Shakespeare's Montaigne

The April issue of Harper's includes a review of a book by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, Shakespeare's Montaigne.


Joshua Cohen, writing the review, calls it "a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multi-culti study of the development of English and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence."


So the working hypothesis of the study is that Shakespeare got his classical education second-hand, largely by reading Montaigne, and that he was at the same time willing to bite the hand that fed him some good material.


For example, in his essay "Of the Cannibals," Montaigne sentimentalizes the just discovered people of the Americas, seeing them as peaceful anarchists. He writes that they:


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 contacts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them.


That quotation is taken from a translation of Montaigne by a contemporary of Shakespeare's, John Florio.


In The Tempest, Gonzalo fantasizes of a similar world, in quite similar language.


I'th' 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; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, coin, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women, too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty...."


It seems as if Shakespeare must have had Florio/Montaigne's book open to the relevant page when he wrote Gonzalo's speech.


Cohen contends though that this was as much commentary as influence. In Montaigne, the passage is in earnest, in Shakespeare, it is a bit of a game, poking fun at Gonzalo's naiveté -- and presumably Montaigne's as well.


Fascinating point, Mr. Cohen.


I do think that Greenblatt, who seems to have been the senior of the two authors in the book under review, is the real deal in Shakespeare scholarship. I've long had difficulties with the excessive efflorescence of Harold Bloom on the subject of the bard. Thus, it is Greenblatt's photo I have included above.