Shakespeare Versus Montaigne
by David P. Gontar (August 2014)
The Philosopher Pyrrho in Stormy Seas by Petrarcameister (Hans Weiditz)
I. Introduction
II. Skepticism
III. Pyrrhonian Skepticism
Classical skepticism is a philosophy of consolation. It was formulated not as a ‘theory of knowledge’ in our sense of the term, but as a cognitive recipe for detachment and inner peace. Contemporary skepticism, on the other hand, is symptomatic of a dilemma. What is termed “epistemology” by writers of the 20th and 21st centuries is a concoction of those who call themselves “professional philosophers,” academics whose business it is to tussle with problems of perception and truth which are the detritus of such sciences as physics and physiology. Hence classical and modern skepticism are not merely different, they are wholly inimical to one another in feeling-tone and meaning. Contemporary philosophers would find absurd the idea of any connection between the “theory” of skepticism and personal satisfaction. On the contrary, the whole thrust of modern philosophy is the refutation of skepticism’s challenge and its supplanting by a robust, if shallow, common sense. Modern skepticism is a Problem; ancient skepticism was a Solution. Unless this contrast is kept firmly in mind, any discussion of “the influence of Montaigne on Shakespeare” can only confound and mislead.
IV. Montaigne’s Skepticism
ii. Opinion is not knowledge. Pyrrhonist sceptics reveled in that fact. Sextus Empiricus systematized that contention into a powerful engine of doubt which helped a wise man to suspend his judgement and so to attain tranquility of mind. (xxxiv, emphasis added)
For Pyrrho and his disciple, Montaigne, on the other hand, doubt itself is the desideratum, for intellectual equilibrium yields equanimity, the solace of incredulity.
Montaigne writes:
[T]he professed aim of Pyrrhonians is to shake all convictions, to hold nothing as certain, to vouch for nothing. Of the three functions attributed to the soul (cogitation, appetite and assent) the Sceptics admit the first two but keep their assent in a state of ambiguity, inclining neither way, giving not even the slightest approbation to one side or the other. (Montaigne, 560)
Now the Pyrrhonians make their faculty of judgment so unbending and upright that it registers everything but bestows its assent on nothing. This leads to their well-known ataraxia: that is a calm, stable rule of life, free from disturbances (caused by the impress of opinions, or of such knowledge of reality as we think we have) which give birth to fear, acquisitiveness, envy, immoderate desires, ambition, pride, superstition, love of novelty, rebellion, disobedience, obstinacy and the greater part of our bodily ills. In this way, they even free themselves from passionate sectarianism, for their disputes are mild affairs and they are never afraid of the other side. (Montaigne, 560)
If it is a child who makes the judgment, he does not know enough about the subject: if it is a learned man, then he has made up his mind already! — Pyrrhonians have given themselves a wonderful strategic advantage by shrugging off the burden of self defence. It does not matter who attacks them as long as somebody does. Anything serves their purpose: if they win, your argument is defective; if you do, theirs is. If they lose, they show the truth of Ignorance; if you lose, you do. If they can prove that nothing is known: fine.
They make it their pride to be far more ready to find everything false than anything true and to show that things are not, rather than that they are. They prefer to proclaim what they do not believe, rather than what they do. Their typical phrases include: ‘I have settled nothing’; ‘It is no more this than that’; ‘Not one rather than the other’; ‘i do not understand’; ‘Both sides seem likely’; ‘It is equally right to speak for and against either side’. To them, nothing seems true which cannot also seems false. They have sworn loyalty to the word epokhé [transliterated from Greek]: ‘I am in suspense’; I will not budge. (Montaigne, 562-563)
After a deep and extensive analysis and considering all objections, Montaigne accepts Pyrronistic skepticism. The key is the secure foundation it provides for human satisfaction and security.
We would be better off if we dropped our inquiries and let ourselves be moulded by the natural order of the world. A soul safe from prejudice has made a wondrous advance towards peace of mind.
* * *
No system discovered by Man has greater usefulness nor a greater appearance of truth [than Pyrrhonism] which shows us Man naked, empty, aware of his natural weakness, fit to accept outside help from on high: Man, stripped of all human learning, and so all the more able to lodge the divine within him, annihilating his intellect to make room for faith; he is no scoffer, he holds no doctrine contrary to established custom; he is humble, obedient, teachable, keen to learn — and as a sworn enemy of heresy he is freed from the vain and irreligious opinions introduced by erroneous sects. (Montaigne, 564)
We turn now to its evaluation.
