What then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's
thought to that of Montaigne? How far did the younger man approve and
assimilate the ideas of the elder, how far did he reject them, how far
modify them? In some respects this is the most difficult part of our
inquiry, were it only because Shakspere is firstly and lastly a dramatic
writer. But he is not only that: he is at once the most subjective, the
most sympathetic, and the most self-witholding of dramatic writers.
Conceiving all situations, all epochs, in terms of his own psychology,
he is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic design on the opinions
of his listeners; and it is only after a most vigilant process of moral
logic that we can ever be justified in attributing to him this or that
thesis of any one of his personages, apart from the general ethical
sympathies which must be taken for granted. Much facile propaganda has
been made by the device of crediting him in person with every religious
utterance found in his plays--even in the portions which analytical
criticism proves to have come from other hands. Obviously we must look
to his general handling of the themes with which the current religion
deals, in order to surmise his attitude to that religion. And in the
same way we must compare his general handling of tragic and moral
issues, in order to gather his general attitude to the doctrine of
Montaigne.
At the very outset, we must make a clean sweep of the strange
proposition of Mr. Jacob Feis--that Shakspere deeply disliked the
philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to
realise how such a hopeless misconception can ever have arisen in the
mind of anyone capable of making the historic research on which Mr. Feis
seeks to found his assertion. If there were no other argument against
it, the bare fact that the tragedy of HAMLET existed before Shakspere,
and that he was, as usual, simply working over a play already on the
boards, should serve to dismiss such a wild hypothesis. And from every
other point of view, the notion is equally preposterous.
No human being in Shakspere's day could have gathered from HAMLET such a
criticism of Montaigne as Mr. Feis reads into it by means of violences
of interpretation which might almost startle Mr. Donnelly. Even if they
blamed Hamlet for delaying his revenge, in the manner of the ordinary
critical moralist, they could not possibly regard that delay as a kind
of vice arising from the absorption of Montaignesque opinions. In the
very year of the appearance of Florio's folio, it was a trifle too soon
to make the assumption that Montaigne was demoralising mankind, even if
we assume Shakspere to have ever been capable of such a judgment. And
that assumption is just as impossible as the other. According to Mr.
Feis, Shakspere detested such a creed and such conduct as Hamlet's, and
made him die by poison in order to show his abhorrence of them--this,
when we know Hamlet to have died by the poisoned foil in the earlier
play. On that view, Cordelia died by hanging in order to show
Shakspere's conviction that she was a malefactor; and Desdemona by
stifling as a fitting punishment for adultery. The idea is outside of
serious discussion. Barely to assume that Shakspere held Hamlet for a
pitiable weakling is a sufficiently shallow interpretation of the play;
but to assume that he made him die by way of condign punishment for his
opinions is merely ridiculous. Once for all, there is absolutely nothing
in Hamlet's creed or conduct which Shakspere was in a position to regard
as open to his denunciation. The one intelligible idea which Mr. Feis
can suggest as connecting Hamlet's conduct with Montaigne's philosophy
is that Montaigne was a quietest, preaching and practising withdrawal
from public broils. But Shakspere's own practice was on all fours with
this. He sedulously held aloof from all meddling in public affairs; and
as soon as he had gained a competence he retired, at the age of
forty-seven, to Stratford-on-Avon. Mr. Feis's argument brings us to the
very crudest form of the good old Christian verdict that if Hamlet had
been a good and resolute man he would have killed his uncle out of hand,
whether at prayers or anywhere else, and would then have married
Ophelia, put his mother in a nunnery, and lived happily ever after.[162]
And to that edifying assumption, Mr. Feis adds the fantasy that
Shakspere dreaded the influence of Montaigne as a deterrent from the
retributive slaughter of guilty uncles by wronged nephews.
In the hands of Herr Stedefeld, who in 1871 anticipated Mr. Feis's view
of HAMLET as a sermon against Montaigne, the thesis is not a whit more
plausible. Herr Stedefeld entitles his book[163]: "Hamlet: a
Drama-with-a-purpose (TENDENZDRAMA) opposing the sceptical and
cosmopolitan view of things taken by Michael de Montaigne"; and his
general position is that Shakspere wrote the play as "the apotheosis of
a practical Christianity," by way of showing how any one like Hamlet,
lacking in Christian piety, and devoid of faith, love, and hope, must
needs come to a bad end, even in a good cause. We are not entitled to
charge Herr Stedefeld's thesis to the account of religious bias, seeing
that Mr. Feis in his turn writes from the standpoint of a kind of
Protestant freethinker, who sees in Shakspere a champion of free inquiry
against the Catholic conformist policy of Montaigne; while strictly
orthodox Christians have found in Hamlet's various allusions to deity,
and in his "as for me, I will go pray," a proof alike of his and of
Shakspere's steadfast piety. Against all such superficialities of
exegesis alike our safeguard must be a broad common-sense induction.
