification. Reading 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 passage in the
+Essays:--[12] "My consultation 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
+coincidence than is presented in the passage cited by Mr. Feis from the
+essay OF PHYSIOGNOMY:--[13] "Therefore do our designs so often
+miscarry.... The heavens are angry, and I may say envious of the
+extension and large privilege we ascribe to human wisdom, 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,[14] 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
+  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 _Daemon_ of Socrates were peradventure a certain
+  impulsion or will which without the advice of his discourse
+  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 himself 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."[15]
+
+  "Even in our counsels and deliberations, some chance or good
+  luck must needs be joined to them; for whatsoever our
+  wisdom can effect is no great matter."[16]
+
+  "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 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."[17] 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,[18]
+  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 commonplace, 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 found justified by the
+evidence, and the idea in that passage being exactly coincident with
+Montaigne's, while the above lines are only partially parallel in
+meaning, we are forced to admit that Shakspere may have been influenced
+by Montaigne 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,[19] 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;[20] while "discourse of thought" appears in
+OTHELLO;[21] and "discourse," in the sense of reasoning faculty, is used
+in Hamlet's last soliloquy.[22] In English literature this use of the
+word seems to be special in Shakspere's period,[23] and it has been
+noted by an admirer as a finely Shaksperean expression. But the
+expression "discourse of reason" occurs at least four times in
+Montaigne's Essays, and in Florio's translation of them: in the
+essay[24] THAT TO PHILOSOPHISE IS TO LEARN HOW TO DIE; again at the
+close of the essay[25] _A demain les affaires_; again in the first
+paragraph of the APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE[26]; and yet again in the
+chapter on THE HISTORY OF SPURINA;[27] and though it seems to be
+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 process of ratiocination.
+
+
+IV. Then again there is the clue of Shakspere's use of the word
+"consummation" in the revised form of the "To be" soliloquy. This, as
+Mr. Feis pointed out,[28] is the word used by Florio as a rendering of
+_aneantissement_ in the speech of Socrates as given by Montaigne in the
+essay[29] OF PHYSIOGNOMY. Shakspere makes Hamlet speak of annihilation
+as "a consummation devoutly to be wished." Florio has: "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 correspondences of phrase so precise
+as to prove reminiscence beyond possibility of dispute; but it is not
+difficult to trace striking correspondences which, though falling short
+of explicit reproduction, inevitably suggest a relation; and these it
+now behoves us to consider. The remarkable 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 Rosencrantz on sedition[30]
+with a passage in Montaigne's essay, OF CUSTOM,[31] we find a somewhat
+close coincidence. In the play Rosencrantz says:
+
+                  "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 ruin."
+
+Florio has:
+
+  "Those who attempt to shake an Estate are commonly 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 like
+  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.
+
+
+VI. The speech of Hamlet,[32] "There is nothing either good or bad but
+thinking makes it so"; and Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or
+thus,"[33] are expressions of a favourite thesis of Montaigne's, to
+which he devotes an entire essay.[34] 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 which we term evil is not so
+  of itself." ... "Every man is either well or ill according as
+  he finds himself."
+
+And in the essay[35] OF DEMOCRITUS AND HERACLITUS there is another close
+parallel:--
+
+  "Therefore let us take no more excuses from external
+  qualities of things. To us it belongeth to give ourselves
+  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
+essay[36] OF CUSTOM, AND NOT TO CHANGE 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 excellent 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 precepts." "The laws of conscience,
+  which we say are born of nature, are born of custom."
+
+Again, in the essay OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL[37] 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 VERONA[38] 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.
+
+
+VIII. A less close but still a noteworthy resemblance is that between
+the passage in which Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
+the veering of his mood from joy in things to disgust with them, and the
+paragraph in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE in which Montaigne 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 altering 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 promontory: 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 like 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 heaven's vaults, that the
+  eternal light of these lamps so fiercely rolling over his
+  head ... were established ... 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 Emperor 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 inclinations, 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 disdainfullest. 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 contrasted ideas of
+human greatness and smallness, and of the splendour of the midnight
+firmament.[39]
+
+
+IX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to Horatio on the point of the
+national vice of drunkenness,[40] 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 essay[41] on THE
+HISTORY OF SPURINA, which discusses at great length a matter of special
+interest to Shakspere--the character of Julius Caesar. In the course of
+the examination Montaigne takes trouble to show that Cato's use of the
+epithet "drunkard" to Caesar could not have been meant literally; that
+the same Cato admitted Caesar's sobriety in the matter of drinking. It is
+after making light of Caesar's faults in other matters of personal
+conduct that the essayist comes 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 only vice
+  (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him the fairest
+  natural and richest ingenuity that ever was, and hath made
+  his memory abominable to all honest minds."
+
+Compare the exquisitely high-strung lines, so congruous in their excited
+rapidity with Hamlet's intensity of expectation, which follow on his
+notable outburst on the subject of drunkenness:
+
+ "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 choose 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 manners; 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 Montaigne.[42] Shakspere's estimate of Caesar, of course,
+diverged from that of the essay.
+
+
+X. I find a certain singularity of coincidence between the words of King
+Claudius on kingship:
+
+ "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[43] OF THE INCOMMODITY 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 but 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 Montaigne.
+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 cannot stand.
+
+
+XI. In Hamlet's soliloquy on the passage of the army of Fortinbras--one
+of the many passages added in the Second Quarto--there is a strong
+general resemblance to a passage in the essay OF DIVERSION.[44] 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
+  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 the 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 pretend 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 trumpets, 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,
+  without substance, overswayeth it up and down."
+
+The thought recurs in the essay, OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL.[45]
+
+  "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-skins?... 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 the idea in Hamlet's lines "rightly to be great," etc., is suggested
+in the essay OF REPENTING,[46] 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 EXPERIENCE[47] there is a sentence 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 there;
+and again, in the essay OF SOLITARINESS[48] we have the picture of the
+soldier fighting furiously 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
+unprofitable, vain, and counterfeit coin that is in use with us."
+
+And yet again the thought crops up in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE:
+
+  "This horror-causing array of so many thousands of armed
+  men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and undaunted 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 peculiar to the revised form of
+the play seems to be an echo of a thought of Montaigne's. At the outset
+of the soliloquy last quoted from, Hamlet says:--
+
+                   "What is a man
+  If his chief good and market of his time,
+  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[49] his small approbation of
+revenge; but the thought itself is there, in the essay[50] 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 commodity?"
+
+Again, there is a passage in the essay OF THE AFFECTION OF FATHERS TO
+THEIR CHILDREN,[51] 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 contrast
+between man and beast is drawn, though not to the same purpose as in the
+speech of Hamlet:--
+
+  "Since it hath pleased God to endow us with some capacity of
+  discourse, that as beasts we should not servilely be
+  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 have a third parallel, with a slight coincidence of terms, in
+the essay[52] 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 instance, there is a classic original, or at
+least a familiar source, in Cicero,[53] where the commonplace of the
+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;[54] 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 easy besides to push the theory of any
+influence too far; and when for instance we find Hamlet saying he fares
+"Of the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-crammed," it would be
+as idle to assume a reminiscence of a passage of Montaigne on the
+chameleon[55] as it would be to derive Hamlet's phrase "A king of shreds
+and patches" from Florio's rendering in the essay[56] OF THE INCONSTANCY
+OF OUR 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."
