Several students, such as Tschischwitz and König, have tried to make out that Giordano Bruno exercised a preponderating influence upon Shakespeare.[1] Passages suggesting a cycle in nature, such as Hamlet's satirical outburst to the King about the dead Polonius (iv. 3), have directed their thoughts to the Italian philosopher. In some cases they have found or imagined a definite identity between sayings of Hamlet's and of Bruno's—for instance, on determinism. Bruno has a passage in which he emphasises the necessity by which everything is brought about: "Whatever may be my pre-ordained eventide, when the change shall take place, I await the day, I, who dwell in the night; but they await the night who dwell in the daylight. All that is, is either here or there, near or far off, now or after, soon or late." In the same spirit Hamlet says (v. 2): "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." Bruno says: "Nothing is absolutely imperfect or evil; it only seems so in relation to something else, and what is bad for one is good for another." In Hamlet (ii. 2), "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
When once attention had been directed to Giordano Bruno, not only his philosophical and more popular writings, but even his plays were ransacked in search of passages that might have influenced Shakespeare. Certain parallels and points of resemblance were indeed discovered, very slight and trivial in themselves, but which theorists would not believe to be fortuitous, since it was known that Giordano Bruno had passed some time in England in Shakespeare's day, and had frequented the society of the most distinguished men. As soon as the matter was closely investigated, however, the probability of any direct influence vanished almost to nothing.
Giordano Bruno remained on English ground from 1583 to 1585. Coming from France, where he had instructed Henri III. in the Lullian art, a mechanical, mnemotechnic method for the solution of all possible scientific problems, he brought with him a letter of recommendation to Mauvissière, the French Ambassador, in whose house he was received as a friend of the family during the whole of his stay in London. He made the acquaintance of many leading men of the time, such as Walsingham, Leicester, Burghley, Sir Philip Sidney and his literary circle, but soon went on to Oxford in order to lecture there and disseminate the doctrines which lay nearest his heart. These were the Copernican system in opposition to the Ptolemaic, which still held the field at Oxford, and the theory that the same principle of life is diffused through everything—atoms and organisms, plants, animals, human beings, and the universe at large. He quarrelled with the Oxford scholars, and held them up to ridicule and contempt in his dialogue La Cena de le Ceneri, published soon after, in which he speaks in the most disparaging terms of the coarseness of English manners. The dirtiness of the London streets, for example, and the habit of letting one goblet go round the table, from which every one drank, aroused his dislike and scorn scarcely less than the rejection of Copernicus by the pedants of the University.
At the very earliest, Shakespeare cannot have come to London until the year of Bruno's departure from England, and can therefore scarcely have met him. The philosopher exercised no influence upon the spiritual life of the day in England. Not even Sir Philip Sidney was attracted by his doctrine, and his name does not once occur in Greville's Life of Sidney, although Greville had seen much of Bruno. Brunnhofer, who has studied the question, points out, as showing how little trace Bruno left behind him in England, that there is not in the Bodleian a single contemporary manuscript or document of any kind which throws the least light upon Bruno's stay in London or Oxford.[2] It has been maintained, nevertheless, that Shakespeare must have read his philosophic writings in Italian. It is, of course, possible; but there is nothing in Hamlet to prove it—nothing that cannot be fully accounted for without assuming that he had the slightest acquaintance with them.
The only expression in Shakespeare which, probably by accident, has an entirely pantheistic ring is "The prophetic soul of the wide world" in Sonnet cvii.; the only passages containing an idea, not certainly identical, but comparable with Bruno's doctrine of the metamorphosis of natural forms are the cyclical Sonnets lix., cvi., cxxiii. If Giordano Bruno really had anything to do with these passages, it must be because Shakespeare had heard some talk about the great Italian's doctrine, which may just at that time have been recalled to the recollection of his English acquaintances by his death at the stake in Rome, on February 17, 1600. If Shakespeare had studied his writings, he would, among other things, have obtained some glimmering of the Copernican system, of which he knows nothing. On the other hand, it is quite conceivable that he may have picked up in conversation an approximate and incomplete conception of Bruno's philosophy, and that this conception may have given birth to the above-mentioned philosophical reveries. All the passages in Hamlet which have been attributed to the influence of Bruno really stand in much closer relation to writers under whose literary and philosophical influence we know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare fell.
There is preserved in the British Museum a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, folio, London, 1603, with Shakespeare's name written on the fly-leaf. The signature is, I believe, a forgery; but that Shakespeare had read Montaigne is clear beyond all doubt.
There are many evidences of the influence exerted by Montaigne's Essays on English readers of that date. It was only natural that the book should vividly impress the greatest men of the age; for there were not at that time many such books as Montaigne's—none, perhaps, containing so living a revelation, not merely of an author, but of a human being, natural, many-sided, full of ability, rich in contradictions.
Outside of Hamlet, we trace Montaigne quite clearly in one passage in Shakespeare, who must have had the Essays lying on his table while he was writing The Tempest. Gonzalo says (ii. I)—
"I' the commonwealth I would by contrarie
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."
We find this speech almost word for word in Montaigne (Book i. chap. 30): "It is a nation that hath no kind 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 povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle ... no manuring of lands, no vse of wine, corn or metal."