V. Tragic Skepticism
The answer, it seems, lies in Shakespeare.
[H]amlet feels at one and the same time the wonder of the human creature and the beauty of the world which has become a “sterile promontory” to him. His mood is one of tragic loss from which there seems no recovery.” (Bell, 4, emphasis in original)
Prof. Bell then follows up with this:
That ideas contend with one another in Shakespeare’s writings is a quality he shares with the skeptic near-contemporary with whom I find him comparable, Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s curiously moving, often evasive, often self-revelatory confessions of alternating belief and unbelief are not merely a feature of his response to the dogmas of his religion. They are duplicated in his attitudes toward numerous other generally accepted assumptions about mankind and the world. Taken as a whole, Montaigne’s essays dramatize the unreadiness of his belief to come down on any conclusion without allowing for the possibility of its opposite. It is that representative skeptic method [sic] of balancing opposing views which was to be inherited from Montaigne by Pierre Bayle, who, at the end of the seventeenth century, made his famous encyclopedic dictionary a dramatization of the “method of doubt,” in which one opinion was posed against [sic] another. I am suggesting that Shakespeare’s thought . . . is, like Montaigne’s or Bayle’s, dialectic or dialogic. It pits an idea against its opposite. It looks to me as though Shakespeare — writing as he did at a time of cultural crisis when old convictions and new doubts were contending in men’s minds — put contrary views into combat to test their strength. His plays are never allegorical — they never dramatize directly the contest of ideas — yet in them ideas contend from line to line in the richest language the stage has ever known. Through the action and language of the plays he invites his audiences to question from moment to moment, the inherited, standard truths of his time. He allows his audience to view fearfully the results of abandoning the prop of such beliefs. This is the hidden structure of argument in Shakespeare’s plays. (Bell, 4-5)
As for the actual relationship of Montaigne and Bayle, attending to the scholars who have devoted themselves to that subject is well advised. Here are the important comments of Karl C. Sandberg in the Journal of History of Philosophy (Vol. 8, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 103-104), reviewing the analysis of Prof. Craig B. Brush in his book, Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
The conclusion of this study establishes similarities and dissimilarities between Bayle and Montaigne, who have often been carelessly lumped together under the catch-all word of “skeptics.” Noting that both of them endorsed a form of religious fideism and argued that skepticism prepared the mind to receive Grace, Professor Brush touches upon the very thorny problem of defining Bayle’s religious belief, which he characterizes semi-fideism. He notes by way of contrast that Montaigne, by not sharing the Calvinist austerity of Bayle’s character, came at the end of his life to a particular brand of gay wisdom that Bayle never knew. Where Montaigne attained to the prize of self-knowledge at the end of his life of inquiry, Bayle found only an unmitigated pessimism, producing in his Dictionnaire a documented indictment of the human race.
Prof. Brush’s point is well taken. Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism cannot be conflated with other less sunny forms of skepticism, a tendency we see in Prof. Bell.
Another swipe at Montaigne is taken on the subject of the supernatural. As her quotation from him employs archaic form, we will use a modern translation (M.A. Screech) from Chapter 27 of the Essays for better understanding.
It is not perhaps without good reason that we attribute to simple-mindedness a readiness to believe anything and to ignorance the readiness to be convinced, for I think I was once taught that a belief is like an impression stamped on our soul: the softer and less resisting the soul, the easier it is to print anything on it . . . . The more empty a soul is and the less furnished with counterweights, the more easily its balance will be swayed under the force of its first convictions. That is why children, the common people, women and the sick are more readily led by the nose. On the other hand there is a silly arrogance in continuing to disdain something and to condemn it as false just because it seems unlikely to us. That is a common vice among those who think their capacities are above the ordinary.
