Montaigne and Shakspere Part 3

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 ent.i.tled 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 pa.s.sage on the music of the spheres in the MERCHANT OF VENICE[77] recalls the pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 cla.s.sics; 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 pa.s.sages 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 languis.h.i.+ng 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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage occurring near the end of the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE:

"We do foolishly fear a kind of death, whereas we have already pa.s.sed and daily pa.s.s 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 n.o.ble; 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 s.h.i.+fts to strange effects, After the moon: If thou art rich, thou art poor; For, like an a.s.s 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 pa.s.sages from the Essays:

"They perceived her (the soul) to be capable of diverse pa.s.sions, and agitated by many languis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sage "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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage which belongs to the current English superst.i.tion 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 a.s.sume that the common superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.signed; who evil, pa.s.seth 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.ddess, she determines Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use...."

Here we have once more a characteristically Shaksperean trans.m.u.tation 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 G.o.d in spirit and soul; we owe him besides and we yield unto him a corporal wors.h.i.+pping: 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 pa.s.sage, "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 ident.i.ty between the thought in the Duke's speech, just quoted, and a notable pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sages: "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 c.u.m altero non habent loc.u.m," 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 pa.s.s, 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 const.i.tute such an amount of reproduction of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about habitual "stealings." There is no justification for applying that to the pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 OTh.e.l.lO (? 1604) we have Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus," already considered, to say nothing of Oth.e.l.lo'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 pa.s.sages in the Fortieth Essay.

(b) In LEAR (1606) we have such a touch as the king's lines[101]--