Montaigne and Shakspere Part 2

Sure He that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and G.o.dlike 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage, for instance, there is a cla.s.sic 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 ent.i.tles 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 a.s.sume a reminiscence of a pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sertion 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 a.s.sertion 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.s.similation of the thought of his cla.s.sics. The process is one not of surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even the vibration of the style pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d! I could be bounded in a nutsh.e.l.l, and count myself a king of infinite s.p.a.ce; 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 G.o.ds] 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages on that theme. "It would be easy," says M. Chasles, "to show in Shakspere the _branloire perenne_[61] of Montaigne, and the whole magnificent pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sages 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 n.o.ble 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 circ.u.mstance 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 _aneantiss.e.m.e.nt_ 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 pa.s.sage 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, a.s.sail 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 pa.s.sages 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 a.s.surance and trust;" and the lines about "the dread of something after death" might point to the pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage in the soliloquy than anything cited from the cla.s.sics.

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]