Since it is thus proved beyond a doubt that Shakespeare was acquainted with Montaigne's Essays, it is not improbable that the resemblance between passages in that book and passages in Hamlet are due to something more than chance. When such passages occur in the First Quarto (1603), we must assume either that Shakespeare knew the French original, or that—as is likely enough—he may have had an opportunity of reading Florio's translation before it was published. It happened not infrequently in those days that a book was handed round in manuscript among the author's private friends five or six years before it was given to the public. Florio's close connection with the household of Southampton renders it almost certain that Shakespeare must have been acquainted with him; and his translation had been entered in the Stationers' Register as ready for publication so early as 1599.
Florio was born in 1545, of Italian parents, who, as Waldenses, had been forced to leave their country. He had become to all intents and purposes an Englishman, had studied and given lessons in Italian at Oxford, had been some years in the service of the Earl of Southampton, and was married to a sister of the poet Samuel Daniel. He dedicated each separate book of his translation of Montaigne to two noble ladies. Among them we find Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, Sidney's daughter; Lady Penelope Rich, Essex's sister; and Lady Elizabeth Grey, renowned for her beauty and learning. Each of these ladies was celebrated in a sonnet.
Every one remembers those incomparably-worded passages in Hamlet where the great brooder over life and death has expressed, in terms at once harsh and moving, his sense of the ruthlessness of the destructive forces of Nature, or what might be called the cynicism of the order of things. Take for instance the following (v. I):—
"Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?... As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!"
Hamlet's grisly jest upon the worms who are eating Polonius is a variation on the same theme (iv. 3):—
"Ham. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
"King. What dost thou mean by this?
"Ham. Nothing, but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar."
An attempt has been made to attribute these passages to the influence of Giordano Bruno; but, as Robert Beyersdorff has strikingly demonstrated,[3] this theory assumes that Bruno's doctrine was an atomistic materialism, whereas it was, in fact, pantheism, a perpetual insistence upon the unity of God and Nature. The very atoms, in Bruno, partake of spirit and life; it is not their mechanical conjunction that produces life; no, they are monads. While cynicism is the keynote of these utterances of Hamlet, enthusiasm is the keynote of Bruno's. Three passages from Bruno's writings (De la Causa and La Cena de le Ceneri) have been cited as coinciding with Hamlet's words as to the transformations of matter. But in the first Bruno is speaking of the transformation of natural forms, and of the emanation of all forms from the universal soul; in the second, he is insisting that in all compound bodies there live numerous individuals who remain immortal after the dissolution of the bodies; in the third, he treats of the globe as a vast organism, which, just like animals and men, is renewed by the transformation of matter. The whole resemblance, then, between these passages and Hamlet's bitter outburst is that they treat of transformations of form and matter in Nature. In spirit they are radically different. Bruno maintains that even what seems to belong entirely to the world of matter is permeated with soul; Hamlet, on the contrary, asserts the wretchedness and transitoriness of human existence.[4]
But precisely in these points Hamlet comes very near to Montaigne, who has many expressions like those above quoted, and speaks of Sulla very much as Hamlet speaks of Alexander and Cæsar.
On a close comparison of Shakespeare's expressions with Montaigne's, their similarity is very striking. Hamlet, for example, says that Polonius is at supper, not where he eats but where he is eaten. "A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king, and your lean beggar, is but variable service; two dishes, but to one table: that's the end."
Compare Montaigne, Book ii. chap. 12:—