+
+In the latter case we have a mere coincidence of idiom; in the former a
+proverbial allusion.[57] An uncritical pursuit of such mere accidents of
+resemblance has led Mr. Feis to such enormities as the assertion that
+Shakspere's contemporaries 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 play there are several
+reproductions of ideas in the essays, some of them 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,
+Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own
+assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of
+surface 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 reflection. Some cause there must have been for this
+marked species of development in the dramatist at that particular time:
+and if we find pervading signs of one remarkable new influence, with 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 continues 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 Montaigne's
+sayings on the power of imagination and the possible equivalence of
+dream life and waking life. In his first dialogue with Rosencrantz 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."
+
+The first sentence may be compared with a number in Montaigne,[58] of
+which the following[59] 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 Guildenstern 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:[60] "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.
+
+
+XV. As regards HAMLET, I can find no further parallelisms so direct as
+any of the foregoing, except some to be considered later, in connection
+with the "To be" soliloquy. I do not think it can be made out that, as
+M. Chasles affirmed, Hamlet's words on his friendship for Horatio can be
+traced directly to any of Montaigne's passages on that theme. "It would
+be easy," says M. Chasles, "to show in Shakspere the _branloire
+perenne_[61] of Montaigne, and the whole magnificent passage on
+friendship, which is found reproduced (_se trouve reporte_) in HAMLET."
+The idea of the world as a perpetual mutation 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 independently 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 quem
+nihil fortuna possit_--"to be something unconquered, something 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
+Montaigne'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 to this
+  advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign 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,[62] we have this:
+
+  "We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and
+  dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply
+  ourselves 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 unequal, 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 fortune 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 his rare poise and
+firmness of character;[63] and elsewhere in the essays we find many
+allusions to the ideal of the imperturbable man, which Montaigne has in
+the above cited passages brought into connection with his ideal of
+friendship. 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 resemblance between the "To be or not
+to be" soliloquy and the general tone of Montaigne on the subject 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 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 MEASURE. What really seems to subsist in
+the "To be" soliloquy, after a careful scrutiny, is a series of echoes
+of single thoughts; but there is the difficulty that some of these occur
+in the earlier form of the soliloquy in the First Quarto, a circumstance
+which tends--though not necessarily[64]--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 resemblance between the phrase "take arms against a
+sea of troubles" and a passage in Florio's version of the same essay,
+which has somehow been overlooked in the 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."
+
+There arises here the difficulty that Shakspere's line had been
+satisfactorily traced to AElian's[65] story of the Celtic practice of
+rushing into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons; and the matter
+must, I think, be left open until it can he ascertained whether the
+statement concerning the Celts was available to Shakspere in any
+translation or citation.[66]
+
+Again, the phrase "Conscience doth make cowards of us all" is very like
+the echo of two passages in the essay[67] OF CONSCIENCE: "Of such
+marvellous working power is the sting of conscience: which often
+induceth us to bewray, to accuse, and to combat ourselves"; "which as it
+doth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it 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, makes 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[68] on A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA, which contains a
+passage 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 "Conscience makes cowards of us
+all" existed in the soliloquy as it stood in the First Quarto, while the
+gist of the idea is actually found twice in a previous play, where it
+has a proverbial ring.[69] And "the _hope_ of something after death"
+figures in the First Quarto also.
+
+Finally, there are other sources than Montaigne for parts of the
+soliloquy, sources nearer, too, than those which have been pointed to in
+the Senecan tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr. Cunliffe has pointed
+out,[70] 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 put:
+
+ "Verum est? an timidos fabula decepit,
+  Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?"
+
+It is true that the choristers in Seneca pronounce definitely against
+the future life:
+
+ "Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil....
+  Rumores vacui verbaque inania,
+  Et par sollicito 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 undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller
+returns." In the HERCULES FURENS[71] we have:
+
+ "Nemo ad id sero venit, unde nunquam
+  Quum semel venit potuit reverti;"
+
+and in the HERCULES OETAEUS[72] there is the same thought:
+
+               "regnum canis inquieti
+  Unde 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 tenebricosum
+  Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam."[73]
+
+And though there was in Shakspere's day no English translation of
+Catullus, the commentators long ago noted[74] that in Sandford's
+translation 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 anything cited from the
+classics.
+
+Finally, in Marlowe's EDWARD II.,[75] written before 1593, we have:
+
+               "Weep not for Mortimer,
+  That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
+  Goes to discover countries yet unknown."[76]
+
+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 translations 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 consider it unlikely, were it
+only because the Montaigne 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 the MERCHANT OF
+VENICE[77] recalls the passage on the subject in Montaigne's essay of
+CUSTOM;[78] but then the original source is Cicero, IN SOMNIUM
+SCIPIONIS, which had been translated into English in 1577. (2)
+Falstaff's rhapsody on the virtues of sherris[79] recalls a passage in
+the essay OF DRUNKENNESS,[80] but then Montaigne avows that what he says
+is the common doctrine of wine-drinkers. (3) Montaigne cites[81] 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 HAMLET, we are bound
+to concede the doubtfulness of any apparent influence before the Second
+Quarto. At most we may say that both of Hamlet's soliloquies which touch
+on suicide evidently owe something to the discussions set up by
+Montaigne's essays.[82]
+
+
+XVII. In the case of the Duke's exhortation to Claudio in MEASURE FOR
+MEASURE, on the contrary, the whole speech may be said to be a synthesis
+of favourite propositions of Montaigne. 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 him 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 dangerous 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
+  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 unavoidable?... 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?...
+
+  " ... 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 RAYMOND
+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 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 the 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 valiant,
+  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,
+  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, affection, limbs, 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."[83]
+
+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
+  offences, 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...."[84]
+
+  "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...."[85]
+
+  "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 whatever is before
+  and behind this moment, and also a good part of this moment,
+  "[86]
+
+  "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."[87]
+
+Compare finally the 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 Montaigne's favourites. And the
+view that Shakspere 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
+likewise an echo 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 superstition 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,[88] of the punishment of the offending daemons, who
+were whirled between earth and air and sun and sea; but there is no
+suggestion in that passage that 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,[89] and of traitors punished by
+freezing in the ninth,[90] 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,[91] whence (rather than from Dante) Milton drew his idea
+of an alternate torture.[92] But there again, the correspondence is only
+partial; whereas in Montaigne's APOLOGY OF RAIMOND 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 Pythagoras is
+  made author ... which is that souls at their departure from
+  us did but pass and roll from one to another body, from a
+  lion to a horse, from a horse 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 themselves unto their first
+  bodies.... Behold her (the soul's) progress elsewhere: He
+  that hath lived well reconjoineth 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
+  customs, and shall never see an end of his punishments until
+  ... by virtue of reason he have deprived himself of those
+  gross, stupid, and elementary qualities that were in him....