I used to do that once: if I heard tell of ghosts walking or of prophecies, enchantments, sorcery, or some other tale which I could not get my teeth into . . . I used to feel sorry for the wretched folk who were taken in by such madness. Now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied as they were. It is not that experience has subsequently shown me anything going beyond my original beliefs (nor is it from nay lack of curiosity on my part), but reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities. (Montaigne, 200-201; cp. Bell, 16-17)
The passage is as good an illustration as one can find in Montaigne’s Essayes of the character of his skepticism, which regards all things doubtfully, and even applies doubt to the act of doubting, because so many things cannot be known. (Bell, 17)
We find two readings of Montaigne as a Sceptic. The first one concentrates on the polemical, negative arguments drawn from Sextus Empiricus, at the end of the Apology [for Raymond Sebond]. This hard-line scepticism draws the picture of man as “humiliated.” Its aim is essentially to fight the pretensions of reason and to annihiliate human knowledge. “Truth,” “being” and “justice” are equally dismissed as unattainable. Doubt foreshadows Descartes’ Meditations, on the problem of the reality of the outside world. Dismissing the objective value of one’s representations, Montaigne would have created the long-lasting problem of ‘solipsism’. We notice, nevertheless, that he does not question the reality of things – except occasionally at the very end of the ‘Apology’ – but the value of opinions and men. The second reading of his scepticism puts forth that Cicero’s probabilism is of far greater significance in shaping the sceptical content of the Essays. After the 1570’s, Montaigne no longer reads Sextus; additions show, however, that he took up a more and more extensive reading of Cicero’s philosophical writings. We assume that, in his search for polemical arguments against rationalism during the 1570’s, Montaigne borrowed much from Sextus, but as he got tired of the sceptical machinery, and understood scepticism rather as an ethics of judgment, he went back to Cicero. The paramount importance of the Academica for XVIth century thought has been underlined by Charles B. Schmitt. In the free enquiry, which Cicero engaged throughout the varied doctrines, the humanists found an ideal mirror of their own relationship with the Classics. “The Academy, of which I am a follower, gives me an opportunity to hold an opinion as if it were ours, as soon as it shows itself highly probable,” wrote Cicero in De Officiis. Reading Seneca, Montaigne will think as if he were a member of the Stoa; then changing for Lucretius, he will think as if he had become an Epicurean, and so on. Doctrines or opinions, beside historical stuff and personal experiences, make up the nourishment of judgment. Montaigne assimilates opinions, according to what appears to him as true, without taking it to be absolutely true. He insists on the dialogical nature of thought, referring to Socrates’ way of keeping the discussion going: “The leaders of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates, is always asking questions and stirring up discussion, never concluding, never satisfying . . . .” Judgment has to determine the most convincing position, or at least to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each position; but if absolute truth is lacking, we still have the possibility to balance opinions [i.e., isothenia]. We have resources enough, to evaluate the various authorities that we have to deal with in ordinary life.
The original failure of commentators was perhaps in labelling Montaigne’s thought as “sceptic” without reflecting on the original meaning of the essay. Montaigne’s exercise of judgment is an exercise of ‘natural judgment’, which means that judgment does not need any principle or any rule as a presupposition. In this way, many aspects of Montaigne’s thinking can be considered as sceptical, although they were not used for the sake of scepticism. For example, when Montaigne sets down the exercise of doubt as a good start in education, he understands doubt as part of the process of the formation of judgment. This process should lead to wisdom, characterized as “always joyful.” Montaigne’s skepticism is not a desperate one. On the contrary, it offers the reader a sort of jubilation which relies on the modest but effective pleasure in dismissing knowledge, thus making room for the exercise of one’s natural faculties. (Stanford, n.p.n., emphases added)
Though occasionally insightful in its readings of specific passages, McGinn’s book suffers from a questionable approach, the effort to discover the meaning behind Shakespeare’s plays by dressing the author in borrowed clothes, the too tight doublet and hose of the smaller Montaigne and the completely inappropriate straightjackets of Hume or Wittgenstein. Thus for McGinn Shakespeare emerges as a sort of skeptical naturalist, a thesis difficult to maintain if one examines the plays in their entirety, neither neglecting nor distorting passages that undermine such a narrow view. (Nemeth, Amazon Books Review, January 7, 2007)
[T]he most relevant fact about this period is that it preceded the Scientific Revolution, so that science was in its infancy in Shakespeare’s day. Very little that we now take for granted was understood — in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. The achievements of Descartes, Leibniz, Galileo, Newton, Boyle and other heroes of the Renaissance were still in the future. (McGinn, 2)
The laws of mechanics were unknown; disease was a mystery; genetics was unheard of. Intelligent people believed in witchcraft, ghosts, fairies, astrology, and all the rest. Eclipses were greeted with alarmed superstition. Scientific method was struggling to gain a foothold. The conception of the world as a set of intelligible law-governed causes was at most a distant dream. (McGinn, 2)
When Shakespeare looked up into the night sky, he had very little idea of what he was seeing, and the earth was still generally considered the center of the universe. (McGinn, 2)
Contrast that Stygian darkness with contemporary cosmology, in which all is as plain as the nose on your face.
