Although he’s revered as a great classic writer, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) is an author we read because we want to, not because we have to. He’s intimate, erudite, chatty, and expansive—qualities well suited to the peculiar genre he essentially created. While puttering around his tower library in 16th-century France, Montaigne crafted conversational observations into familiar prose, inventing the personal essay as a new literary form. Others had composed essays before Montaigne, but they wrote as kings, soldiers, officials, or philosophers. Montaigne wrote simply as himself—a bemused and befuddled French aristocrat trying to make sense of it all.
“Authors communicate themselves unto the world,” he told readers, “by some strange and special mark; I the first by my general disposition, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, or poet or lawyer.”
On that score, Montaigne was the world’s first reality star, someone who shrewdly saw the modest intrigues of his domestic life as a marketable commodity. The public readily agreed, making his Essays, published between 1580 and 1588, a period bestseller. Since their appearance more than four centuries ago, Montaigne’s essays have never been out of print. Yet unlike Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump, Montaigne regarded the inward glance as an adventure in self-effacement, not self-infatuation. He was a charming and perceptive critic of his own foibles, especially alert to his weakness for inconsistency:
In accepting the sometimes conflicting beliefs and feelings that could exist within himself, Montaigne suggests that people are bound to disagree with themselves, and with others. A Roman Catholic, he celebrated tolerance while his country was being torn apart by bloody conflicts between Protestants and members of his own faith. It was a daring stand in an era so dominated by sectarian strife and political oppression. His essays don’t fully suggest the danger of his times or the risks he took as a mediator between religious zealots. Even Montaigne’s celebrated candor had its limits. But what abides in his writing is how much of himself he manages to get on paper. Montaigne appears to transcribe the workings of his mind in real time, so the conventions of formal argument give way to spontaneity and digression. The titles of his essays often offer only the vaguest of clues about where his brain is headed: “Of Experience,” for example, begins as a reflection on the limits of reason but eventually includes topics as varied as eggs, chimneys, and Portuguese tastes in wine. Along the way, Montaigne sizes up his country’s government:
That’s the other thing about Montaigne: Although he wrote his essays while Elizabeth I still sat on the throne of England, you sometimes feel as if he’s scanning this morning’s headlines. In our age of blogs, Tweets, and Instagrams, using the self as source material for a running commentary might not seem very special. But as Virginia Woolf (no slouch as an essayist herself) observed, writing as yourself isn’t the biggest challenge faced by an author of personal essays. There is, first and foremost, “the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” Authenticity is something many writers claim when they use the perpendicular pronoun, of course. “But this talking of oneself,” said Woolf of the master, “following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, color, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection—this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne.”
If anything, Montaigne succeeded too well. He made essays look so easy that everyone assumes he can write one. Teachers might think twice about asking a child to write a novel, short story, or poem, but kids get assigned essays at least occasionally, even if it’s an obligatory composition about What I Did This Summer. That’s made us think of the essay as an elementary exercise, something a 6-year-old might handle, and not as a genre, in other words, in which a person of letters will easily gain stature as a genius. E. B. White correctly concluded that an author intent on a Nobel Prize had best pen a play, a poem, or novel; few folks are going to readily consider an essayist a great talent.
Here, however, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt argue that Montaigne had a clear influence on William Shakespeare, a connection that affirms Montaigne’s intellect and standing within the Western canon. Greenblatt begins with a short critical essay on Montaigne references in Shakespeare’s plays, and Platt follows with a chapter on John Florio, who produced the first complete English translation of Montaigne’s essays, the version that Shakespeare most likely read. Greenblatt and Platt keep their scholarship short, quickly ceding the stage to selections from Florio’s work. Platt is chairman of English at Barnard; Greenblatt, a Harvard professor, is best known for his Will in the World (2005), a popular study of Shakespeare, and The Swerve (2012), a book about how the rediscovery in 1417 of a poem by Lucretius changed the course of history. In Shakespeare’s Montaigne, as in his previous book, Greenblatt considers the odd currents that allow literature to pollinate other works, often with surprising results.