+  They (the Epicureans) demand, what order 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 staved 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...."[93]
+
+It is at a short distance from this passage that we find the suggestion
+of a frozen purgatory:
+
+  "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."[94]
+
+And over and above this peculiar correspondence between the 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, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
+  Herself the glory of a creditor,
+  Both thanks and use...."
+
+Here we have once more a characteristically Shaksperean transmutation
+and development of the idea rather than a reproduction; and the same
+appears when we compare the admirable lines of the poet with a homiletic
+sentence from the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND 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[95]:
+
+ "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 conclusive as to the time of
+composition of the plays, there is so much of identity between the
+thought in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and a notable passage in
+TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, 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[96]:
+
+                  "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
+BENEFICIIS[97] throws out the germ 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."[98] 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; nec 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 foregone
+  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 Montaigne that sent him to Seneca,
+to whom Montaigne[99] avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot
+tell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we
+have here another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on
+which Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point
+or initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the
+point of contact with Montaigne in HAMLET, where the saying that reason
+is implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many
+correspondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is
+more subtly and deeply developed in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and still more
+subtly and philosophically in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. The fact of the
+process of development 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,[100] when VOLPONE 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 contemporary 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 Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are
+thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Othello's phrase--
+
+ "I saw it not, thought it not, it harmed not me....
+  He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen,
+  Let him not know it, and he's not robb'd at all."
+
+--a philosophical commonplace which compares with various passages in
+the Fortieth Essay.
+
+(b) In LEAR (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]--
+
+ "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
+SOBERLY TO MEDDLE WITH THE JUDGING OF THE DIVINE LAWS,[102] where
+Montaigne 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
+  incomprehensible motives of its works."
+
+This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; 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 coincidence between a passage in
+the essay[103] of JUDGING OF OTHERS' DEATH and the speech of Edmund[104]
+on the subject of stellar influences. In the 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 protest
+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 followeth 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 Caesar'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 our own interests
+  disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least
+  actions. 'There is no such society between 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; drunkards, 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[105]:
+
+ "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 essay[106] OF SADNESS, in which
+Montaigne 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 Lord Raisciac looked on his
+  dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having
+  suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark
+  dead to the ground."
+
+The parallel here, such as it is, is at least much more vivid than that
+drawn between Shakspere's lines and one of Seneca:
+
+  Curae leves loquuntur: ingentes stupent[107]--"Light
+  troubles 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 question. 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 Montaigne 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 prepossessed--as even
+Mr. Fleay still seems to be--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"[108] 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 Montaigne as we have seen; and it remains to consider what the
+reproduction signifies, as regards Shakspere's mental development.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+But first there has to be asked the question whether the Montaigne
+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[109] 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 confidently decide, too, with Professor Minto,[110]
+that the Eighty-sixth Sonnet, beginning:
+
+  "Was it the full, proud sail of his great verse?"
+
+has reference to Chapman, in whom Shakspere might well see one of his
+most formidable competitors in poetry. But we are here 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 exhaustive 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.
+
+Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakspere (1767) proved for all
+open-minded readers that much of Shakspere's supposed classical
+knowledge was derived from translations alone;[111] and further
+investigation does but establish his general view.[112] Such is the
+effect of M. Stapfer's chapter on Shakspere's Classical Knowledge;[113]
+and the pervading argument of that chapter will be found to hold good as
+against the view suggested, 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 valuable
+research has shown, did much to colour the style and thought of the
+Elizabethan drama, as well as to suggest its themes and shape its
+technique. 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. Cunliffe 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 difficult
+  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
+  Middleton 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 Shakspere we cannot be
+  absolutely certain either way. Professor 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 turn to the generally accepted model of
+  classical tragedy, either in the original or in the
+  translation."[114]
+
+This seems partially inconsistent; and, so far as the evidence from
+particular parallels goes, we are not led to take with any confidence
+the view put in the last sentence. The above-noted parallels between
+Seneca's tragedies and Shakspere'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. Cunliffe is one which, as he notes,
+points to AEschylus as well as to Seneca. The cry of Macbeth:
+
+ "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
+  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:[115]
+
+ "Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis persica
+  Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox
+  Tagusve ibera turbidus gaza fluens,
+  Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
+  Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
+  Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
+  Haerebit altum facinus"
+
+and that of Seneca's Hippolytus:[116]
+
+ "Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,
+  Maeotis undis pontico incumbens mari.
+  Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater
+  Tantum expiarit sceleris."
+
+But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from
+AEschylus,[117] 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 mediaeval. The phrases used were
+already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:
+
+ "Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys
+  Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."[118]
+
+In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] 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. Marston did his best with it, in a play
+which may have been written before, though published after,
+MACBETH[120]:--
+
+ "Although the waves of all the 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 figure 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,"[121]
+
+which he compares with Seneca's
+
+ "Et ferrum et ignis saepe medicinae loco est.
+  Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"[122]
+
+--a passage that may very well be the original
+for the modern oracle about fire and iron--is
+really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates,
+that "Extreme remedies are proper for
+extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be
+more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to
+Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,[123] as translated
+by Florio:
+
+ "To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."
+
+Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's
+
+ "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"
+
+and the sentence of Hercules:
+
+                    "Nemo polluto queat
+  Animo mederi."[124]
+
+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 minister to."[125]
+
+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."[126]
+
+and Macbeth'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."[127]
+
+Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the
+versification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a
+lament had 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;"[128]
+
+and
+
+        "We but teach
+  Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
+  To plague the inventor."[129]
+
+--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 the tragedies of
+Seneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a
+deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold 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 industrious 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 Shakspere 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 IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as
+the essayist does[130] over Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what
+death and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself 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 difference 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
+intellectual influence undergone by Shakspere--the theory of Dr. Benno
+Tschischwitz, 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 writings
+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 IL CANDELAJO, Octavio asks the pedant Manfurio,
+"Che e la materia di vostri versi," and the pedant replies, "Litterae,
+syllabae, dictio et oratio, partes propinquae et remotae," on which Octavio
+again asks: "Io dico, quale e il suggetto et il proposito."[131] 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 with Polonius is one of them. And beyond this, Dr. Tschischwitz's
+parallels are flatly unconvincing, or rather they promptly put
+themselves out of court. He admits that nothing else in Bruno's comedy
+recalls anything else in Shakspere;[132] 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 indestructible atoms, and that death is but a transformation, Dr.
+Tschischwitz cites as a reproduction of it Hamlet's soliloquy:
+
+ "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!"
+
+It is difficult to be serious over such a contention; 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 these passages he finds the source or suggestion in one which 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 annihilation 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."[133]
+
+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 reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on
+the 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
+endless 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,[134] Dr. Tschischwitz parallels the speech with a sentence
+in the BESTIA TRIONFANTE, which gives a merely Rabelaisian picture of
+drunken practices.[135] 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
+affirmation:
+
+  "We do not maintain that such expressions are philosophemes,
+  or that Shakspere otherwise went any 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 acquaintance with the atomic philosophy and the
+  writings of the Nolan."