Hear, for example, breaking news from Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, December 10, 2013, courtesy of Mr. Ron Cowen.
SIMULATIONS BACK UP THEORY THAT UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM
A Ten Dimensional Theory of Gravity Makes the Same Predictions As Standard Quantum Physics in Fewer Dimensions
A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our universe could be one big projection.
In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space, plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos, where there is no gravity. Maldacena’s idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a duality that allowed them to translate back and forth between two the languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Malcadena’s idea has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive. In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Malcadena’s conjecture is true. (Cowen, n.p.n., emphases added)
It was left to the Greek skeptics, notably Sextus Empiricus, to push the Socratic lesson to its conclusion: that knowledge, however desirable, is simply not within our grasp. Plato’s entire philosophy therefore founders, since it is just not possible to know anything worthwhile . . . Man does not have the capacity to satisfy his epistemological desires — he is too prone to illusion, error, and uncertainty. We cannot be sure that our senses are not deceiving us, or that our reasoning faculties yield sound inferences, even whether we are dreaming. Man is a small and feeble creature, epistemologically blighted, and not able to comprehend the universe. At its extreme, such skepticism claims that no belief has any greater justification than any other, so that belief itself is an irrational act (this is the school known as Pyrrhonism). The skeptics accepted Aristotle’s dictum [that the purpose of human being is to achieve knowledge] but argued that it is man’s nature also to be thwarted in his desire for knowledge. (McGinn, 5)
In his taxonomy of skepticism, Montaigne put his finger on the confusion.
Whoever sets out to find something eventually reaches the point where he can say that he has found it, or that it cannot be found, or that he is still looking for it. The whole of Philosophy can be divided into these three categories; her aim is to seek true, certain knowledge.
1. Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics and others think they have discovered it. They founded the accepted disciplines and expounded their knowledge as certainties.
2. Clitomachus, Carneades and the Academics despaired of their quest<span style="line-height: 1.6em; font-size: 12px;">; they conclude that Truth cannot be grasped by human means. Their conclusion is one of weakness, of human ignorance. This school has had the greatest number of adherents and some of the noblest.
3. As for Pyrrho and the other Sceptics or Ephetics, whose teachings many of the Ancients derived from Homer, the Seven Sages, Archilochus and Euripides, and associated with Zeno, Democritus, and Xenophanes), they say they are still looking for Truth. They hold that the philosophers who think they have found it are infinitely wrong. They go on to add that the second category — those who are quite sure that human strength is incapable of reaching truth — are overbold and vain. To determine the limits of our powers and to know and judge the difficulty of anything whatsoever constitutes great, even the highest, knowledge. They doubt whether Man is capable of it. (Montaigne, 560, emphases added)
Not content with misrepresenting skepticism and its varieties in the history of philosophy, McGinn goes on to make an extraordinarily equivocal general claim:
I shall be arguing . . . that Montaigne had a profound influence on Shakespeare’s works — or, to be more cautious, that many passages in Shakespeare echo passages from Montaigne. [!] In particular, a skeptical thread can be seen running through the plays, which draws upon the kind of skeptical thinking Montaigne revived from the Greeks.” (McGinn, 6-7, )
Montaigne was especially noted for his eloquent revival of Greek skepticism, particularly in his long essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Here he dwells with some relish on the limitations on man, his feeble senses, his preposterous overconfidence, his desire not just to obey God, but to imitate Him. In Montaigne’s view, man is but a paltry animal, inferior to many animals in his acuity and good sense, far too fond of his Reason . . . . So Shakespeare would be exposed to full-blown philosophical skepticism in Montaigne’s writings, and in a form I suspect he would have found especially appealing — since Montaigne is a dramatic, anecdotal, poetic, and powerful writer. Not for Montaigne the dry tomes of the traditional philosopher; his essays are personal, lively, and pungent. I myself, some five hundred years later, find them unusually persuasive and affecting, full of rugged wisdom and brutal honesty — the very characteristics, indeed, which leap from the page of Shakespeare. The word “unflinching” aptly describes the style of both authors — yet with a wry humanity. The great subject of death is never far from either writer, with a steady-eyed contemplation of its terrors and mysteries. But most of all it is Montaigne’s contrarian skepticism that seems to have impressed Shakespeare — as it did many of his contemporaries. (McGinn, 6)
In 1912, Bertrand Russell published a small book which exercised an impact out of all proportion to its diminutive size: The Problems of Philosophy. There he departed from the traditional view of philosophy as either a vehicle of wisdom or a presentation of reality as a systematic whole, casting it instead as the puzzling over certain issues which are largely the dregs of modern science. Up until that point, the foremost philosopher in the English-speaking world had been F.H. Bradley, whose major work, Appearance and Reality (1893), argued along neo-Hegelian lines that our lived world of relational experience is incoherent and non-veridical, and contained and resolved in a supra-relational Absolute. Against this metaphysical system, Russell proposed that the business of philosophy is to confirm the content of quotidian experience by disposing of the challenges of epistemology in such a way that we can be confident that the real world corresponds closely to the world of human apperception. Against the idealism of Bradley, then, Russell erected an epistemological realism. Ever since that time, Anglophone philosophers have sought to practice philosophy not in the context of wisdom seeking, nor in systematic manner, but as an attempt to put to rest the particular intellectual riddles of their day. Perennial visions of Truth and Transcendence have been off limits in academic philosophy for more than a century.
