Montaigne and Shakspere by J. M. Robertson

Author:J. M. Robertson [Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Sources, Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Philosophy, Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592 -- Influence
Published: 2008-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

V.

It is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary statement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, in 1603, Shakspere was thirty-seven years old, and he had written or refashioned King John, Henry IV., The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II., Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Henry V., Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Julius Cæsar. It is very likely that he knew Florio, being intimate with Jonson, who was Florio's friend and admirer; and the translation, long on the stocks, must have been discussed in his hearing. Hence, presumably, his immediate perusal of it. Portions of it he may very well have seen or heard of before it was fully printed (necessarily a long task in the then state of the handicraft); but in the book itself, we have seen abundant reason to believe, he read largely in 1603-4.

Having inductively proved the reading, and at the same time the fact of the impression it made, we may next seek to realise deductively what kind of impression it was fitted to make. We can readily see what North's Plutarch could be and was to the sympathetic and slightly-cultured playwright; it was nothing short of a new world of human knowledge; a living vision of two great civilisations, giving to his universe a vista of illustrious realities beside which the charmed gardens of Renaissance romance and the bustling fields of English chronicle-history were as pleasant dreams or noisy interludes. He had done wonders with the chronicles; but in presence of the long muster-rolls of Greece and Rome he must have felt their insularity; and he never returned to them in the old spirit. But if Plutarch could do so much for him, still greater could be the service rendered by Montaigne. The difference, broadly speaking, is very much as the difference in philosophic reach between Julius Cæsar and Hamlet, between Coriolanus and Lear.

For what was in its nett significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming thus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life and into Shakspere's ken? Simply the most living book then existing in Europe. This is not the place, nor am I the person, to attempt a systematic estimate of the most enduring of French writers, who has stirred to their best efforts the ablest of French critics; but I must needs try to indicate briefly, as I see it, his significance in general European culture. And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for the civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically declared to be—the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also is a framer of artificial compositions in a dead language, where Montaigne writes with absolute spontaneity in a language not only living but growing.

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