+
+All this belongs to the uncritical method of the German
+Shakspere-criticism of the days before Ruemelin. It is quite possible
+that Shakspere may have heard something of Bruno's theories from his
+friends; and we may be sure that much of Bruno's teaching would have
+profoundly 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,[136] above cited from
+Montaigne. We might again, on Dr. Tschischwitz's lines, trace the
+verses on the "shaping fantasies" of "the lunatic, the lover, and the
+poet," in the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,[137] to such a passage in Bruno
+as this:--
+
+  "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 philosophers in a certain sense
+  painters; the poets, painters and philosophers; the
+  painters, philosophers and poets: true poets, painters, and
+  philosophers love and reciprocally 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."[138]
+
+But since Shakspere does not recognisably echo a passage which 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 the famous passage in
+HENRY V.,[139] 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 REPUBLICA; yet rational criticism must decide
+with M. Stapfer[140] 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 knowledge concerning Shakspere,
+as well 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 important and the most
+potential for suggestion and provocation.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+To have any clear idea, however, of what Montaigne 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 aesthetics
+or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who
+became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played
+in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little
+brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and
+refashioning; 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 rigorously 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 absolutely all the archaeological facts as to
+theatrical life in Shakspere'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.[141] Emerson, it is
+true, protested at the close of his essay that he "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 psychological solidity in the ordinary
+presentment of Shakspere by his admirers. The heresy, of course, merely
+leaps over the difficulty, into absolute irrelevance. Emerson was
+intellectually 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 conceive 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 picking 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 aesthetic and metaphysic syntheses. Where
+Coleridge and Schlegel more or less ingeniously 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 Stratford; son of a
+burgess once prosperous, but destined to sink steadily in the world;
+married at eighteen, under pressure of circumstances, 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 turn for play-acting. To know him as he began
+we must measure him narrowly by his first performances. 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 unaided 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 TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader
+is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections
+that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy
+naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be
+Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable 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 evidence of having been
+refashioned at a later time."[142] These plays, then, with all their
+evidences 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 technical arrangement, are of a homogenous literary
+substance, and can be shown to be the work of a man brought up in the
+Warwickshire dialect,[143] are not even challenged, I believe, by the
+adherents 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 conscious, were
+the uninspired and pitilessly prolix poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and THE
+RAPE OF LUCRECE, the first consisting of some 1,200 lines and the second
+of more than 1,800; one a calculated picture of female concupiscence and
+the 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 commercial 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--inexhaustible flow of
+words and endless observation of concrete detail. Of the countless
+thrilling felicities of phrase and feeling for which Shakspere 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
+contrary, the wearisome succession of stanzas, stretching the succinct
+themes immeasurably beyond all natural fitness and all narrative
+interest, might seem to signalise such a lack of artistic judgment as
+must preclude all great performance; while the apparent plan of
+producing an effect by mere multiplication of words, mere extension of
+description without intension of idea, might seem to prove a lack of
+capacity for any real depth of passion. They were simply manufactured
+poems, consciously constructed for the market, the first designed at the
+same time to secure the patronage of the Maecenas 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
+succeeded 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
+evidence 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 his trade of actor the
+business not merely of playwright 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;[144] 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 accumulations 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
+disappeared. 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 working partner. We are thus dealing with a
+temperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not
+at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness,
+not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for
+acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of minute
+observation, joined with a thoroughly practical or commercial handling
+of the problem of life, in a calling not usually taken-to by
+commercially-minded men. What emerges for us thus far is the conception
+of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate
+circumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, 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 tragedies and tragic comedies, there must concur
+two kinds of life-conditions with those already noted--the fresh
+conditions of deeply-moving experience and of deep intellectual
+stimulus. Without these, such a mind would no more arrive at the highest
+poetic and dramatic capacity than, lacking 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 Venus 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 actor-manager with a good share in the company'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 PLUTARCH, published in 1579, does not seem to have affected his
+literary activity till about the year 1600: and even then the subject of
+JULIUS CAESAR may have been suggested 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 bricklayer's apprentice,
+unwillingly following the craft of his stepfather, sticking obstinately
+all the while to his 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 enthusiastic 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 marriage, with its consequent
+family responsibilities, Shakspere would have allowed himself a little
+more of youthful 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.[145] 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 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,[146]
+that Shakspere had ever been 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 theory[147] as to surmise that the central episode of
+faithless love occurred about 1594. If so, here was enough to deepen and
+impassion 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
+contact with the imaginative literature of the Renaissance, so far as
+then translated, and a psychological training of great though little
+recognised importance to the dramatist. It seems obvious that the
+practice of acting, by a plastic and receptive temperament, capable of
+manifold appreciation, must have counted for much in developing 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 frequently
+idealistic method of portraiture, the verbalism and factitiousness 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[148] 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 convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of
+a rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the 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 attention turned from the physical to the
+psychical. But 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 Falstaff and his group we have a
+roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature
+thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all,
+remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of
+which, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.
+For it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been
+popularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:[149] and what he
+did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty
+of imagination 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 LABOUR 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 that the greater reality of his earlier male historic 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 assimilated body of culture, the English translation by Sir
+Thomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we
+find Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries 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 ROMEO 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 fundamentally unhappy. But in JULIUS
+CAESAR 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 of mutually destroying
+energies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration
+dogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching
+out the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the
+reader; to the master of the 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 organism
+and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond;
+culture that came without search, and could be undergone as
+spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge 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 humanity that could possibly have
+reached him; and he responded to the stimulus with all his energy of
+expression because 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 off 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
+aesthetic platitudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man.
+And if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but
+to reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced
+antiquity with greater accuracy 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 of classic reading might
+have constituted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are
+mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the
+expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive
+reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. 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--speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as
+spontaneously as he breathed--these historic data, which happen to be
+among the most perfectly 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 his own tongue to
+make him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth,
+charm, tenderness, 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 singularly 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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+It is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary
+statement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, 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 CAESAR. 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. Portions 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 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-cultured 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 Rome 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 JULIUS CAESAR and HAMLET, between CORIOLANUS
+and LEAR.
+
+For what was in its nett significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming
+thus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life
+and into Shakspere's ken? Simply 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 enduring 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 impressionist where Petrarch is a framer
+of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also
+is a framer of artificial compositions 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 modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is
+there too English to be significant for all Europe. The high figure of
+Dante is decisively mediaeval: it is the central point in mediaeval
+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 _bonne foi_
+is still sophisticated 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 living nerve. And there is no theme
+on which 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 vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at
+Shakspere'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 influence. A writer
+affects 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 Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in
+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 technical 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 essayist the more we shall
+realise its perennial fascination. The culture-content of Montaigne's
+book is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and
+reflective intelligence; it is the living quintessence of all Latin
+criticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh
+and pungent as the essayist's expression of his special individuality.
