| Transcribers note: Old spellings of thewords have been retained as well as thedoubtful use of colons instead ofsemicolons in many places for the sakeof 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 anatomicstudy of Shakspere, of which a revival seemsnow on foot, has been somewhat out of fashion,as compared with its vogue in the palmy daysof the New Shakspere Society in England,and the years of the battle between the iconoclastsand the worshippers in Germany. WhenMr. Fleay and Mr. Spedding were hard at workon the metrical tests; when Mr. Speddingwas subtly undoing the chronological psychologyof Dr. Furnivall; when the latterstudent was on his part undoing in quiteanother style some of the judgments ofMr. Swinburne; and when Mr. Halliwell-Phillippswas with natural wrath callingon Mr. Browning, as President of theSociety, to keep Dr. Furnivall in order, we(then) younger onlookers felt that literary historywas verily being made. Our sensations, itseemed, might be as those of our elders had2been over Mr. Collier's emendated folio, and thetragical end thereof. Then came a period of lullin things Shaksperean, partly to be accountedfor by the protrusion of the Browning Societyand kindred undertakings. It seemed as ifonce more men had come to the attitude of 1850,when Mr. Phillipps had written: "An opinionhas been gaining ground, and has beenencouraged by writers whose judgment isentitled to respectful consideration, that almostif not all the commentary on the works ofShakspere of a necessary and desirable kindhas already been given to the world."1 And,indeed, so much need was there for time todigest the new criticism that it may be doubtedwhether among the general cultured public theprocess is even now accomplished.
To this literary phase in particular, and toour occupation with other studies in general,may be attributed the opportunity which stillexists for the discussion of one of the most interestingof all problems concerning Shakspere.Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi—ahost of peculiarly modern problem-makers3have been exorcising our not inexhaustible tastefor the problematic, so that there was no veryviolent excitement over even the series of new"Keys" to the sonnets which came forth in thelull of the analysis of the plays; and yet, evenwith all the problems of modernity in view, itseems as if it must be rather by accident ofoversight than for lack of interest in newdevelopments of Shakspere-study that so littleattention has been given among us to a questionwhich, once raised, has a very peculiar literaryand psychological attraction of its own—thesubject, namely, of the influence which the playsshow their author to have undergone from theEssays of Montaigne.
As to the bare fact of the influence, there canbe little question. That Shakspere in onescene in the Tempest versifies a passage from theprose of Florio's translation of Montaigne'schapter Of the Cannibals has been recognisedby all the commentators since Capell (1767), whodetected the transcript from a reading of theFrench only, not having compared the translation.The first thought o