We are entitled to say at the outset, then, only this, that Shakspere at
the time of working over HAMLET and MEASURE FOR MEASURE in 1603-1604 had
in his mind a great deal of the reasoning in Montaigne's Essays; and
that a number of the speeches in the two plays reproduce portions of
what he had read. We are not entitled to assume that these portions are
selected as being in agreement with Shakspere's own views: we are here
limited to saying that he put certain of Montaigne's ideas or statements
in the mouths of his characters where they would be appropriate. It does
not follow that he shared the feelings of Claudio as to the possible
life of the soul after death. And when Hamlet says to Horatio, on the
strangeness of the scene with the Ghost:
"And therefore as a stranger give it welcome!
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy"--
though this may be said to be a summary of the whole drift of
Montaigne's essay,[164] THAT IT IS FOLLY TO REFER TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD TO
OUR SUFFICIENCY; and though we are entitled to believe that Shakspere
had that essay or its thesis in his mind, there is no reason to suppose
that the lines express Shakspere's own belief in ghosts. Montaigne had
indicated his doubts on that head even in protesting against sundry
denials of strange allegations: and it is dramatically fitting that
Hamlet in the circumstances should say what he does. On the other hand,
when the Duke in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, playing the part of a friar
preparing a criminal for death, gives Claudio a consolation which does
not contain a word of Christian doctrine, not a syllable of sacrificial
salvation and sacramental forgiveness, we are entitled to infer from
such a singular negative phenomenon, if not that Shakspere rejected the
Christian theory of things, at least that it formed no part of his
habitual thinking. It was the special business of the Duke, playing in
such a character, to speak to Claudio of sin and salvation, of
forgiveness and absolution. Such a singular omission must at least imply
disregard on the part of the dramatist. It is true that Isabella,
pleading to Angelo in the second Act, speaks as a believing Christian on
the point of forgiveness for sins; and the versification here is quite
Shaksperean. But a solution of the anomaly is to be found here as
elsewhere in the fact that Shakspere was working over an existing
play;[165] and that in ordinary course he would, if need were, put the
religious pleading of Isabella into his own magistral verse just as he
would touch up the soliloquy of Hamlet on the question of killing his
uncle at prayers--a soliloquy which we know to have existed in the
earlier forms of the play. The writer who first made Isabella plead
religiously with Angelo would have made the Duke counsel Claudio
religiously. The Duke's speech, then, is to be regarded as Shakspere's
special insertion; and it is to be taken as negatively exhibiting his
opinions.
In the same way, the express withdrawal of the religious note at the
close of HAMLET--where in the Second Quarto we have Shakspere making the
dying prince say "the rest is silence" instead of "heaven receive my
soul," as in the First Quarto--may reasonably be taken to express the
same agnosticism on the subject of a future life as is implied in the
Duke's speech to Claudio. It cannot reasonably be taken to suggest a
purpose of holding Hamlet up to blame as an unbeliever, because Hamlet
is made repeatedly to express himself, in talk and in soliloquy, as a
believer in deity, in prayer, in hell, and in heaven. These speeches are
mostly reproductions of the old play, the new matter being in the nature
of the pagan allusion to the "divinity that shapes our ends." What is
definitely Shaksperean is just the agnostic conclusion.
Did Shakspere, then, derive this agnosticism from Montaigne? What were
really Montaigne's religious and philosophic opinions? We must consider
this point also with more circumspection than has been shown by most of
Montaigne's critics. The habit of calling him "sceptic," a habit
initiated by the Catholic priests who denounced his heathenish use of
the term "Fortune," and strengthened by various writers from Pascal to
Emerson, is a hindrance to an exact notion of the facts, inasmuch as the
word "sceptic" has passed through two phases of significance, and may
still have either. In the original sense of the term, Montaigne is a
good deal of a "sceptic," because the main purport of the APOLOGY OF
RAYMOND SEBONDE appears to be the discrediting of human reason all
round, and the consequent shaking of all certainty. And this method
strikes not only indirectly but directly at the current religious
beliefs; for Montaigne indicates a lack of belief in immortality,[166]
besides repeatedly ignoring the common faith where he would naturally
be expected to endorse it, as in the nineteenth and fortieth essays
hereinbefore cited, and in his discussion of the Apology of Socrates. As
is complained by Dean Church:[167] "His views, both of life and death,
are absolutely and entirely unaffected by the fact of his profession to
believe the Gospel." That profession, indeed, partakes rather obviously
of the nature of his other formal salutes[168] to the Church, which are
such as Descartes felt it prudent to make in a later generation. His
profession of fidelity to Catholicism, again, is rather his way of
showing that he saw no superiority of reasonableness in Protestantism,
than the expression of any real conformity to Catholic ideals; for he
indicates alike his aversion to heretic-hunting and his sense of the
folly of insisting on the whole body of dogma. When fanatical
Protestants, uncritical of their own creed, affected to doubt the
sincerity of any man who held by Catholicism, he was naturally piqued.