To his credit, Greenblatt doesn’t overstate his case. Many of the details of Shakespeare’s life are unknown, and how closely he might have read Florio’s Montaigne is unclear. But in a couple of plays, Shakespeare’s debt to Montaigne seems obvious. In “Of the Cannibals,” an essay about people recently discovered in the New World, Montaigne writes admiringly of natives who “hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority.” Very similar language appears in The Tempest, when Gonzalo considers the kind of society he wants to establish on the island where he and others have been shipwrecked. There’s another apparent instance of borrowing in King Lear, which includes a passage that seems cribbed from Montaigne’s observations about the ideal relationship between parents and children.
Beyond that, the question of Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare becomes more speculative. Greenblatt shrugs at that ambiguity, concluding that whatever the possibilities, the mere existence of these two men was a miracle in itself: “Two of the greatest writers of the Renaissance—two of the greatest writers the world has ever known—were at work almost at the same time, reflecting on the human condition and inventing the stylistic means to register their subtlest perceptions in language.”
True enough, although Montaigne and Shakespeare worked in different languages and would have depended on Florio’s mediating influence to bridge the gap. Platt points out that Florio used a free hand as translator, rendering a work that seems as much his masterpiece as Montaigne’s. Florio sometimes went overboard in “Englishing” Montaigne, as when Montaigne argued that we can’t understand animals any more than “les Basques et les Troglodytes.” Florio changed the reference to “no more do we the Cornish, the Welsh, or Irish.” Florio also sanitized some of Montaigne’s bawdier passages—and occasionally he was simply wrong, as when he translated the French poisson, or fish, as “poison.”
Greenblatt and Platt hang over Florio’s shoulder as he works, offering editorial asides, through copious footnotes, when his translation seems arbitrary or erroneous. For example, they note Florio’s refusal to translate Montaigne’s quotation of a line from Horace, in which we learn that “the phallus of the young man is firmer than a young tree.” The editors maintain that Florio’s Montaigne, despite its frequent inaccuracies and editorial caprices, is still interesting as a study in composition, since Florio’s channeling of Montaigne into the idioms of Elizabethan England created a book that inspired not only Shakespeare but also Ben Jonson, John Marston, John Webster, Robert Burton, and Francis Bacon.
In “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Florio renders Montaigne quoting Heraclitus on the stages of life: “The flower of age dyeth, 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 dyeth in infancy.” In M. A. Screech’s 1991 translation, the same passage becomes “the flower of our life withers and dies into old age; but youth ended in that adult flower, as childhood in youth and as that embryonic stage died into childhood.” Screech’s meaning is clearer and more accurate, while Florio’s is more rhythmic and poetic. But readers who like Florio’s flourishes will also have to tolerate some period obscurities in the bargain. Try this opening line, from Montaigne’s essay “Of Coaches”:
Huh? A helpful footnote explains that “eftsoons” means “moreover,” but I still regularly retreated to the Screech edition to get a better handle on the essay.
Screech, following a modern convention of Montaigne scholarship, also clearly marks where Montaigne added material as he reworked his essays over the years. That feature is absent from Florio’s version, and while reading his translation of Montaigne, I found myself missing the vivid sense of evolution in the essays that comes from contemporary annotation. While readers might enjoy Florio, they’ll want to keep around Screech—or Donald Frame’s wonderful 1957 translation of the Essays—as a backup.
Montaigne would periodically throw in new insights as he returned to his essays, even if they contradicted earlier statements. In this way, his essays often resemble Twitter feeds—endlessly alive, moving, and mutable. And because Montaigne’s style so keenly anticipated today’s literary universe, revisiting these essays by way of Florio is a bit of a shock. Did an author this hip really coincide with the Elizabethan age? Perhaps there was a writer known as “Shakespeare’s Montaigne.” But as any random hour with the Essays reminds us, Michel de Montaigne belongs to us all.
Danny Heitman is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
