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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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+BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS: A Study in
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+_Weekly Times and Echo_, MAY 30, 1897:
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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
+almost invariably followed hard upon the great religious revivals.
+
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