The problem arises from a basic duality in human nature — the split between interior and exterior. It seems undeniable that all we observe of another person is his or her body — that is all that we can see and touch and smell. But another person’s mind belongs to the interior aspect of the person — which we cannot see, touch, or smell There is something hidden about other people’s minds, which we can only infer from what is publicly available. People can keep their thoughts and motives to themselves, simply by not expressing them, and this puts us in a position of not knowing. (McGinn, 7)
I may know that I have dubious motives in regard to someone else, but I also know that you do not know this — and I know that I can easily prevent you from knowing it. This is what makes deception possible — the asymmetry between my knowledge of my mind and your knowledge of my mind. There is a sense, then, in which my mind is private, and known to be so, while my body is public property. (McGinn, 7)
‘Tis just;
And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow.
(I, ii, 56-60)
Therefor, good Brutus, be prepared to hear.
And since you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.
(I, ii, 68-72)
In other words, though according to Professor Colin McGinn, Brutus should know far more about himself than any other man, the fact is that Cassius knows important things about Brutus to which Brutus himself is blind. Here the mind of Shakespeare soars above the “problem of other minds” to teach us a far more searching lesson: we are often open books to others, who can read our souls more easily and thoroughly than can we ourselves. Brutus is ambitious. But he cannot admit that ambition. He fears that Caesar will not allow him to succeed him as the leader of Rome, but of that fear he sees almost nothing, preferring to represent himself to himself as a champion of “honor” and the general welfare only. His “mind” (to use McGinn’s term) knows not itself. Brutus is a self-deceiver. Of such complexities McGinn seems entirely innocent.
Other minds actually are, in a quite everyday sense, extremely hard to know about, and radical mistakes are not only possible but also common. The philosopher’s skeptical problem is thus rooted in mundane realities. I think Shakespeare was acutely conscious of this problem, and that it powers and structures many of his plays, notably Othello. He is working out the dramatic consequences of a philosophical problem, as this problem affects people locked into very real and intimate relationships. All our social relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate, as in marriage and family connections, are conditioned by the fundamental inaccessibility of other minds. Everything becomes a matter of interpretation, of competing hypotheses, with the perpetual possibility of massive error. Overconfidence is the besetting sin here, as people leap to unwarranted conclusions about the motives and thoughts of others. Tragedy can result. (McGinn, 7-8)
The skeptic, we might say, is a kind of tragedian about knowledge: he admits Aristotle’s dictum [All human beings desire knowledge] is correct — people do desire to know; they are not indifferent to knowledge — but he claims that this desire is necessarily thwarted. Thus a basic value in human life is declared unrealizable, and this is our tragedy.
I shall suggest that Shakespeare’s tragedies often revolve around the tragedy of knowledge itself. It is a tragic fact that one of our deepest desires must go unfulfilled, and from this tragedy other tragedies ensue. (McGinn, 8)
is not always a harmonious whole, running on rational principles, but often a mélange of conflicting forces, the source of which is unclear. We are as much victims of ourselves as we are of the world around us . . . Accordingly, we can be mysteries to ourselves, bewildered by our feelings and actions; the conscious rational will has limited sway.