But he was more deeply piqued, as Naigeon has suggested, when the few
but keen freethinkers of the time treated the THEOLOGIA NATURALIS of
Sebonde, which Montaigne had translated at his father's wish, as a
feeble and inconclusive piece of argumentation; and it was primarily to
retaliate on such critics--who on their part no doubt exhibited some
ill-founded convictions while attacking others--that he penned the
APOLOGY, which assails atheism in the familiar sophistical fashion, but
with a most unfamiliar energy and splendour of style, as a manifestation
of the foolish pride of a frail and perpetually erring reason. For
himself, he was, as we have said, a classic theist, of the school of
Cicero and Seneca; and as regards that side of his own thought he is not
at all sceptical, save in so far as he nominally protested against all
attempts to bring deity down to human conceptions, while himself doing
that very thing, as every theist needs must.
Shakspere, then, could find in Montaigne the traditional deism of the
pagan and Christian world, without any colour of specifically Christian
faith, and with a direct lead to unbelief in a future state. But,
whether we suppose Shakspere to have been already led, as he might be
by the initiative of his colleague Marlowe, an avowed atheist, to
agnostic views on immortality, or whether we suppose him to have had his
first serious lead to such thought from Montaigne, we find him to all
appearance carrying further the initial impetus, and proceeding from the
serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception
of things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, so
abnormally alive to all impressions, that when he fully faced the darker
sides of universal drama, with his reflective powers at work, he must
utter a pessimism commensurate with the theme. This is part, if not the
whole, of the answer to the question "Why did Shakspere write
tragedies?"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's,
that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic
serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he
had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of
tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE),
after having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must
conclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas
formerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its
tragedies mostly from others, it now took its comedies mostly from
others and its tragedies from him. Further, we must assume that the
gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the new tragedies is
partly a reflex of his own experience, but also in large part an
expression of the philosophy to which he had been led by his reading, as
well as by his life. For we must finally avow that the pervading thought
in the tragedies outgoes the simple artistic needs of the case. In
OTHELLO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of
wrong--weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is
already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of
evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate
insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and
prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a
note of gloom as is struck in the lines:
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods:
They kill us for their sport."
And since there is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any
decorous platitude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the
admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than
Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of
reacting against Montaigne's "scepticism," as Herr Stedefeld supposes,
he produced yet other tragedies in which the wrongdoers and the wronged
alike exhibit less and not more of Christian faith than Hamlet,[172] and
in which there is no hint of any such faith on the part of the
dramatist, but, on the contrary, a sombre persistence in the presentment
of unrelieved evil. The utterly wicked Iago has as much of religion in
his talk as anyone else in OTHELLO, using the phrases "Christian and
heathen," "God bless the mark," "Heaven is my judge," "You are one of
those that will not serve God, if the devil bid you," "the little
godliness I have," "God's will," and so forth; the utterly wicked Edmund
in LEAR, as we have seen, is made to echo Montaigne's "sceptical"
passage on the subject of stellar influences, spoken with a moral
purpose, rather than the quite contrary utterance in the APOLOGY, in
which the essayist, theistically bent on abasing human pretensions,
gives to his scepticism the colour of a belief in those very
influences.[173] There is here, clearly, no pro-religious thesis. The
whole drift of the play shows that Shakspere shares the disbelief in
stellar control, though he puts the expression of the disbelief in the
mouth of a villain; though he makes the honest Kent, on the other hand,
declare that "it is the stars ... that govern our conditions;"[174] and
though he had previously made Romeo speak of "the yoke of inauspicious
stars," and the Duke describe mankind as "servile to all the skiey
influences," and was later to make Prospero, in the TEMPEST[175] express
his belief in "a most auspicious star." In the case of Montaigne, who
goes on yet again to contradict himself in the APOLOGY itself,
satirising afresh the habit of associating deity with all human
concerns, we are driven to surmise an actual variation of opinion--the
vivacious intelligence springing this way or that according as it is
reacting against the atheists or against the dogmatists. Montaigne, of
course, is not a coherent philosopher; the way to systematic philosophic
truth is a path too steep to be climbed by such an undisciplined spirit
as his, "sworn enemy to obligation, to assiduity, to constancy";[176]
and the net result of his "Apology" for Raimond Sebonde is to upset the
system of that sober theologian as well as all others. Whether
Shakspere, on the other hand, could or did detect all the
inconsistencies of Montaigne's reasoning, is a point on which we are not
entitled to more than a surmise; but we do find that on certain issues
on which Montaigne dogmatises very much as did his predecessors,
Shakspere applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the
essayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master
doctrine that we should live "according to nature," is given to talking
of "art" and "nature" in the ordinary manner, carrying the primitive
commonplace indeed to the length of a paradox. Thus in the essay on the
Cannibals,[177] speaking of "savages," he protests that
"They are even savage, as we call those fruits wild which
nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath
produced, whereas indeed they are those which ourselves have
altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their
common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the
true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most
lively and vigorous;"[178]
deciding with Plato that
"all things are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by
art; the greatest and fairest by one or other of the two
first; the least and imperfect by this last."