+For Montaigne stands out among all the 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,[150] 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 European intelligence, in the age
+when the modern languages first decisively asserted their birthright,
+learned his Latin as a living and not as a dead tongue, and knew Greek
+literature almost solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist who of
+all of his 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 regards 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 Montaigne 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 exercises were to
+turn bad Latin into good.[151] 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,[152] and, refusing to play the
+apprentice where he was accustomed to be master,[153] he declined 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 undulled 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 influence on Shakspere could be so potent as has been above
+asserted. Among those whom we know him to have acted upon in the highest
+degree--setting aside the disputed case of Bacon--are Pascal,
+Montesquieu, Rousseau, Flaubert, Emerson, and Thoreau. In the case of
+Pascal, despite his uneasy assumption that his philosophy 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
+Montaigne, 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 demolish 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 Montaigne's as a
+defence of theism, he could do no more for himself than repeat the
+process, disparaging reason in the very language of the essayist, and
+setting up in his turn his private predilection 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 exhausted convertite instead of a theist of the stately school of
+Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the
+_Pensees_ might never have been written: they represent to-day, for all
+vigilant readers, rather the painful struggles of a wounded intelligence
+to fight down the doubts it has caught from contact with other men's
+thought than any coherent or durable philosophic construction.
+
+It would be little more difficult to show the debt of the _Esprit des
+Lois_ to Montaigne's inspiration, even if we had not Montesquieu's
+avowal that "In most authors I see the man who writes: in Montaigne, the
+man who thinks."[154] That is precisely Montaigne's significance, in
+sociology as in philosophy. His whole activity is a seeking for causes;
+and in the very act of undertaking to "humble reason" he proceeds to
+instruct and re-edify it by endless corrective comparison of facts. To
+be sure, he departed so far from his normal _bonne foi_ as to affect to
+think there could be no certainties while parading 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
+ecclesiastical law he anticipates the age of tolerance; in discussing
+criminal law, the work of Beccaria; in discussing _a priori_ science,
+the protest 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
+  progress, as all other things, so the beliefs, the
+  judgments, the opinions of men, if they have their
+  revolutions, 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 experience nous touchons a la
+  main," _i.e._, nous 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?"[155]
+
+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 for a new inductive system. And in the last essay of
+all he makes a campaign against bad laws, which unsays many of his
+previous sayings on the blessedness of custom.
+
+In tracing his influence elsewhere, it would be hard to point to an
+eminent French prose-writer who has not been affected by him.
+Sainte-Beuve finds[156] 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 recognised 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 Rousseau 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 emphatic denunciations[157] of laws more criminal than the
+crimes they dealt with, he had a deeper inspiration still; in the essay
+on the training of children he had his starting-points for the
+argumentation of _Emile_; and in the whole unabashed 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 essayist 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 Villemain
+suggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his
+pollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La
+Rochefoucauld is thrown out[158] in the essay[159] _De l'utile et de
+l'honneste_; and the most modern-seeming currents of thought, as M.
+Stapfer 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 whose whole work is coloured by
+Montaigne's influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially developing one
+side of Emerson's gospel, may be said to have found it all where Emerson
+found it, in the Essay on Solitude.[160] 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 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. "I remember," he says, telling how
+in his 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 sincerely 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 for style; and no less
+constantly "found himself" in the self-revelation and analysis of the
+essays.
+
+After all these testimonies to Montaigne's seminal virtue, and after
+what we have seen of the special dependence of Shakspere's genius on
+culture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative, 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 CAESAR to HAMLET as
+corresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the
+first play exhibits the concrete perception 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 this is the secret of the whole
+transformation 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 perception; 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
+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 circuitous 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 Shakspere, 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, weariness of
+spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable
+evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic
+spirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred
+suggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a
+self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness of the past.
+Hence an involution rather than an elucidation of the play. There can be
+no doubt that Shakspere, in heightening and deepening the theme, has
+obscured 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 praying murderer to
+heaven. There is no solution of these anomalies: the very state of
+Shakspere'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 o'er" in the sense of making it too intellectual for
+dramatic unity and strict dramatic success. Between these undramatic,
+brooding soliloquies which stand so aloof from the action, but dominate
+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 constituents, 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 framing of
+the play was the poet's perusal of Montaigne's essays. And it would be
+easy to overstate that thesis in such a way as to make it untrue.
+Indeed, M. Chasles has, to my thinking, so overstated it. Had I come to
+his main proposition before realising the infusion of Montaigne's ideas
+in HAMLET, I think I should have felt it to be as excessive in the
+opposite direction as the proposition of Mr. Feis. Says M.
+Chasles:[161]--
+
+  "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 l'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, CLEOPATRA, and JULIUS CAESAR 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 MIRROR OF MARTYRS, 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 be a straining of the evidence to ascribe its
+production, with that of CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, to the
+influence of Montaigne, when every one of these themes was sufficiently
+obtruded on the Elizabethan theatre by North's translation of Amyot's
+PLUTARCH. Any one who will compare CORIOLANUS with the translation in
+North will see that Shakspere has followed 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
+comparison throws a flood of light on Shakspere's mode of procedure; but
+it tells us nothing of his perusal 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 Shakspere beyond HAMLET, as we have seen, lies
+not in the Roman plays, but in MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
+
+There is a misconception involved, again, in M. Chasles' picture of an
+abrupt transition from Shakspere's fantastic youthful method to that of
+HAMLET and the Roman plays. He overlooks the intermediate stages
+represented by such plays as ROMEO AND JULIET, HENRY IV., KING JOHN, the
+MERCHANT OF VENICE, and AS YOU 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 Shakspere's mind is not that
+presented by CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, which with all their
+intense vitality represent rather his marvellous power of reproducing
+impressions than 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 conception 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 developed 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 then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's
+thought to that of Montaigne? 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-witholding of dramatic writers.
+Conceiving all situations, 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 personages, 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
+utterance found in his plays--even in the portions which analytical
+criticism proves to have come 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
+philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to
+realise how such a hopeless 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.
+
+No human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from HAMLET such a
+criticism of Montaigne 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 detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet'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 conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by
+stifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is outside of
+serious discussion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a
+pitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play;
+but to assume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his
+opinions is merely ridiculous. 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 denunciation. 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 withdrawal
+from public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with
+this. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public 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 anywhere else, and would then have married
+Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162]
+And to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the 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[163]: "Hamlet: a
+Drama-with-a-purpose (TENDENZDRAMA) opposing the sceptical and
+cosmopolitan 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; 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 reproduce portions of
+what he had read. We are not entitled to assume that these portions are
+selected as being in agreement with Shakspere's own views: we are here
+limited to saying 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!