Self-knowledge, therefore, like knowledge of other selves, is not always reliable; a person can be quite wrong about his character, and the way his mind operates. Self- knowledge, when possessed, is a hard-won achievement, not a given; it tends to come to Shakespeare’s characters only toward the end of their ordeals. (McGinn, 12-13)
VII. Shakespeare Versus Montaigne on War
WESTMORELAND
Pleaseth your grace to answer them directly
How far forth you like their articles.
PRINCE JOHN
I like them all, and do allow them well,
And swear here, by the honour of my blood,
My father’s purposes have been mistook,
And some about him have too lavishly
Wrested his meaning and authority.
(to the Archbishop)
My lord, these griefs shall be with speed redressed;
Upon my soul they shall. If this please you,
Discharge your powers unto their several counties,
As we will ours; and here between the armies
Let’s drink together friendly and embrace,
That all their eyes may bear those tokens home
Of our restorèd love and amity.
ARCHBISHOP OF YORK
I take your princely word for these redresses.
PRINCE JOHN
I give it you, and will maintain my word;
And thereupon I drink unto your grace.
(He drinks)
(IV, i, 278-294)
Upon this solemn pledge of the Prince, the rebel lords dismiss their squadrons, only to find too late that the King’s forces have not been released, and that they are prisoners of the stealthy Prince.
HASTINGS
Our army is dispersed.
Like youthful steers unyoked, they take their courses,
East, west, north, south; or, like a school broke up,
Each hurries toward his home and sporting place.
WESTMORELAND
Good tidings, my lord Hastings, for the which
I do arrest thee, traitor, of high treason;
And you, Lord Archbishop, and you, Lord Mowbray,
Of capital treason I attach you both.
MOWBRAY
Is this proceeding just and honourable?
WESTMORLAND
Is your assembly so?
ARCHBISHOP OF YORK
Will you thus break your faith?
PRINCE JOHN
I pawned thee none.
I promised you redress of these same grievances
Whereof you did complain; which, by mine honour,
I will perform with a most Christian care.
But for you rebels, look to taste the due
Meet for rebellion and such acts of yours.
Most shallowly did you these arms commence,
Fondly brought here, and foolishly sent hence. —
Strike up our drums, pursue the scattered stray.
God, and not we, hath safely fought today.
Some guard these traitors to the block of death,
Treason’s true bed and yielder up of breath.
( IV, i, 328-349)
For all his wisdom, Montaigne never occupied this point of view.
A recent study of Montaigne’s notion of war in the Essays has reached the conclusion that, while the French gentleman does not explicitly praise war, neither does he condemn it. (See, Montaigne on War, by Alfredo Bonadeo, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 46, No. 3, July – Sept 1985, pp. 417-426)
MIRANDA
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have sufferèd
With those I saw suffer! A brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.
Had I been any god of Power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere
It should the good ship so have swallowed and
The fraughting souls within her.
(I, ii, 1-13)
In war or peace, Shakespeare is the poet of the passions.
VIII. Conclusion
Democritus and Heraclitus were both philosophers, the former, finding our human circumstances so vain and ridiculous, never went out without a laughing and mocking look on his face: Heraclitus, feeling pity and compassion for these same circumstances of ours, wore an expression which was always sad, his eyes full of tears.
I prefer the former temperament, not because it is more agreeable to laugh than to weep but because it is more disdainful and condemns us men more than the other — and it seems to me that, according to our deserts, we can never be despised enough. Lamentation and compassion are mingled with some respect for the things we are lamenting: the things which we mock at are judged to be worthless. I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as of inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable. Thus Diogenes who frittered about all on his own trundling his barrel and cocking a snook at Alexander, accounting us as no more than flies or bags of wind, was a sharper and harsher judge (and consequently, for my temperament, a juster one) than Timon who was surnamed the misanthropist. For what we hate we take to heart. Timon wished us harm; passionately desired our downfall; fled our company as dangerous, as that of evil men whose nature was depraved. Diogenes thought us worth so little that contact with us could neither trouble him nor corrupt him: he avoided our company not from fear of associating with us but from contempt. He thought us incapable of doing good and evil.
Statilius’ reply was of a similar character when Brutus spoke to him about joining in their plot against Caesar: he thought the enterprise to be just but did not find that men were worth taking any trouble over; which is in conformity with the teaching of Hegesias (who said the wise man should do nothing except for himself, since he alone is worth doing anything for) and the teaching of Theodorus, that it is unjust that the wise man should hazard his life for the good of his country, so risking his wisdom for fools.
