His Life

Michel 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.

Although 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

Every student who has ever had to write an essay can thank—or curse—Montaigne. In his work , 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, , 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 , , and .

The , or 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 barbarians of other continents (Foglia et al).

Influence on Early Modern England

While a few copies of Montaigne’s 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 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.

The most famous example of Montaigne’s ideas seeping into Elizabethan culture can be found in Shakespeare’s . In Act 2, Gonzalo is describing his perfect utopia and says that: I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would 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)

This statement is not original to Shakespeare but can be found in Montaigne’s essay on where 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.

A 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 . This isn’t the only place in 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. and Revisited. vol. 109, no. 4, July 2012, pp. 455–473. Hamlin, William M. . vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, p. 491.

Key Online Sources Best, Michael. . . . University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/new%20knowledge/montaigne.html. Accessed 5 Jul. 2024. Foglia, Marc, and Emiliano Ferrari. . . Ed. Edward N. Zalta. 20 Nov. 2019. . https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/montaigne/. Sankovitch, Tilde A. . . 23 Apr. 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-de-Montaigne. Shakespeare, William. . . Folger Shakespeare Library, 12 Nov. 2019. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/.