+  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+  Than are dreamt of in our philosophy"--
+
+though this may be said to be a summary of the whole drift of
+Montaigne's essay,[164] THAT IT IS FOLLY TO REFER TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD TO
+OUR SUFFICIENCY; and though we are entitled to believe 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 contain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable of sacrificial
+salvation and sacramental forgiveness, we are entitled to infer from
+such a singular negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere rejected the
+Christian theory of things, at least that it formed no part of his
+habitual thinking. It was the special business of the Duke, playing in
+such a character, to speak to Claudio of sin and salvation, of
+forgiveness and absolution. Such a singular omission must at least imply
+disregard on the part of the dramatist. 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;[165] 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 negatively exhibiting his
+opinions.
+
+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 circumspection than has been shown by most of
+Montaigne's critics. The habit of calling him "sceptic," a habit
+initiated by the Catholic 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 purport of the APOLOGY OF
+RAYMOND SEBONDE appears 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,[166]
+besides repeatedly ignoring 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:[167] "His views, both of life and death,
+are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to
+believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously
+of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are
+such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His
+profession of fidelity 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, uncritical of their own creed, affected 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 NATURALIS of
+Sebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a
+feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to
+retaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some
+ill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the
+APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but
+with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour 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 Christian
+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 Marlowe, 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 carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the
+serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception
+of things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, 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?"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's,
+that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic
+serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he
+had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of
+tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE),
+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 comedies mostly from
+others and its tragedies from him. Further, we must assume that the
+gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the 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 overwhelming energy of the element of
+evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate
+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
+admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than
+Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of
+reacting 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,[172] 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 Iago 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 Montaigne's "sceptical"
+passage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral
+purpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in
+which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions,
+gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very
+influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The
+whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in
+stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the
+mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand,
+declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and
+though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious
+stars," and the Duke describe mankind as "servile to all the skiey
+influences," and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] 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 surmise an actual variation of opinion--the
+vivacious 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 steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit
+as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to assiduity, to constancy";[176]
+and the net result of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset 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 Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors,
+Shakspere applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the
+essayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master
+doctrine that we should live "according 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
+Cannibals,[177] 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 ourselves have
+  altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their
+  common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the
+  true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most
+  lively and vigorous;"[178]
+
+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 the APOLOGY,[179] after citing some as arguing 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 creatures," 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 showing, 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 have been reading or re-reading the 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."[180]
+
+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"--
+
+                          "I'll not put
+  The dibble in earth to set one slip of them."
+
+The mind which could thus easily pierce below the 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 VENUS 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 thought 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 evidence which seems
+to show that Shakspere sought zealously,[181] 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
+essay[182] OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG US. The Frenchman's hardy saying[183]
+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 Shakspere would have endorsed it, with his 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 deliberate 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
+question whether his extravagant idealisation and justification of Henry
+V.--which, though it gives so little pause to some of our English
+critics, entitled M. Guizot to call him a mere John 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 compliment,[184] was any more sincere about it
+than Ben Jonson, who would do as much while privately accepting the
+grossest scandal concerning her.[185] It is certainly a remarkable fact
+that Shakspere abstained from joining in the poetic out-cry over her
+death, incurring reproof by his silence.[186]
+
+However all that may have been, we find Shakspere, after his period of
+pessimism, viewing life in a spirit which could be expressed in terms of
+Montaigne's philosophy. He certainly shaped his latter years in
+accordance with the essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no other man in
+Shakspere's theatrical group deliberately turning his back, as he did,
+on the 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 without him. But
+that retirement, rounding with peace the career of manifold and intense
+experience, 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 nothing specially perplexing
+in the matter. Shakspere's personality was an uncommon combination; but
+was not that what should have been looked for? And where, after all, is
+the evidence that he was "not wise for himself"?[187] 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 marvellous in
+their content, were well worth the writing, where enters the "profanity"
+of having written them, or of having acted in them, "for 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:[188]
+
+ "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 Montaigne might
+have been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of
+the final retirement, the 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 Montaigne's
+very words[189]: "My design is to pass quietly, and not laboriously,
+what remains to me of life; 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 essay[190] on
+SOLITUDE:
+
+  "We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether
+  ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish
+  our true liberty, the principal retreat and solitariness,
+  wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long
+  enough for others, live we the remainder of all 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...."
+
+A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells
+of revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and
+exhorts 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, herein before cited.[192]
+
+In perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and
+contemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of
+Montaigne, 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 a pre-existing
+basis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we
+find him picturing, 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 life unto a dream, have
+  happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. When
+  we dream, our soul liveth, 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 doubt whether our thinking
+  and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some
+  kind of sleeping?"[193]
+
+  "Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination
+  will forge me commodities and afford 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
+  yourself, 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."[194]
+
+  " ... 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 impressions from falsehood,
+  by very frivolous appearances."[195]
+
+Again and 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 themselves
+very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be
+remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them 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 furniture 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 like 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
+  And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
+  Leave not a wrack behind. _We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made on_, and our little life
+  Is rounded with a sleep."
+
+In 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 congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained
+oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, 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 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[196]
+as the real "cannibal," 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:[197]
+
+  "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
+  goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I
+  diverted him to ambition."
+
+And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the
+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 Prospero's society; even the
+cursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] 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 sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide, philosopher, and
+friend," who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of
+his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] "I esteem all
+men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman,
+subordinating this national tie to the common and universal." Here, too,
+was not Montaigne the first of the moderns?
+
+  [1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of
+  Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.
+
+  [2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers,
+      I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
+      Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly
+      Almost as much as from Montaignie;
+      He has so modern and facile a vein,
+      Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.
+
+                                           --Act iii. sc. 2.
+
+  [3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.
+
+  [4] Article in _Journal des Debats_, 7 November, 1846,
+  reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, ed. 1879, p.
+  136.
+
+  [5] _Montaigne_ (Serie des _Grands Ecrivains Francais_),
+  1895, p. 105.
+
+  [6] _Moliere et Shakspere._
+
+  [7] _Shakspere and Classical Antiquity_, Eng. tr. p. 297.
+
+  [8] See this point discussed in the _Free Review_ of July,
+  1895: and compare the lately published essay of Mr. John
+  Corbin, on _The Elizabethan Hamlet_, (Elkin Matthews, 1895).
+
+  [9] _Hamlet_, Act V, scene 2.
+
+  [10] Book I, Essay 33.
+
+  [11] _Advice_ in Florio.
+
+  [12] B. III, Ch. 8. _Of the art of conferring._
+
+  [13] B. III, Ch. 12.
+
+  [14] Act II, Sc. 1, 144.
+
+  [15] Book I, ch. II, _end_.
+
+  [16] Book I, ch. 23.
+
+  [17] _Ibid._
+
+  [18] Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this
+  confused line. The original _Et male consultis pretium est:
+  prudentia fallax_--is sufficiently close to Shakspere's
+  phrase.
+
+  [19] "O heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason" (Act
+  I, Scene 2.)
+
+  [20] Act II, Sc. 2.
+
+  [21] Act IV, Scene 2.