Our own specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh. (Montaigne, 339-340)
In youth melancholy and brooding, Montaigne rose through study and reflection to the peaks of genius, and attained happiness in the company of bygone sages who showed the way to human fulfillment. He learned that our emotions and impulses are often the engines of our undoing, and he developed a profound antipathy to the passions. Shakespeare took a more Olympian route to enlightenment. Montaigne was, after all, a magistrate, a judge, a hearer of gritty disputes, and the essays in many ways resemble reports of appellate decisions. Such a figure was familiar to Shakespeare, who, if the Oxfordians are correct, was a member of the bar himself. Brutus (Praetor Urbanus), Shallow, Angelo and Escalus are all judges. That is to say, the mind of Montaigne already appears inscribed in Shakespeare as
the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances
(As You Like It, II, Sc. 7, 153-156)
Hence, as prodigious an intellect and personality as Montaigne is, an imperishable legacy to the humanity he teased and cajoled, in comparison to Shakespeare there is no comparison. Montaigne is a compendium of opinions, Shakespeare a fashioner of souls. Montaigne is a philosopher, one who seeks to persuade through arguments, anecdotes and authorities. Shakespeare is a poet who, like Prospero, tosses us on the billows of language and brings us safely home. Montaigne is aloof and in his best moments impervious to the sensational. Only for his friend did he remove the mask of indifference. Shakespeare takes another tack, releasing at every turn the power of our hearts to make us new, more fully engaged and animated, compassionately attuned to ourselves and others.
PAULINA
No longer shall you gaze on’t, lest your fancy
May think anon it moves.
LEONTES
Let be, let be!
Would I were dead but that methinks already.
What was he that did make it? See, my lord,
Would you not deem it breathed, and that those veins
Did verily bear blood?
POLIXENES
Masterly done.
The very life seems warm upon her lip.
LEONTES
The fixture of her eye has motion in’t,
As we are mocked with art.
PAULINA
I’ll draw the curtain.
My lord’s almost so far transported that
He’ll think anon it lives.
LEONTES
O sweet Paulina,
Make me to think so twenty years together.
No settled senses of the world can match
The pleasure of that madness. Let’t alone.
PAULINA
I am sorry, sir, I have thus far stirred you; but
I could afflict you farther.
LEONTES
Do, Paulina,
For this affliction has a taste as sweet
As any cordial comfort. Still methinks
There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.
PAULINA
Good my lord, forbear.
The ruddiness upon her lip is wet.
You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
With oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain?
LEONTES
No, not these twenty years.
(V, iii, 60-84)
And so the statue of Leontes’ beloved wife comes alive before his eyes, descends to him, and they embrace. Here is a piece of pathos indeed.
What fine chisel could ever cut this breath? None but the pen of Shakespeare, the chisel of blood and tears, laughter and despair, anguish and exaltation. Red was the color of his ink.
He slept on for some time, for this was in the winter and the nights were long, and when at last he woke it was near daybreak and the cocks were crowing. He noticed that all the others had either gone home or fallen asleep, except Agathon and Aristophanes and Socrates, who were still awake and drinking out of an enormous bowl which they kept passing round left to right. Socrates was arguing with the others — not that Aristodemus could remember very much of what was said, for, besides having missed the beginning, he was still more than half-asleep. But the gist of it was that Socrates was forcing them to admit that the same man might be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy — that the tragic poet might be a comedian as well.
But as he clinched the argument, which the other two were scarcely in a state to follow, they began to nod, and first Aristophanes fell off to sleep and then Agathon, as day was breaking. Whereupon Socrates tucked them up comfortably and went away, followed of course, by Aristodemus. And after calling at the Lyceum for a bath, he spent the rest of the day as usual, and then, toward evening made his way home to rest. (223c-d)
Shakespeare is the supreme dramatist heralded by Socrates. It is he who spans the gap between mirth and misery, adopting us as his lesser characters. Under his tutelage we struggle, grow and prosper, and our little lives are rounded still with sleep. We shall not see his like again.
WORKS CITED:
David P. Gontar, Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays, New English Review Press, 2013
Bryan Magee, The Story of Thought, DK Publishing Company, 1998
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, M.A. Screech, trans., Penguin Books, 1991
Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton, Huntington Cairns, eds., Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1961
Karl C. Sandberg, Review of Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966) in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 1, Jan. 1978, pp. 103-104
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 2d edition, S. Wells, G. Taylor, eds., Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 2005
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