Michel de Montaigne
His Life
Para1Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) grew up in France with all of the wealth and privilege
afforded to a young man of noble birth. His father had acquired nobility after fighting
in Italy and came back to France with the intention of living a life inspired by classical
values. As a result, he sought to educate his family in all that ancient Rome and
Greece had to offer. Montaigne learned Latin as a young child, his German tutor speaking
no other language to him on the order of his father. Classical thought and wisdom
became essential parts of his life, and, in his later age, after having retired from
public life, he studied Greek and Roman authors intensively, going so far as to have
pieces of their sayings carved into the beams of his library.
Para2Although Montaigne sought a private life, his vast learning and wealth made it difficult
to avoid the public eye. In 1571, after the death of a close friend that left him
deeply distraught and with a desire to retire from the public sphere, he was awarded
the decoration of the Order of Saint-Michel. This distinction was even more unusual
because of the recentness of his family’s nobility. Admired in the French royal court,
Montaigne was also called on repeatedly to arbitrate between religious factions over
the deepening crisis between Protestants and Catholics. Later, while being treated
at thermal springs in Italy for kidney stones, he was elected Mayor of Bordeaux. All
of these responsibilities, along with the responsibility of taking care of his large
inherited estate, made it difficult for him to focus on his chosen calling: meditating
on life through the writing of his famed Essais.
Essais
Para3Every student who has ever had to write an essay can thank—or curse—Montaigne. In
his work Essais, published in France in three separate editions between 1580 and 1595, Montaigne
created the essay genre by examining with deep erudition a vast variety of seemingly
random topics. The title, Essais, comes from the French word “to attempt or weigh” and is appropriate for the philosophical
and literary style which Montaigne brought to the exploration of things like
Liars,
Coaching,and
The Lame or Cripple.
Para4The Essais, or Essays as they are known in English, are remarkable for not only their depth of learning
and variety of ideas, but for the marked skepticism which Montaigne displays. Montaigne
was deeply concerned about the apparent corruption, disillusionment, and violence
that characterized 16th century Europe and saw many of these problems as stemming
from an inability to discern truth from falsehood. His Essays are written in a spirit
of truth-seeking but begin from a position of skepticism which involves the dismantling
of commonly held truths like the superiority of man over animals or Western Europeans
over the
barbariansof other continents (Foglia et al).
Influence on Early Modern England
Para5While a few copies of Montaigne’s Essais made it to England in their original French, they were not widely read outside of
elite circles (which included thinkers like Sir Francis Bacon). It wasn’t until they
were translated into English by John Florio that they were circulated to a wider audience
of readers which included authors as Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare.
Florio, an Anglo-Italian who spent most of his youth in an assortment of places in
Europe before coming back to England (where he was born), was fluent in Italian and
French, but his translations of Montaigne’s Essays are unique in that he takes quite a few liberties with the original text while also
deploying a style of English both eloquent and diverse. So widely read in the early
17th century did his translations become, that much of the English idea of Montaigne
at the time was shaped by Florio.
Para6The most famous example of Montaigne’s ideas seeping into Elizabethan culture can
be found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Act 2, Gonzalo is describing his perfect utopia and says that:
I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contrariesExecute all things, for no kind of trafficWould I admit; no name of magistrate;Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,And use of service, none; contract, succession,Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;No occupation; all men idle, all,And women too, but innocent and pure;(Shakespeare 2.1.162–170)
Para7This statement is not original to Shakespeare but can be found in Montaigne’s essay
on
Caniballeswhere he says:
It is a nation, would I answere Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no vse of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparrell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no vse of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst— them.
Para8A quick comparison of the two shows that Shakespeare must have had Montaigne’s essay
either right in front of him or fresh in mind while he penned Gonzalo’s lines in The Tempest. This isn’t the only place in The Tempest which mirrors Montaigne’s essay and there are many scholarly disputes on how great
an influence Montaigne actually had on the writings of Shakespeare.
Key Print Sources
Go, Kenji.
Montaigne’sStudies in Philology vol. 109, no. 4, July 2012, pp. 455–473.Cannibalsand The Tempest Revisited.
Hamlin, William M.
Florio’s Montaigne and the Tyranny ofRenaissance Quarterly vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, p. 491.Custome: Appropriation, Ideology, and Early English Readership of the Essayes.
Key Online Sources
Best, Michael.
Montaigne.Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/new%20knowledge/montaigne.html. Accessed 5 Jul. 2024.
Foglia, Marc, and Emiliano Ferrari.
Michel de Montaigne.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. 20 Nov. 2019. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/montaigne/.
Sankovitch, Tilde A.
Michel de Montaigne.Encyclopedia Britannica. 23 Apr. 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-de-Montaigne.
Shakespeare, William.
The Tempest.The Folger SHAKESPEARE. Folger Shakespeare Library, 12 Nov. 2019. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/.
Prosopography
Kate McPherson
Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley
University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity
in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities
Institute,
Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom,at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.
Leah Hamby
Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed
several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from
Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her
other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the
Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the
ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery,
a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on
Electronic Shakespeares,and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.
Navarra Houldin
Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual
remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major
in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary
research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They
are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice
Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.
Tyler Abbott
Tyler Abbott was a student at Utah Valley University.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | Michel de Montaigne |
| Type of text | Critical |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | Early Modern England Encyclopedia |
| Source |
By Tyler Abbot, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
|
| Editorial declaration | This document uses Canadian English spelling |
| Edition | Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a |
| Sponsor(s) |
Early Modern England EncyclopediaAnthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
|
| Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
| Document status | published, peer-reviewed |
| Funder(s) |
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University |
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