+
+  [22] Act IV, Scene 4.
+
+  [23] See Furniss's Variorum edition of _Hamlet, in loc._
+
+  [24] B. I, Chap. 19; Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68.
+
+  [25] B. II, Chap. 4; Ed. cited, p. 382.
+
+  [26] B. II, Chap. 12; _Ibid_, p. 459.
+
+  [27] B. II, Chap. 33.
+
+  [28] _Shakespere and Montaigne_, 1884, p. 88.
+
+  [29] B. III, Chap. 12.
+
+  [30] Act III, Scene 3.
+
+  [31] B. I, ch. 22.
+
+  [32] Act II, Scene 2.
+
+  [33] _Othello_, Act II, Scene 3.
+
+  [34] B. I, ch. 40, "That the taste of goods or evils doth
+  greatly depend on the opinion we have of them."
+
+  [35] B. I, ch. 50.
+
+  [36] B. I, ch. 22.
+
+  [37] B. III, ch. 10.
+
+  [38] Act V, Scene 4.
+
+  [39] 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 observed when writing 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.
+
+  [40] Act I, Scene 4.
+
+  [41] B. II, Chap. 33.
+
+  [42] It is further relevant to note that in the essay _Of
+  Drunkenness_ (ii. 2) Montaigne observes that "drunkenness
+  amongst others appeareth to me a gross and brutish vice,"
+  that "the worst estate of man is where he loseth the
+  knowledge and government of himself," and that "the grossest
+  and rudest nation that liveth amongst us at this day, is
+  only that which keepeth it in credit." The reference is to
+  Germany: but Shakspere in _Othello_ (Act II, Sc. 3) makes
+  Iago 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 course
+  there is nothing peculiar in such a coincidence.
+
+  [43] B. III, Chap. 7.
+
+  [44] B. III, Chap. 4.
+
+  [45] B. III, Chap. 10.
+
+  [46] B. III, Chap. 2.
+
+  [47] B. III, Chap. 13.
+
+  [48] B. I, Chap. 38.
+
+  [49] B. III, Chap. 4.
+
+  [50] B. I, Chap. 40.
+
+  [51] B. II, Chap. 8.
+
+  [52] B. II, Chap. 18.
+
+  [53] _De Officus_ i, 4: _cf._ 30.
+
+  [54] 1534, 1558, 1583, 1600. See also the compilation
+  entitled _A Treatise of Morall Philosophie_ 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.
+
+  [55] Mr. Feis makes this attribution.
+
+  [56] B. II, Chap. 1.
+
+  [57] This may fairly be argued, perhaps, 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 service of the mind and soul
+    Grows wide withal,"
+
+  and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the
+  _Apology_
+
+   "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 of the (then
+  familiar) verb "wax" in both passages could suggest
+  imitation in the case of such a well-worn commonplace.
+
+  [58] See some cited at the close of this essay in another
+  connection.
+
+  [59] B. II, Chap. 12.
+
+  [60] Act IV, Scene 3.
+
+  [61] "_Le monde est un branloire perenne_" (Book III, Essay
+  2). Florio translates that particular sentence: "The world
+  runs all on wheels" a bad rendering.
+
+  [62] B. III, Chap. 3.
+
+  [63] B. II, Chap. 17.
+
+  [64] 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. [65] _Varia
+  Historia_, XII, 23.
+
+  [66] The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in
+  Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of
+  Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii. Sec. 1) gives it further
+  currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.
+
+  [67] B. II, Chap. 5.
+
+  [68] B. II, Chap. 3.
+
+  [69] Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.
+
+  [70] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, 1893,
+  p. 80-5.
+
+  [71] Actus III, 865-866.
+
+  [72] Actus IV, 1526-7.
+
+  [73] This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in
+  Doering's edition.
+
+  [74] See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, _in loc._
+
+  [75] Yet again, in Marston's _Insatiate Countess_, the
+  commentators have noticed the same sentiment.
+
+  "Death, From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path."
+
+  It was in fact a poetic commonplace.
+
+  [76] Act 5, Scene 6.
+
+  [77] Act v, sc. 1.
+
+  [78] I, 22.
+
+  [79] 2 _H. IV_, iv. 3
+
+  [80] ii, 2
+
+  [81] ii, 10.
+
+  [82] So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a
+  desertion of one's post without the deity's permission is
+  first found, in English literature, in Sidney, and he would
+  find it in Montaigne's essay on the _Custom of the Isle of
+  Cea_ (edit. Firmin-Didot, i. 367).
+
+  [83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of
+  similar drift in the anonymous play of _Edward III._ ("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
+  elaboration constitutes a special resemblance between the
+  speech in Shakspere and the passages in Montaigne
+
+  [84] _APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE._
+
+  [85] ii, 6, _Of Exercise or Practice_.
+
+  [86] _Apology._
+
+  [87] _Ibid._, near end.
+
+  [88] _On Isis and Osiris_, c. 26.
+
+  [89] Canto v.
+
+  [90] Canto xxxii.
+
+  [91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends
+  that the mediaeval 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 Purgatory_, 1844, p. 18.
+
+  [92] _Paradise Lost_, B. II, 587-603.
+
+  [93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.
+
+  [94] _Ibid._ p. 621.
+
+  [95] Act iv, sc. 5.
+
+  [96] iii, 3.
+
+  [97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. _Cf._ vi, 2, 3.
+
+  [98] B. v, cc. 22-25.
+
+  [99] ii, 32.
+
+  [100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his _Essays on
+  Shakspere_ (Eng. 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
+  Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the
+  Earl of Stirling's _Darius_ must have been written
+  immediately after the publication of that work. The argument
+  is (1) that Shakspere must have seen _Darius_ when it came
+  out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or
+  never.
+
+  [101] Act v, sc. 3.
+
+  [102] i, 31.
+
+  [103] ii, 13.
+
+  [104] Act i, sc. 2.
+
+  [105] Act iv, sc. 3.
+
+  [106] i, 2.
+
+  [107] _Hippolytus_, 615 (607).
+
+  [108] See the Prologue to _Every Man in His Humour_, first
+  ed., preserved by Gifford.
+
+  [109] The 29th.
+
+  [110] See his _Characteristics of English Poets_, 2nd. ed.
+  p. 222.
+
+  [111] The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove
+  Shakspere classically learned is that made in the _Critital
+  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 congenially criticised. To a reader of
+  to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax
+  are peculiarly unconvincing.
+
+  [112] 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 pertinence of his
+  remarks, proceeds to say (_Shakspere and Classical
+  Antiquity_, Eng. trans, p. 83) 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 unjust as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has
+  misunderstood Farmer's tone, which is one of banter against,
+  not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly ascribed
+  to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. Towards
+  Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative--and in the
+  preface to the second edition of his essay he wrote:
+  "Shakspere wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him
+  above all other men."
+
+  [113] Ch. iv, of vol. cited.
+
+  [114] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, pp.
+  66-67.
