Comparative Drama

Peter Platt's compelling new book, Shakespeare's Essays: Sampling Montaigne from Hamlet to The Tempest, is the culmination of over two decades of research on Shakespeare's thinking and his later plays. Platt's first book, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (University of Nebraska, 1997), focused on Shakespeare's late plays and the concept of wonder, while his next book, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Routledge, 2009), looked at the way logical opposites could be juxtaposed in order to question such concepts as justice, love, knowledge, and truth, a pervasive intellectual maneuver in the works of both Montaigne and Shakespeare. Most recently, Platt co-edited with Stephen Greenblatt an edition of John Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's Essays (New York Review of Books, 2014). One motivation for Platt's writing Shakespeare's Essays can perhaps be found in Greenblatt's introduction to this edition. In it, Greenblatt claims that, apart from some "passages in King Lear and The Tempest, the attempts to establish the direct influence of Montaigne on Shakespeare have never seemed fully and decisively convincing"(xxxi). After all, there is uncertainty about when Shakespeare may have read the Essays, either in French or in Florio's translation, and therefore about when Montaigne's influence can first be detected. But there is also the "more intractable problem" of Shakespeare and Montaigne sharing the same "historical moment," which could have led to "a shared grappling with pressing questions of faith, consciousness, and identity"(xxxii). Why assume Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne rather than their both being shaped by the same currents of thoughts circulating in Europe and England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries? Shakespeare's Essays can arguably be seen as Platt's extended reply to his co-editor.

Platt opens the book with an important question: "Why do critics and audiences feel that there is something 'different' about the plays that Shakespeare wrote after 1603?" (1). According to Platt, stylistic and thematic features that mark Shakespeare's later plays—"the darkness of their comedy" and "the general pessimism of the largely tragic period that followed," their exploration of "doubt, contingency, uncertainty, and mutability" along with "instabilities of self, knowledge, and form" (1)—can be traced back to Shakespeare's reading of Florio's translation of the Essays. Understanding Shakespeare's plays after 1603 thus means understanding the influence Montaigne had on Shakespeare. And there [End Page 274] is no doubt that Shakespeare read Florio's translation. As the late 18th century Shakespeare editors Edward Capell and Edmund Malone demonstrated, at least one speech by Gonzalo in The Tempest was closely patterned on a passage in Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay "Of the Caniballes." Subsequent scholars built upon this initial observation, so much so that, by 1876, Friedrich Nietzsche could confidently proclaim that Shakespeare was Montaigne's "best reader" (2). One of the most important scholars for Platt is George Coffin Taylor, who in Shakspere's Debt to Montaigne (1925) catalogued verbal echoes of Montaigne that can be found in Shakespeare's plays. This kind of linguistic evidence allows Platt to pursue more ambitious questions about "larger thematic and structural parallels" between Montaigne and Shakespeare, about "connections and resonances that swirl throughout the essays and plays, especially those concerning the problems of knowing and being" (12). Although "resonances" and "thematic and structural parallels" may not show a "direct influence," they can also be seen as the likely result of Shakespeare's close engagement with Montaigne. Verbal echoes show that Shakespeare repeatedly turned to Florio's translation when he was writing plays after 1603, so it would be surprising if the playwright's thinking somehow remained unaffected by the ideas he found in Montaigne's Essays. It is this intriguing, if perhaps ineffable, type of influence that Platt details in Shakespeare's Essays.

According to Platt, after reading the Essays Shakespeare came to adopt...