+
+  [115] _Hercules Furens_, ad fin. (1324-1329.).
+
+  [116] _Hippolytus_, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)
+
+  [117] _Choephori_, 63-65.
+
+  [118] Carm. lxxxviii, _In Gellium_. See the note in
+  Doering's edition.
+
+  [119] _Gerusalemme_, xviii, 8.
+
+  [120] _The Insatiate Countess_, published in 1613.
+
+  [121] _Hamlet_, Act iv, sc. 3.
+
+  [122] _Agamemnon_, 152-153.
+
+  [123] ii, 3 (near beginning.)
+
+  [124] _Hercules Furens_, Act. V. 1261-2.
+
+  [125] Act iv, Sc. 3.
+
+  [126] _Hercules Furens_, 1258-61.
+
+  [127] _Macbeth_, Act v, Sc. 2.
+
+  [128] _Ibid._ Act iv, Sc. 2.
+
+  [129] _Ibid._ Act i, sc. 7.
+
+  [130] B. ii, ch. 10.
+
+  [131] Tschischwitz, _Shakspere-Forschungen_, i. 1868, S. 52.
+
+  [132] "Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere
+  Brunos Komodie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie
+  enthaelt so masslose Obscoenitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen
+  staerksten Stellen daneben fast jungfraeulich erscheint" (Work
+  cited, S. 52).
+
+  [133] Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's
+  translation, so far as syntax permits.
+
+  [134] Act i, Sc. 4.
+
+  [135] Work cited, Sc. 59.
+
+  [136] See Frith's _Life of Giordano Bruno_, 1889, pp.
+  121-128.
+
+  [137] Act v. Sc. 1.
+
+  [138] Cited by Noack, art. _Bruno_, in
+  _Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon_.
+
+  [139] Act i, Sc. 2.
+
+  [140] Work cited, p. 90.
+
+  [141] 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 necessary
+  steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President
+  of the New York Shakspere Society, 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 ourselves, whose moods and veins
+  were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings,
+  employments, 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 conception of Shakspere as
+  an organism in an environment was first closely approached
+  in the present century by French critics, as Guizot 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 German Ruemelin (_Shakspere
+  Studien_); and that the structural anomalies of _Hamlet_ as
+  an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix
+  (_Die Shakspereomanie_) these two critics thus making amends
+  for much vain discussion of _Hamlet_ by their countrymen
+  before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the
+  man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America.
+  The admirable 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.
+
+  [142] _Life of Shakspere_, 1886, p. 128.
+
+  [143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's _Shakspere's Venus and
+  Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect_.
+
+  [144] Professor Dowden notes in his _Shakspere Primer_ (p.
+  12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe,
+  the theatrical lessee, vary from L4 to L8, and not till
+  later did it rise as high as L20 for a play by a popular
+  dramatist.
+
+  [145] Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;--
+
+    But thou art all my art, and dost advance
+    As high as learning my rude ignorance.
+
+  [146] _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 29, 128.
+
+  [147] See it in his _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 120-124. Mr.
+  Fleay's theory, though perhaps the best "documented" of all,
+  has received little attention in comparison with Mr.
+  Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.
+
+  [148] Only in Chaucer (_e.g._, _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.
+
+  [149] See Fleay's _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 130-1.
+
+  [150] Cp. the _Essays_, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol.
+  ii, pp. 40, 231.)
+
+  [151] _Essays_, i, 25; _cf._ i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i,
+  pp. 304, 429.)
+
+  [152] ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)
+
+  [153] ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)
+
+  [154] _Pensees Diverses._ Less satisfying is the further
+  _pensee_ in the same collection:--"Les quatre grand poetes,
+  Platon, _Malebranche_, _Shaftesbury_, Montaigne."
+
+  [155] Edition cited, i, 622-623.
+
+  [156] _Port Royal_, 4ieme edit., ii. 400, _note_.
+
+  [157] B. iii, Chap. 13.
+
+  [158] "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 Rochefoucauld, _Pensee_ 104.)
+
+  [159] B. iii, Chap. 1.
+
+  [160] i, Chap. 38.
+
+  [161] _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, p. 133.
+
+  [162] This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms
+  even of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Dowden.
+
+  [163] _Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's_ [_sic_
+  throughout book] _gegen die skeptische und cosmopolitische
+  Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne_, von G. F.
+  Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.
+
+  [164] B. i, Chap. 26.
+
+  [165] It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in
+  Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_; and there was probably
+  an intermediate drama.
+
+  [166] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.
+
+  [167] _Oxford Essays_, p. 279. Sterling, from his
+  Christian-Carlylese point of view, declared of Montaigne
+  that "All that we find in him of Christianity would be
+  suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral
+  beings" (_London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p.
+  340.)
+
+  [168] Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he
+  added many safeguarding clauses in the later editions.
+
+  [169] See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the
+  _Cornhill Magazine_, August, 1880.
+
+  [170] Art. cited, _end_.
+
+  [171] Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to _Leopold_
+  Shakspere p. lxxxvii.
+
+  [172] Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion
+  goes no further.
+
+  [173] See the passage cited above in section iii in
+  connection with _Measure for Measure_.
+
+  [174] Act iv, Sc. 2.
+
+  [175] Act i, Sc. 2.
+
+  [176] B. i, Chap. 20.
+
+  [177] B. i, Chap. 30.
+
+  [178] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.
+
+  [179] _Ibid._, pp. 477-478.
+
+  [180] _Here_, it may be said, there is a trace of the
+  influence of Bruno's philosophy; 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.
+
+  [181] Fleay's _Life_, pp. 138, &c.
+
+  [182] B. i, Chap. 42.
+
+  [183] B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i. 501.)
+
+  [184] _Midsummer Nights Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.
+
+  [185] See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden
+
+  [186] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of
+  Shakspere_, 5th ed., p. 175.
+
+  [187] I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless
+  difficulty on this head. In his _Shakspere in Fact and
+  Criticism_, 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 single 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 published
+  as _his_ the existing mass, so largely made up of other
+  men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after
+  his death, being simply bent on making money.
+
+  [188] Sonnet 110. Compare the next.
+
+  [189] B. ii, Chap. 10.
+
+  [190] B. i, Chap. 38.
+
+  [191] 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
+  first 126 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take
+  those remaining as of later date.
+
+  [192] 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 subjection and
+  constraint." "No man did ever prepare himself to quit the
+  world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I
+  shall do. The deadest deaths are the best"
+
+  [193] ii, 12.
+
+  [194] iii, 11.
+
+  [195] iii, 4.
+
+  [196] 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."
+
+  [197] iii, 4.
+
+  [198] Act ii, Sc. 2.
+
+  [199] iii, 9.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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+_The Sun_, MARCH 31, 1897:
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+The author of "Pseudo-Philosophy" handles his weapons well, and seems to
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+champions of orthodoxy, as a rule, frankly admit that some of their
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+the same charge will stand against the latter is only to ignore the
+fact, if not indeed the law, that the great social awakenings have
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+
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